Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Educational Freedom – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen plenty of fearmongering and hysteria about the changing educational landscape. But don’t let your Facebook friends or Instagram followers lead you astray. What’s happening in education is exciting — and long overdue — not something to be feared.

As Tom Woods, a libertarian scholar and author, might put it, “Your Facebook friends are wrong about education.” Woods has written several ebooks on a similar theme, such as Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Healthcare. The same could be said about educational freedom.

Let’s start with President Donald Trump’s push to eliminate the Department of Education, which has many people in a tizzy. There is no constitutional role for the federal government regarding education. This wasn’t an accidental oversight. Many Founding Fathers believed strongly in a governmental role in education; they just did not believe this was the role of the federal government. They recognized that decisions about education are best left to parents, with the possible support of state and local governments. No wonder the U.S. Department of Education didn’t even exist until 1980.

The motives for creating the department were probably good — supporters saw it as a way to ensure equal access to education regardless of race, income, or disability. But top-down control is not the way to achieve these goals. History has shown that using regulations and bureaucracy to drive quality doesn’t work. For example, in the highly regulated Baltimore public schools, 40 percent of high schools that administered the state exam in 2023 did not have a single student score proficient in math.

Education is, by its nature, very individualized. Different children have different educational needs. Beyond that, parents have a wide variety of considerations when it comes to education, including quality, pedagogy, values, religious teachings, safety, and environment. When rules about education are pushed at the federal level, it’s impossible to have the flexibility to meet these varied preferences and needs. And it’s hard for parents who disagree with the federal rules to make their voices heard. 

Recognizing the individual nature of education, there has been a growing move to let funding follow students to various educational options rather than funding certain public schools. These programs are collectively called school choice since the early ones did just that — equip parents to choose a school other than the one their children had been assigned to. With vouchers, a portion of state funding can be used for private school tuition, and with tax credit scholarships, donors receive a credit against their state taxes for donating to organizations that provide private school scholarships.

But not all families want a conventional school. Some states offer more flexible education savings accounts, funded by state taxes, which can be used for expenses such as tutoring, curriculum, à la carte classes, and services for kids with special needs. Education tax credits can often offset expenses for a similarly diverse range of options. These more versatile “school” choice programs can typically be used for microschools, which are small schools that tend to group kids by ability rather than just age and use a student-centered approach; home education expenses; and hybrid options that include some days at home and some days in person.

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Trump campaigned on school choice, and many supporters are pushing for a federal program. But the same concerns that justify ending the U.S. Department of Education give good reasons to be wary of a federal school choice program. While every state constitution mandates the creation of a public education system, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention education. Moreover, when states attempt to push harmful regulations on school choice programs, parents and other supporters have opportunities to rebuff those regulations. But at the federal level, it’s much harder to make an impact. Given both the constitutional and logistical issues, school choice programs are best enacted at the state level.

The good news is that school choice has expanded tremendously at the state level. The first modern school voucher program was enacted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990. There are now more than 80 school choice programs, including vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts, operating in thirty-three states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Around 1.2 million students are participating in private school choice programs this year, compared to around 10,000 in 1996.

Of course, your Facebook friends are probably telling you this school choice expansion is terrible — that it will destroy public schools, is racist, and won’t help kids in rural areas. And I can’t skip the laughable claim that private schools aren’t as accountable as public schools. Well, your Facebook friends are wrong on all counts. 

When someone tells you that school choice will destroy public schools, ask them how. Public schools are only affected if kids leave them for another educational option. Even then, only a portion of the funding would follow the kids, with the bulk remaining in the school they no longer attend. Anyone who thinks school choice will destroy public schools must assume nearly every student would switch schools as soon as it was feasible. Even the most ardent school choice supporters don’t think that. But if you believe that most students currently in public schools want to leave, shouldn’t that make you support choice? Why would you like students trapped in a school that isn’t working for them?

You may have also seen the allegation that school choice is racist or that it originated as a way for white Southerners to avoid integrated schools in the 1950s. In reality, racial minorities are often the biggest beneficiaries of school choice because they are often assigned to the lowest-performing public schools. That may explain why around 75 percent of black and Hispanic parents support school choice programs. While it’s true that some people wanted to use a voucher-type system to establish all-white private schools following school desegregation, the idea of school choice dates back to at least 1780 in the U.S., as the Cato Institute’s School Choice Timeline shows. Moreover, those same people had already used public schools to enforce segregated schooling.

When it comes to rural areas, your Facebook friends are probably offering contradictory claims — saying school choice will destroy rural public schools while simultaneously saying it won’t help kids in rural areas because other schools are not available. In reality, neither of these charges is true. As noted in a Heritage Foundation report, data from 2019 showed that a similar proportion of rural students attended public schools as did students in cities, and a greater proportion of rural students attended non-public schools than students in suburbs and towns. A 2022 study by Step Up for Students, Florida’s main scholarship organization, pointed to the growth of educational options in rural areas as school choice spread. Moreover, there is no evidence that the spread of school choice has harmed public schools. According to EdChoice, there have been twenty-eight studies looking at the competitive effects of school choice based on public school students’ test scores, and twenty-five found positive effects, while only two found negative effects.

This brings us to accountability. You’ve probably seen your Facebook friends saying school choice is bad because private schools aren’t as accountable as public schools. It’s absurd. Public schools attempt to drive accountability through bureaucratic rules and standardized test scores. But these things don’t empower parents to ensure their kids get a quality education, as evidenced by the earlier Baltimore example. What good does it do for parents to find out in high school that their kids didn’t learn to read? Especially if they don’t have access to another educational option. School choice programs offer true accountability because parents can leave — and take a portion of funding with them. The fear of losing funding can incentivize schools to improve. Just as important, it gives families the chance to find another option right away rather than wait years for their assigned school to improve.

So don’t let your Facebook friends steer you wrong. It may have made sense to assign kids to schools based on where they lived when public schools were created in the 1800s. But times have changed. In 2025, there’s no reason to limit kids to the school they happen to live near. With the spread of school choice programs, families across the income spectrum increasingly have access to the education that works for their children. And that’s a good thing.

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