These are tough times for public schools. Enrollment has dropped so much in some areas that some schools are closing. The Brownsville Independent School District is considering consolidating two more elementaries and two alternative schools in order to shutter one campus of each. The Donna ISD also plans to close its alternative school due to low enrollment.
The Department of Education is looking to address those losses, but in doing so will deny many families the choices that enabled many students to thrive in nontraditional educational environments.
Public schools have been losing students rapidly since shortly after the 2007 recession, which prompted a significant reduction in our country’s birth rate — a reduction that did not reverse itself after the economy improved.
COVID-19 closures accelerated the trend. Many families found alternative ways to educate their children, including homeschooling, online tutoring and even neighborhood learning groups. Their success inspired many parents to continue them even after public schools reopened.
Applications for charter schools, most of which already have lengthy waiting lists, shot up even higher. Charter school enrollment has increased 13% nationally since the pandemic.
New proposed rules by the Education Department, however, threaten to restrict and even reverse charter school enrollment at the expense of parents who will lose control over their children’s education, taxpayers who pay more for public school students than for those in charter schools, and our nation in general due to the lost innovation that comes from the freedom charter schools have to try new educational methods.
Under the new rules, charter schools would not receive any federal funding unless they could prove an “unmet need.” If a public school district can take students the charter schools can’t — even if their parents prefer the charter school.
This mostly would hurt students in low-income areas, where underperforming public schools seem to be clustered and charter schools have done the most good — and where children most need a good education that can help them secure better jobs and pull their families out of chronic poverty.
Quality of education is only one reason more parents are looking for educational alternatives. Public schools increasingly are mired in ideological debates over what can and can’t be taught with regard to race, history and other subjects; some officials are looking to restrict the materials that are available in school libraries and other resources, and even battling over gender issues and how they relate to sports, other extracurricular activities and even what bathrooms students can use.
Unfortunately, rather than listen to the parents’ obvious dissatisfaction and work to address it, federal officials apparently want families to simply shut up and take it, even if their children’s education is compromised.
The proposed rules would worsen our nation’s educational system as a whole by restricting options. It raises questions as to whether officials are looking to feed the minds of our future leaders, or to feed our underperforming bureaucracy.
