Letters to the Editor: November 2026

The Scolding Specter

As a product of Western civilization, I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile my gratitude for Western culture with my disgust at its flagrant decadence. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s address to Harvard University in the 1970s thus reads like a splash of ice water to the face: it stings but it’s refreshing.

Cicero Bruce resurrects Solzhenitsyn’s ghost to scold us at a time when, like children without parents, we are tormented by moral chaos of our own making (“One Day in the Life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” Sept.). We prefer to think of Solzhenitsyn as a victim of the Soviet state, as the 20th century’s most valuable informant of the horrific realities of totalitarian oppression. When a person flees such oppression to the West, surely he is better off, we think. Not necessarily, Solzhenitsyn counters.

In the West, and in the academy specifically, Progress with a capital “P” is elevated as an ideal in and of itself. Academia notoriously does not stop to consider the thing toward which we are progressing, and, in many cases, many in the academy could not tell you what that thing is. We say “Yay” to AI because new technology is a sign of Progress, but we refuse to acknowledge that the infrastructure such technology requires infringes on the well-being of small, rural communities across our country and, in the classroom, enables and even weaponizes the illiteracy of our students.

Likewise, “freedom” (or what academics refer to as freedom when they really mean license) is touted as the value we should prize above all else, even when one person’s license infringes on another’s right (e.g., a man’s license to enter a woman’s restroom under certain circumstances infringes on a woman’s right to privacy and safety in the company of other women). What good is freedom, asks Solzhenitsyn, when the outcome is moral instability? Even worse, what good is the label of freedom when the reality is functional oppression riding the line of a legal technicality?

Fortunately, Bruce, like Solzhenitsyn, doesn’t leave us without hope. Both call us toward something higher and more profound than Progress: spiritual transcendence. Our secular liberalism, our Progress, only push us forward, not upward. As Bruce observes, Solzhenitsyn echoes Thomistic principles in his insistence on the reconciliation of our earthly moral order with the divine order. An earthly moral code is necessary to prevent the oppression of our physical being (in the USSR, for instance), but the worship of abject license and Progress in the West oppresses our spiritual being. We have to move up if we truly want to move forward.

Maggie Miller

Dalton, Georgia

Choose Your Own Education

Lewis M. Andrews correctly describes the possibilities inherent in the accelerated growth of government-supported school choice (“School Choice Wouldn’t Just Reform Education. It Would Reform Society,” Sept.). That American public education is in crisis is not debatable; enrollment is down, spending is up, and achievement levels are stagnant on national exams and declining by international comparison. The disaster of extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic has harmed a generation of children and opened parents’ eyes to the need to seek alternatives to public schools.

As inevitable as the growth of private and religious schools, remote learning, and homeschooling appears to be, it still faces organized and powerful opposition from teachers’ unions. In late August, the head of New York State United Teachers proclaimed that Americans should not be separating into religious schools, whether Islamic, Catholic, or Jewish, and she warned of the fundamental threat to democracy if we allow this to occur. This unhinged fearmongering came in reaction to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s commitment to allow the federal tax credit for contributions to scholarship-granting organizations to fund scholarships in New York. She is only the second Democratic governor to make such a commitment, as unions across the country pressure their governors to reject the opportunities for educational pluralism provided for in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

Of course, that program and the state-level universal-choice programs adopted in red states across the country are not limited to religious schools or even to existing schools. They anticipate a new era of school creation, as well as the growth of nontraditional schools that utilize online resources and homeschooling. For this new school creation to occur, supporters of school choice must accept that not all schools and approaches will appeal to everyone. Part of the myth of public education is that all families want the same thing educationally. We know this is not true. We also know the history of anti-Catholic sentiment that attempted to squash the growth of the Catholic school system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, the anti-religious-school forces point to Islamic, Hasidic Jewish, Orthodox Christian, and Catholic schools as bridges too far in educational freedom.

For educational pluralism to grow, we need more schools grounded in a moral vision. This is particularly true of Catholic schools, which must adapt to new opportunities by moving away from the parish and diocesan models, which are no longer sustainable, and into a network approach similar to charter schools. These networks will distinguish themselves by their educational and theological vision rather than by their physical locations. Some of these networks already exist, such as the Chesterton schools and the Partnership schools, founded in New York and now growing in Ohio.

As Dr. Andrews points out, the thirst for religious education extends to parents who are “marginally religious” and “religiously unaffiliated.” So, too, there is desire for educational choice among nonreligious families. Some seek schools aligned with their values; others seek things the public schools are unable to provide. Truly, school choice is about much more than reforming schools.

