School Choice Wouldn’t Just Reform Education. It Would Reform Society

Every once in a while, Americans’ lives are profoundly changed by a new law or government policy whose influence reaches far beyond its stated purpose. When such a powerful social catalyst is initially adopted, most are only aware of the immediate problem it is designed to address. But over time they discover the ripple effects are much larger, broader, and culturally transformative than they had imagined.

The 1944 GI Bill of Rights, for example, not only allowed millions of World War II veterans to get a college education; over time, it created enough high-income workers to expand America’s suburbs, accelerated the country’s transition to a knowledge-based economy, and even helped break down class barriers. Similarly, the 1956 Interstate Highway Act did much more than improve the speed of military and civilian transport. By cutting travel times, it nurtured entire industries, from malls and big-box stores to logistics firms and fast-food restaurants. Far-flung regions of the country were tied closer together, sparking a demand for greater social equality and enabling its advocates to organize more effectively.

But even these transformations pale compared to how school choice — the policy that lets families use the public funding set aside for their children’s education at a private or parochial school or other learning venue — promises to radically change American life.

We already know from the many experimental school-choice programs conducted over the years that once parents know they can provide their children with a quality education no matter where they live, one of their biggest expenses — housing — drops considerably. This is because families no longer feel they must settle in one of the few high-priced communities known for having good public schools. The research of Bartley Danielsen, professor of real estate at North Carolina State University, has been especially revealing. For more than a decade he has studied the impact of various school-choice programs on economically struggling areas, and no matter where he looked — from small towns in Vermont to the most congested districts of Paris, France — the result was always the same. Upwardly mobile families no longer felt the need to move to towns with better public schools, while many outsiders from more affluent areas wanted to move to what had been considered less desirable areas.

What this means as school choice becomes more prevalent is that millions of Americans will experience a sizeable increase in their disposable incomes — money they can use to pursue an advanced degree, start a new business, save for retirement, or contribute to a favored charity. At the same time, many stagnant and even distressed municipalities will experience a revitalizing influx of professionals and entrepreneurs who are no longer put off by the prospect of placing their kids in the local public school.

Turning to politics, the spread of school choice will clearly diminish the influence of America’s teachers’ unions, which have played a critical role in promoting such things as LGBT curricula, boys competing in girls’ sports, critical race theory, and DEI programs. With fewer students attending unionized public schools, fewer teachers will be paying union dues, consequently shrinking how much money the unions funnel to left-wing candidates ($39.8 million in 2024), progressive ballot initiatives, and related media campaigns. A smaller number of public-school teachers would reduce the size of the “volunteer” armies that teachers’ unions have historically made available to favored politicians during the crucial final weeks of their campaigns. The 203,000-member New Jersey Education Association, for example, would no longer be able to organize nearly the number of phone banks, town halls, door-to-door canvassing operations, and get-out-the-vote rallies it has during previous election cycles.

While the spread of school choice would significantly diminish the political influence of left-leaning teachers’ unions, it would also greatly magnify the importance of organized religion, which already supplies the majority of non-public-school teaching venues. This would happen, in part, because parishes have large spaces that are mostly unused during the work week and would be the most economical places in which to incubate a non-public school.

Research on experimental school-choice programs around the United States has shown that when parents are given the freedom to direct the public dollars for their kids’ educations, the preference for a religiously affiliated venue is surprisingly high. For example, when the State of Indiana decided to subsidize 34,000 poor and minority children to attend private schools in 2016, participating families gave as their primary incentive “a more religious environment,” not “better academics” (which came in second). Similarly, a study of New Orleans parents who put their children in a state-funded voucher program post-Katrina revealed that “having religious subject matter inform the curriculum” was a major consideration in their choice of schools.

As Christel J. Manning, professor of religious studies at Sacred Heart University, has documented, parents’ desire to have their children educated in a religious venue, given the option, extends even to many “religiously unaffiliated” and “marginally religious” mothers and fathers. Whether it is because they themselves fell away from their faith before starting a family or switched from their parents’ very strict faith to a liberal one or simply ended up as time-pressed single parents, many secular parents are more than happy to let parochial schools provide their children a moral vision.

As the spread of school choice increases home affordability, tames the disproportionate political influence of teachers’ unions, and gives organized religion a greater role in the education of future generations, it could also help reduce the U.S. government’s $38 trillion debt. It could do so in part by increasing students’ future wages, thereby increasing how much they pay in taxes. A study by the economics think tank CESifo Network found that students whose families were given a choice of schools earn five to seven percent more annually by the time they are 30 than those whose families were not given that choice.

Equally helpful to lowering the federal debt would be the tendency of school choice to reduce the cost of such expensive government services as medical care for the poor, welfare, unemployment and food assistance, criminal corrections, and remedial education. Reports by David Figlio, professor of economics and education at Northwestern University; Angela Dills, professor of regional economic development at Western Carolina University; and CESifo show that students given a publicly funded choice of schools are not only less likely to commit crime, become teen parents, or suffer mental-health problems, but carry this resistance to dysfunctional behavior into adulthood. As a result, they are significantly less likely than their non-choice peers to claim a mental-health disability or file for welfare.

At state and local levels, budget windfalls would arise from the fact that the cost of subsidizing school choice is almost always less than keeping the same number of students in an existing public school. For example, when Martin Lueken, director of fiscal research for the EdChoice Foundation, calculated how much the State of New York could save by subsidizing just one percent of its students to leave its school districts, the result was over a quarter billion annually. And when he recalculated for ten percent of the Empire State’s K-12 students, the savings jumped to nearly $3 billion a year. Lueken’s studies of three other states — California, Connecticut, and New Jersey — yielded similar results.

