Why Public Schools Must Remain a Priority Amid School Choice Expansion
By: Dr. Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed
In much of rural America—where one in five students in our nation lives—there is no such thing as school choice. My aunt recently shared challenges our family had in finding high-quality, career-connected learning opportunities for my cousin, who was not finding school to be meaningful and engaging. He is a smart and talented young man who wanted more hands-on and real-world learning, but he attends school in a town with fewer than 200 people and one school. She was hoping to find a regional career and technical school for him, but they did not have any local option to even consider.
As with many rural communities across our country, the small and rural towns that my family calls home are losing population, facing significant shifts in the labor market and the economy, experiencing poverty, limiting educational offerings due to teacher turnover and lack of funding, and struggling to keep young people from leaving to seek their fortunes and raise their families in larger towns and cities. We need to strengthen our rural public schools to be able to provide more real choices and opportunities for students and families to pursue their dreams without having to leave their hometowns.
In suburban and urban America, school choice can be hampered by economic hardship, access to transportation, limited numbers of available openings, lotteries and high stakes testing for entry, minimal or no services for students with disabilities, and other factors that hinder engagement. President Trump’s recent Executive Order, Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families, seeks to strengthen and expand choice by mandating multiple federal agencies to develop plans to use federal funding designated for our nation’s public schools—with the transparency and accountability of our public school system—to instead support “educational choice initiatives” in private and faith-based schools that have zero requirements for public transparency and accountability. Yes, every child deserves a quality education, but private and religious schools can pick and choose which students they want, and they don’t have to meet the same requirements as public schools. We need to fully fund public schools which serve every child, not take our precious limited public taxpayer dollars away to pay for private schools that can and do discriminate.
And while I fully support parents and young people seeking out the best educational option to meet their needs—be that public, public charter, private, religious, or homeschool—we know the majority of students (about 90%) across our nation attend our traditional public schools. All4Ed recently commissioned a bipartisan pre-election poll to hear what Americans want and need from education, and we learned that a majority of Americans, regardless of party, strongly support public education (72% overall). We also learned that, by 68 percent to 24 percent, Americans prefer increasing funding to improve public schools over increasing funding to give parents vouchers so they can send their child to the school that best meets their needs. This is true for majorities of Trump voters and voters across party lines, who all prefer increasing public school funding.
This means that if we are to fulfill our endless potential as a nation, we must work together to ensure that every single public school—regardless of zip code—has excellent and innovative, student-centered, community-engaged, and career-connected learning options and opportunities for our students to thrive. At All4Ed we believe that the ultimate purpose of education is to empower people to have choice-filled lives, and all our young people need and deserve a strong education that sparks their passion, builds their skills, and provides them with the experiences and connections they need so that our young people and their families can decide for themselves the lives and futures they seek to create.
We want meaningful choice to be the core value for our public schools: choices among a wide array of courses and extracurricular opportunities that provide a rigorous and well-rounded education; choices among multiple career pathways that start in middle and high school and engage students’ passions and purpose while also leading students to good jobs and economic mobility; and choices among what to do after graduating from high school, be it go to a community college or a four-year college, enter an apprenticeship, earn a high-quality certificate or certification that opens doors to opportunity, serve our nation through military or public service, or enter the workforce. And we do not want any choice that our students and families make today to limit the choices and opportunities they have tomorrow. Our education and workforce system should have no wrong doors and no dead ends, so that no matter what our young people choose to do, they can always level up in their skills through returning to education throughout their lives to power their next choices.
I am heartened by our nation’s overwhelming bipartisan commitment to public education and the vast opportunities education gives us to choose who we want to become and how we want to live. I’m happy to share that my cousin is now thriving in a new career and technical education offerings at his small, rural school—and his experiences in public school led him to win a state skills competition last month. Here’s to all our children having bright, joyful, prosperous, and choice-filled lives thanks to our public schools. And when we think about expanding educational freedom, let’s listen to what Americans want and invest in and strengthen our public schools to build our nation’s future.
