On the night of Jan. 4, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted on a labor action that demanded that the city institute remote learning until Jan. 18. As Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot had already announced that no such transition to remote learning would take place, the union was effectively determining whether it would strike. The measure passed with 73% of the vote.
Immediately, there was a cascade of backlash from around the country and within Chicago itself. Many parents sued the union, arguing that their children needed to be in classrooms. The CTU was rightfully derided as a self-serving organization that places their own desires (an executive board member was vacationing in Puerto Rico at the time of the vote) over the needs of students, who are generally known to have suffered from 2020 and 2021’s remote learning.
But the operative word in that statement is “generally.” What many on the outside looking in (myself included) failed to understand is that not all Chicago families opposed the union. In fact, many parents — as many as 60% according to a survey conducted when COVID transmission in the city was low — were equally uncomfortable with a full return to in-person learning.
The science indicates that remote learning was catastrophically harmful, but stats aren’t that important when it comes to what parents want for their children. After all, nobody knows children better than their parents. If parents feel uncomfortable sending their children to in-person school, that discomfort should be validated. But, in equal measure, parents whose children desperately need in-person schooling should not be forced to conform to the fearful’s desires. The only way to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable differences?
School choice.
After all— yes, it’s better to trust parents than to rely on the data exclusively. A 2002 study published by the National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools found that “regardless of family income or background, students whose parents are involved in their schooling are more likely to have higher grades and test scores, attend school regularly, have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school.” Later scholarship continues to affirm those results.
Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has added an element of crippling uncertainty, but the core principle remains the same — parents, not governments or teachers’ unions, are the people most likely to make the right decision for children.
But coercion, political squabbles, and institutional failures limit parents’ ability to meet their children’s needs. Again, Chicago is an example, with families being caught in the middle of a broader collective bargaining battle between the city and the teachers’ union. In this case, the dispute was resolved within a reasonable amount of time, but it can be and has been so much worse. Look no further than the Los Angeles Teachers’ Union which, at one point, demanded Medicare-for-All as a prerequisite for returning to the classroom.
With choice, at least in theory, this would no longer be a concern. In the short term, families could pick schools that are mask-optional (or not), offer classes in-person (or not), or require vaccination (or not). In the long-term, parents could pick schools with institutional frameworks that best fit their child, and, with open policies in place, there could be a lot of variety.
But sadly, choice will not come on a silver platter. It will require hard work, activism, and pressuring quite a few legislators. Many states still have limited options. Vermont, North Dakota, and Nebraska offer neither charter schools nor a voucher or education savings account system.
No policy can make everybody happy, but, with school choice, we can make the most people possible happy. It places responsibility with the parent rather than the government or a union boss. It may be too late to mitigate the tension-filled dichotomy among Chicago’s families, but maybe we can spare the rest of the country a similar fate.
In 1978, Stephen D. Sugarman and I published our third book on school finance, “Education Choice: the Case for Family Control.” That summer, we designed a constitutional initiative for parental choice to be voted on by California citizens; we announced our hope for support to get it on the 1979 state ballot. Soon we received promising inquiries from could-be supporters in several states.
Milton Friedman called with an invitation to dinner. In the ’60s, he had been a repeat guest on my old Chicago radio show. Like us, he had moved to the Bay Area. We all spent a pleasant evening discussing our proposal to subsidize poor parents, leaving with hope of Milton’s voice in support.
Instead, my big money calls ceased. Milton and friends had filed their own, more pure, free-market style initiative, offering equal subsidy for all levels of family income. Neither his nor our proposal made it to the ballot.
Nevertheless, Friedman-style initiatives began to emerge in various states sponsored by newly organized nonprofits funded principally by wealthier free-market admirers. Many of these organizations survive to this day and remain stumping for Miltonian solutions to this civil plague of ours. Betsy DeVos was (and remains) an important figure among them.
Few have much to show in the way of choice programs focused upon lower-income families; several state systems, notably Florida and Ohio (plus D.C.) are happy exceptions, with very encouraging results as measured by test scores and parental satisfaction.
What the well-intending super-free-market champions of universal and uniform parental subsidies did succeed in producing on a grand scale was the unintended mobilization of the elite of the teacher unions who suddenly recognized the danger to themselves of empowering any parents to chooses, and especially those poor serving in the union’s inner-city empire.
Cannily, these, our society’s champion exploiters of the poor, mobilized to spread the gospel that school choice was by nature a gift to the rich, while the union remained the true and liberal hope of our tired and our poor. It is “liberal” to conscript such people!
In any case, the unions, to this day, continue to exploit the image of both Friedman and DeVos, making them appear as opponents of truly public education. Maybe worse, these sham Democrats are supported by my own chosen president who now slams charter schools while giving abject approval to our historic humiliation of the poor.
With his explicit blessing, the teacher unions maintain their thriving dominion over the lower-income family, meanwhile pretending to be its true political champion against those ever-grasping rich.
With some confidence, I urge Friedman’s intellectual heirs to consider enlarging their focus beyond market theory; the rescue of the poor family – and our own society – may turn out the winning message.
Say it loud and clear.
Not according to the Catholic Conference of Ohio. The Catholic Church has long supported school choice measures, particularly for disadvantaged children. But it also has been historically aligned with the labor movement, as evident in this excerpted statement from the Ohio bishops on proposed legislative changes to their state's collective bargaining laws for public employees:
The Catholic bishops of Ohio encourage leaders in government, labor and business to pursue changes that promote the common good without the elimination of collective bargaining ... [Economic] justice places the good of the person at the center of all economic activities ... It challenges society to measure the moral effectiveness of our economic practices by how well they strengthen families and provide for the poor and vulnerable. This social doctrine has long recognized that all people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, to decent working conditions, to organize and join unions or other associations, and to engage in collective bargaining.
Social justice also reaches public education, as the bishops write in a separate entry on their Web site:
Parents—the first and most important educators—have a fundamental right to choose the education best suited to the needs of their children, including public, private and religious schools. Government, through such means as tax credits and publicly funded scholarships, should help provide resources for parents, especially those of modest means, to exercise this basic right without discrimination.
