In her new book, Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos presents her case for “education freedom.” This goal necessitates that DeVos also put forth her theory of what, exactly, is meant by education freedom, and what differentiates it from, say, your traditional clarion call for “school choice.” This shift, from advocating school choice to advocating educational freedom, has been made over the past year or two by many in the education reform sphere (here, I mean mostly, though not exclusively, conservatives).
I, for one, welcome the move. For one thing, education freedom, as DeVos notes in her book, better captures the breadth and depth of mission than does school choice, a term that is not only conceptually bounded to the entity of the schoolhouse but in popular understanding comes to mean “charter schools” and little else. More to the point, however, education freedom better represents the very idea, the animating vision undergirding this reform movement. Chartering is just an authorizing policy vehicle; education savings accounts, vouchers, and scholarship grants are all just funding certifications — it’s freedom, in and through your education, that’s the whole bag. Education freedom is the purpose and the destination.
It’s a mission that’s taken on clear salience in the past two years against the backdrop of stifling confinement, as self-serving union goons and anemic administrators coupled to keep schools shuttered, while DEI hucksters and race-baiting ideologues bled districts dry for the chance to lash a nation of students trapped in online isolation onto their wheel of oppressive identity-obsession. It’s little wonder that support for policies promoting educational freedom and choice is surging, both in states and nationally. A June poll from RealClear Opinion Research found that 72% of voters support school choice, including a majority of Republicans (82%), independents (67%), and Democrats (68%). Last year alone saw 19 states enact 32 new or expanded education choice policies, while parents and other education voters made their displeasure with the system status quo clear at the ballot box from Virginia to California.
As we head into another school year, and into the heart of the midterm season, it’s appropriate for those who care about the cause of educational freedom to take a clear-eyed look at the landscape. Much of it is positive: Legislation that expands educational opportunity for students and their families continues to make headway in various states. The party with the strongest current commitment to educational freedom, the GOP, has a more favorable electoral position than that of the Democrats heading into the midterm elections, though that lead does appear somewhat more tenuous after several recent primary outcomes. And the grassroots momentum for system change that began during quarantine lockdowns can still be felt and seen.
Regardless of whether the Republicans take both chambers in November or take back only the House of Representatives (looking most likely at the moment), all signs point to the sole GOP focus on education, at least in the short term, being directed at higher education. House Republicans, led by Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Jim Banks (R-IN), released a first-foray messaging bill restructuring many of the myriad federal student loan programs, including ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. This (solid, in my opinion) bill presages a host of coming legislative action on the higher education side, leading up to a major overhaul of the severely-in-need-of-reform Higher Education Act.
All this means that at least until after the 2024 presidential election, most GOP efforts to expand education freedom will not come from the federal level but from the states. This is a good thing. The federal loan program is a ticking time bomb — Joe Biden’s continued loan repayment moratorium is the cheapest part of it, coming in at a cool $5 billion a month in new debt — and K-12 choice programs should be pursued almost entirely at the state and local level anyway.
State-level education freedom campaigns have also proved successful, in the past 18 months especially. Just last month, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona signed into law the country’s most expansive education savings account bill, which allows families to take state-provided schooling dollars to the education provider of their choice. The bill built on the state’s existing program and expanded eligibility to every K-12 student in Arizona. West Virginia, too, passed an expansive ESA bill last year, which was set to go into effect for the coming school year until it was blocked by a union-backed judge. (West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is appealing the ruling.)
Iowa’s GOP majority is poised to create an ESA program in the coming weeks, thanks to the almost single-handed efforts of Gov. Kim Reynolds. The plan originally failed to pass through the GOP-held Iowa House (after clearing the state Senate 31-18) due to recalcitrant Republicans. As the indefatigable Corey DeAngelis reported for Fox News, after failing to pass the bill with the current legislature, Reynolds waded into the primary cycle to find one that would. “In the GOP primary, the governor backed nine pro-school choice candidates, including — in a rare move — several challengers to incumbent legislators who had blocked her proposal. Eight of them won. The most prominent scalp belonged to Rep. Dustin Hite, an incumbent backed by the teachers’ union who blocked the governor’s school-choice bill as Chair of the House Education Committee.”
Reynolds’s involvement in the primary against GOP opponents of education choice is representative of a new tactic seen in many other states. Earlier this month in Tennessee, nine of the 10 House Republican candidates in the state’s primary who were supported by the Tennessee teachers union were defeated after a targeted conservative campaign against them. Choice advocates have had enough, it seems, of anti-education freedom Republicans and have thus far copied the conservative legal movement target-and-destroy playbook to great effect.
Yet, even with all the recent victories, educational freedom advocates should opt for reserved prudence instead of optimism. As an Arkansas Razorback fan, I have witnessed defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory far too often — an achievement the Republican Party is quite fond of as well.
