How the School Choice Movement Finally Began Winning | Opinion

The following essay is an adapted excerpt from Corey A. DeAngelis' new book, The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools (Center Street, May 14).

Decades of appealing to Democrats by using liberal arguments for school choice—for example, that it expands educational opportunity for the most disadvantaged—failed to result in more than token support from a small number of elected officials on the Left. The bipartisan approach had a certain appeal to it, but it was not enough to form a winning coalition. Meanwhile, the school-choice movement writ large was avoiding the very arguments that might appeal to conservative, rural Republicans out of a concern that those arguments would turn off Democrats.

Moreover, it wasn't clear that the education reform coalition was really as bipartisan as it claimed. Over time, the education reform movement had begun to drift to the political Left—and spurn the political Right. Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute analyzed the political giving among staff at major education reform organizations. In 2000, political campaign contributions by education reform advocates were nearly "evenly split between Democratic and Republican candidates." But by 2019, more than 90 percent of the contributions were going to Democrats, even though Republican legislators were much more likely to support education reforms like school choice.

As Greene and Hess observed, education reform organizations that had bent over backward to avoid alienating liberals suddenly had no compunction about alienating conservatives or even the median voter. But if the Democrats weren't on board anyway, what did we have to lose?

So instead of playing the same old advocacy game, I went rogue. In 2020, I began coordinating regularly with a small group of like-minded education choice advocates to discuss the future of our movement. We all recognized that the union response to COVID had provided a unique window of opportunity—parents were more aware than ever before of the problems with government schooling and they wanted solutions. Taking over school boards was not enough. They needed education choice, too. That required forming a winning political coalition.

America has two major political parties. To get anything done politically, you need at least one of them on board. Most Republicans already were on board for school choice as it aligns with their general support for families, freedom, and market competition. But there were enough GOP holdouts in deep red states' legislatures to block reform. Forming a winning coalition would require either persuading a sizable number of Democrats to buck one of their most powerful constituencies, or persuading a similar number of Republicans to side with their base, key coalitional allies, and a majority of parents. Which seems like the easier lift?

We decided that the first step to winning on school choice was to show frustrated families that school choice was a solution to their problems. Parents who had been upset about a host of issues—mask mandates, CRT in the classroom, secret transgender policies, males in girls' locker rooms, and so on—tended first to try to get schools or school boards to reverse the policies, then to go to the legislature to force their hands. We needed to show them how school-choice policies provided them with additional leverage with school officials and school boards, and an immediate escape hatch when they still wouldn't listen.

The second step was to help parents turn up the heat on state legislators, especially Republicans. If we amplified the voices of frustrated parents and the GOP's conservative base, then Republican politicians would feel pressure to vote for school choice. Until now, many GOP legislators had only been hearing from union lobbyists and their local superintendents. Now they needed to hear from a host of their actual constituents.

The third step to winning on school choice was to make the policy a litmus test for Republicans. Despite the pressure, some GOP legislators would probably continue to vote against it. We needed to let their constituents know who they were so the voters could replace them. We needed to transform the Grand Old Party into the Parents' Party.

If we were right that school choice was popular among the general population, then voters would reward the Republican Party in the general elections. The fourth step was capitalizing on those electoral victories. Success begets success. When legislators saw that school choice was a winning issue among voters, some of the holdouts would flip their views on the issue or risk being thrown out of office.

We presented our strategy to many of the legacy education reform groups but did not find a receptive audience. Even if it worked in a few deep red states, they argued, this hyperpartisan strategy was going to backfire in the long run. Tying school choice too closely to one party would make it impossible for anyone associated with the other party to embrace it. Red states might eventually come on board, but blue states would be lost forever.

We disagreed. First, the blue states were nowhere near making any progress on school choice and were highly unlikely to do so in even the distant future. If all we managed to do was pick up a few red states, that was already better than the stagnant status quo. And second, our strategy was only hyperpartisan in the short term. In the long term, our strategy was bipartisan, too, just in a more realistic fashion. How so? Those who championed bipartisanship appealed to the Left's ideals. That's nice, but insufficient. We were appealing to interests. With a few notable and admirable exceptions, Democratic politicians were not going to embrace choice because we persuaded them that it was the morally right thing to do. They were going to come on board because the voters forced them to.

If we passed school-choice laws in enough red states, then we would normalize them. As citizens of those states became accustomed to more education freedom, voters in other states would start demanding school choice, too. And if the issue of school choice gave the Republicans a significant enough advantage in elections, then Democrats would eventually get tired of losing and tell the unions they weren't going to die on that hill anymore. But we would never get to that point unless the school-choice movement—or at least some elements of it—was willing to make school choice a culture war issue.

Not a single state had universal school choice prior to 2021. In the past three years, 11 states have enacted it. This is a monumental achievement—and more victories for America's children are imminent. The red-state strategy was not only the most effective way to expand education choice, it was also the right thing to do.

Corey A. DeAngelis, PhD is a senior fellow at American Federation for Children and a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Follow @DeAngelisCorey

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.