Perhaps the most important way school choice could change American life is by paving the way for citizens to have a greater say over the provision of public services, a desire that has grown considerably in the wake of the suppression of evidence by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease of the origins of COVID-19, the mishandling of the Los Angeles wildfires by the State of California, massive social-service fraud in Minnesota, and other recent government-related scandals. Instead of requiring parents to negotiate a large bureaucracy to influence their sons’ and daughters’ schooling, choice programs would enable them to take direct, immediate, and comprehensive charge — not just by substituting a conventional private or parochial school for a public one but by choosing the educational environment that best suits their children’s unique needs and personalities. Already entities with names like “micro-school,” “homeschool collaborative,” “cyber school,” “hybrid school,” “church homeschool,” and “recovery school” are becoming commonplace in those parts of the country that have begun to experiment with school choice.

The more this educational freedom is exercised, the more it could open the door to other public-service reforms that replace impersonal bureaucracy with personal preference and individual responsibility. Its impact would “not be limited to education,” Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman predicted in a 1973 article for The New York Times Magazine. “Once the principle is accepted that parents should have the right to choose how their children are educated, it will be difficult to deny them the right to choose in other areas as well — health care, housing, or whatever. [It will] be the opening wedge for the introduction of choice and competition into a wide variety of other government services.”

Of course, detailing all the social changes that nationwide adoption of school choice is likely to precipitate is not the same thing as saying these changes will happen anytime soon. After all, each of the 18 states that currently subsidizes parents to pick their children’s schools is either solidly Republican or was able to get choice legislation at a moment when the GOP happened to control both the executive and legislative branches of government. To get blue and purple states to make it unanimous means overcoming the resistance of powerful factions firmly opposed to greater parental control of K-12 education — most obviously teachers’ unions but also local boards of education and individuals whose home values have been grossly inflated by proximity to the “best” public schools.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that school choice will expand to the remaining 32 states far sooner than its opponents wish. There is, for example, a provision in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that, beginning in 2027, will allow any U.S. taxpayer to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal income-tax credit for donating to a nonprofit group that gives independent school scholarships to students from poor and middle-class families. What this means is that within a few years, every state could, at no expense to its citizens, develop a large network of charitably funded private and parochial schools, strategically located to serve students most in need of better educational opportunities. And though a state’s ability to do this will depend on its governor’s willingness to let local nonprofits receive tax-credited donations, its citizens would still be free to make such donations to scholarship programs in other parts of the country.

Over time, it is hard to imagine any blue or purple state governor denying better schooling options to his own disadvantaged children, while the money that could pay for it is flowing across the state line to help deserving students elsewhere — especially as studies from Harvard and elsewhere show that students from low-income households who have access to alternative K-12th-grade placements are 30 percent more likely to go to college and, once admitted, 70 percent more likely to earn a degree. Already, Colorado Democrat Jared Polis has become the first blue-state governor to pledge to enroll his state in the new scholarship program. “I would be crazy not to,” he said.

At the same time that Congress passed a bill designed to advance school choice in purple and blue states, the cabinet-level department that has historically provided teachers’ unions with their greatest control over state school systems — the U.S. Department of Education — is in the process of being dismantled. Subsidiary agencies such as the $28 billion School Improvement Grants Program and Head Start will not be ended but transferred to departments where operating regulations will no longer be designed to stymie school reform.

The second reason school choice will continue to expand is that voters everywhere have clearly taken to the idea, regardless of where their legislators currently stand on the issue. Whether it is because parents were shocked by the poor quality of many public-school classes conducted online during the COVID lockdowns, the extent to which teachers’ unions continue to promote woke ideology, or the fact that many people had bad K-12 experiences themselves, Americans increasingly favor a child’s right to alternative schooling. Indeed, when RealClear Opinion Research surveyed 1,000 registered voters in June 2023, an overwhelming 71 percent said they favored school choice, while just 13 percent expressed opposition. This support not only crossed party lines — with 66 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans, and 69 percent of Independents agreeing that parents should have the “right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs” — but when broken down by race, it was favored by 70 percent of Asians, 73 percent of blacks, 71 percent of Hispanics, and 71 percent of whites.

Even Democrat policymakers like Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education from 2009 to 2015, have become willing to jeopardize teachers’ unions’ support of their party by praising the federal tax credit scholarship provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Noting that students’ scores on national tests of science, math, and reading have fallen precipitously for years — and that almost all the exceptions are in school-choice states — he declared helping poor and minority families send their kids to alternative schools a “no-brainer,” adding, it “isn’t about abandoning Democratic values. It’s about fulfilling them.”

The final reason to think that school choice will continue to spread rapidly is that while a lot of progressive ideas about racial discrimination have fallen into disrepute, the goal of building a more just and equitable society has not. If we have learned anything from over three decades of research on choice, it is that detaching school assignment from zip code clearly improves racial integration. In 1998, for example, professors from the University of Texas found that the lunchrooms of private and parochial schools tend to be more integrated than public-school lunchrooms. In other words, students in non-public schools mix more frequently and spontaneously with students of other races when they are outside class. This happens, the professors came to see, because almost every private or parochial school has a distinct theme: a religious outlook, an educational philosophy, or an emphasis like science or the arts. And by choosing their children’s schools, families are effectively giving them something other than a racial identity with which to build relationships.

As for exactly when school choice will reach a tipping point and be practiced in almost every state, no one can say, for it is in the nature of political watersheds that they hover unpredictably until some seemingly ordinary event triggers a rapid and no longer stoppable transformation. What we do know is that the potential for school choice to produce far-reaching social transformations is increasingly sensed, if not by the larger public, then certainly in policy circles. When American Federation for Children fellow Shaka Mitchell prefaced his recent congressional testimony on school choice by calling it “not only a matter of education policy but also an issue of economic growth, civic health, and long-term national competitiveness,” no one from either party had to ask what he meant.

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