American education sits at a crossroads. The veil hiding the ugly truth of our one-size-fits-none system of schooling has been torn away for a great many, and as we see, there is real interest among voters in exploring avenues for change. Yet any moment that so unsettles the national zeitgeist enough to provide such an opportunity also carries a tremendous amount of risk. Uncertainty is by nature unpleasant, and even the prospect of change can often be alarming. Reformers will have to navigate this swelling support for their cause without getting too far out over their skis. There is every possibility Republicans and educational freedom advocates misstep, overreach, and invite retrenchment to the status quo rather than the much-vaunted system “disruption” DeVos is always quick to invoke.
And this recent spate of legislative successes, while certainly positive, obscures some visible cracks in the coalition’s woodwork. As DeVos writes in Hostages No More, policy mechanisms such as vouchers or charter schools “are the ‘hows’ of education freedom. … In my experience, we spend way too much time arguing about the ‘hows.’ … The ‘why’ is much more important.”
One need look no further than the reframing of school choice into education freedom to see the truth in the secretary’s point. And it is the whys where disagreements get more significant and compromise more difficult. Having this conversation of why (or what) public education should or should not be constituted or oriented in one way or another is bound to get a little messy, but avoiding the question is how we got what should be a student- and families-oriented public service system controlled by adult-focused partisans and identitarian ideologues in the first place.
For the first time in a generation, at least the first time since the passage of No Child Left Behind, there appears appetite among millions of normal Americans to put some of the most fundamental assumptions about how we educate our citizenry back up for discussion. This offers an exceptional opportunity for those of us who, like me, wish to change the type of conversations we most frequently have about education in this country.
What do I mean by this? As I wrote in these pages back in March, there is no such thing as a value-less education. Education is inherently character-forming, despite our best efforts to sterilize and euthanize the process. Progressives understand this, though they don’t say it in so many words. It’s for this reason, as much as the base avariciousness of teachers union honchos, why the Left despises system choice mechanisms that permit homeschooling and parochial private schools. “For reasons such as this,” I wrote, “it is hard to overstate the importance of the debate over the proper role of parents in their children’s education. It is necessary for conservatives, then, to full-throatedly defend the right of parents to bring their children up in the virtues they so wish, to enunciate the reasons why this is necessary and good, and to promote through policy and politics the legal and practical ability to do so.”
Having it out about the values we wish to impart and promote through public education means reckoning with the fact that a pluralistic system across a vast, heterogenous society is going to involve some choices you oppose. Educational freedom means someone, somewhere is going to exercise their opportunity in ways you would not. That’s OK.
But educational freedom, as opposed to merely school choice, does necessitate some rules. Without order, without some restraint, some organizing form, freedom ceases to be liberty and becomes destructive license (Plato’s Republic isn’t assigned in many public schools, so see also: The Tempest). If freedom is the goal, then spades must be called spades, and priorities must be set. Some questions are “either, or” choices, period. Ravi Zacharias once put it: “In some cultures they love their neighbors; in other cultures, they eat them. Do you have any preference?”
Prioritizing character-formation education would also unsettle our achievement-score myopia. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published “A Nation at Risk,” warning how far American students were falling behind those in other countries. It is an easy watermark to point to when looking at the creation of modern test-score mania, and something the older generation of education reformers has yet to adequately reconsider. This all-consuming score obsession only increased in fervor, significance, and record of failure when achievement gaps between racial groups began to be used as metrics for district and educator accountability and eventually as proxies for racism. Consider instead an education aimed toward freedom and flourishing, focused not on internationally benchmarked PISA scores and pre-cal achievement but on things that matter just a little more.
As AEI's Robert Pondiscio points out, in discussing the scholarship of Ian Rowe: “If a child in poverty graduates from high school, finds full-time employment, gets married, and has children, in that order ... the chance they will remain in poverty as an adult drops to a mere 2%.”
Such an intervention requires value-laden instruction, however, and is far afield from the relativistic pedagogy slopped out in teacher education graduate programs. Too often, Rowe writes, “young people’s efforts to develop agency are thwarted, sometimes tragically, by the very people and institutions with the power and moral responsibility to propel their lives forward.” This is all the more true when considering the education system in question is a public one. A civilization unwilling or unable to propagate its virtues, that has denied or forgotten its history and contributions, that trains its citizenry to oppose it rather than cherish it, cannot be long for this Earth. “Begin with the infant in his cradle,” wrote public education champion Noah Webster in 1790. “Let the first word he lisps be ‘Washington.’”
Tellingly, DeVos’s overall argument for choice expansion programs returns time and again to test score comparisons at charter and traditional public schools. And while hers is a fine enough book, and you can count me on her side in the push for reform, it is this frequent return to existing status quo assumptions about scores and college attendance that are in no way dispositively valuable. We gave away the farm and Washington’s cherry tree and still score lower than Norway. Surely there is a better why for the public education system of the greatest country on the planet. Surely, we can aspire to more than this, to true educational freedom.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
