For school choice, father and mother know best

Who knows what’s best for children?

The GOP legislature says the answer is obvious: parents. And so they continue to empower them to choose the education options for their children. Given this freedom, increasing numbers are fleeing traditional schools.

Last year, charter school enrollment in North Carolina topped 100,000 for the first time. That number would be higher but for the tens of thousands of students (there’s no precise figure) on waiting lists.

Even more parents are pulling their kids out of the system altogether. More than 100,000 students attend private schools and another 127,000 children are home schooled. North Carolina's Public schools enroll 1.4 million students.

North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to $4,200 per year for low-income families to send their children to private schools, is also popular. The program began in the 2014-15 school year with 2,000 scholarships; this year there were 7,300. The General Assembly plans to increase funding every year for the next 15 years – including funds for 10,000 slots next year.

Those numbers do not mean traditional schools are failing. Most families, including my own, believe they have good options and happily remain in the system.

But many parents are not so satisfied. And, instead of figuring out how to make traditional schools more attractive to them, the educational establishment pushes back through two spurious claims. The first is a chicken and egg argument which says traditional schools are suffering because these alternatives are draining resources. Putting aside the fact that private schools and home schools free up money, this argument ignores the fact that it is the perceived shortcoming of traditional schools that is leading parents to withdraw their students. It also doesn’t address why charter schools, which have fewer resources, are appealing.

The second claim is that parents don’t really know what’s best for their kids. This argument has been advanced since N.C. State researchers released a study on June 4 which found that Opportunity Scholarship students outperformed their comparable peers in traditional schools on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills.

The researchers noted that their small sample size and other restrictions meant their study was probably indicative rather than definitive. Supporters of traditional public schools seized on these caveats. The N&O’s Editorial Board argued, “What the study makes clear is there’s no way to know whether the students who received [the vouchers] … are getting a better education than they would at their local public school.”

Actually, we do have a very reliable measure besides the test scores: the low-income parents who jumped through hoops to secure the vouchers. If the private schools were not an upgrade, we would expect these engaged families to exercise their option to re-enroll their kids in traditional public schools. That is not happening.

A related line of attack points to a League of Women Voters study suggesting that perhaps three quarters of private schools in North Carolina use a Christian-based curriculum which dismisses the theory of evolution. I am troubled by that. But it’s also true that only 19 percent of Americans in a 2017 Gallup poll believe humans developed apart from God. So traditional schools are not doing a great job on that front either.

In addition, most Americans lead happy productive lives in our high-tech society without ever invoking Darwin. There is zero evidence that graduates of fundamentalist schools are ill-equipped to do college work or secure jobs.

Note that defenders of the fading status quo now demanding more test score data to evaluate private schools are the same folks pushing for universal Pre-K – whose test score bump largely disappears by third grade. The real and lasting benefits of Pre-K appear less rooted in academic achievement than socialization skills, especially the development of character traits such as perseverance and grit.

Perhaps parents are concerned that it is harder to inculcate character in classrooms where, a new study shows, teachers feel less safe because of a breakdown in discipline. Perhaps they take pause at the fact that 34 percent of public school teachers took ten or more sick days last year – compared with 12.8 percent of teachers at charter schools.

Want to improve education? Listen to those who know best: the parents.

Contributing columnist J. Peder Zane can be reached at jpederzane@jpederzane.com.

This story was originally published June 21, 2018 at 8:58 AM with the headline "For school choice, father and mother know best."