Ray Domanico, Senior Fellow

Manhattan Institute

New York, New York

Lewis M. Andrews is spot-on in his assessment of school choice. He asks when school choice will “reach a tipping point and be practiced in almost every state.” I’m often confronted with some version of this question in public and private settings, and I’ve recited some version of his article nearly every time. Promoting “economic growth, civic health, and long-term national competitiveness” through school choice is a worthy endeavor, but it is wanting in one critical aspect: human formation.

Parents have substituted nostalgia for a Cesarean education and are surprised that Romans emerge from our public schools. I would build on Dr. Andrews’s diagnosis by saying we need parents to radically reclaim their children’s minds, souls, and bodies from the subcontractors our property taxes are subsidizing. Were states to take family formation more seriously, they would do fewer things to impact the futures parents could provide their children if they didn’t have to keep up with the local school district trustees. However, I am afraid our bread-and-circuses lives are not congruent with extreme ownership of our children, and Americans will accept a poor status quo until it’s too late. And it’s almost time to blow out the candles on this public education experiment.

Lance Christensen, Vice President

California Policy Center

Tustin, California

Lewis M. Andrews keenly illustrates that school choice is not merely an educational policy; it can renew families, neighborhoods, civic institutions, and the relationship between citizens and government. I would add that regardless of education policy, graduation without preparation is a civic failure.

A diploma is a public promise that a young person possesses a meaningful foundation in literacy, mathematics, reasoning, responsibility, and citizenship. Yet, while the national public-school graduation rate reached 87 percent in 2021-2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) 2024 Nation’s Report Card found that 45 percent of 12th graders performed below NAEP Basic in mathematics, and 32 percent performed below Basic in reading.

With approximately 3.43 million public-school graduates in 2022-2023, deficiencies on this scale represent millions of young people over only a few graduating classes. And hundreds of thousands have gone missing from graduation without a diploma at all. Black, Latino, and low-income families bear a disproportionate share of the harm, but the consequences belong to the entire country. We are making millions of empty promises. Employers lose prepared workers, communities lose potential leaders, and our democracy loses citizens equipped to evaluate evidence and participate thoughtfully in self-government.

No political party owns literacy, numeracy, parental dignity, or the future of a child. Dr. Andrews is right: school choice could reform society. I think he and his opponents would agree that their prescriptions should also restore the diploma as a genuine covenant. And I think they would agree that schools that consistently fail children should not be protected merely because they belong to the favored institutional category of one political camp or another. No policy should protect a delivery system while abandoning a public promise.

Andrews has performed a valuable service by showing that school choice could transform education and rebuild confidence that public institutions exist for citizens, rather than the other way around. I would add that a key first test of that transformation should be whether we restore meaning to the promise of the diploma itself. Until every family can expect that promise to be honored, graduation without preparation must be recognized for what it is: not a Republican failure or a Democratic failure but an American civic failure.

Steve Looney

Brooklyn, New York

I wholeheartedly agree with Lewis M. Andrews’s report on school choice and how it could influence society. I’d like to add positive information from the real world of a small Catholic school in Ohio. I was the principal of a K-8 Catholic elementary school, with only 60-80 students per year, and our four teachers taught combined grades successfully. Our students earned top academic honors in the local public high school, with many being named valedictorian their senior year.

We often received students who were in trouble in the public school but who acclimated quickly and successfully to our program. The infusion of Catholic faith gave them a sense of worth, while the small classes and mixed grades gave them more attention and validation as a loved child of God. I observed especially among students with behavior issues that they needed help overcoming the labels they had been assigned and that defined them in the public school.

Fifty percent of our students were Catholic and great role models for the 50 percent non-Catholic ones, which resulted in a productive and unintentional evangelization of many of the families that transferred into our school. With school choice becoming more available, the numbers should continue to increase, and the children would benefit most.

Carolyn Price

Bloomville, Ohio

I agree with many of Lewis M. Andrews’s arguments and appreciate his attention to the political, economic, and family dimensions of the school-choice question. Those dimensions are important, especially for parents seeking alternatives to public schools that no longer reflect their convictions.

I would add another perspective: that of those who have served in the administration and governance of private Catholic schools. From that vantage point, school-choice programs raise a serious concern. Government funding rarely remains detached from government regulation. Once public dollars flow into private religious schools, the pressure to conform to public-school standards, definitions, and mandates is likely to follow.

My own concern is grounded in experience. I served on the board of a Catholic school district in Minnesota when vouchers were first being discussed in the mid-1990s. At the time, we were not yet embroiled in today’s controversies over LGBT curricula, critical race theory, or diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas. Our concern was more immediate and practical: If such a program passed, we would be very cautious about participating in it, because accepting vouchers could oblige us to add staffing to meet state-mandated student-teacher ratios, special-education requirements, and other public-education policies.

That concern has only grown stronger with time. For Catholic and Christian schools, curriculum is not merely a neutral delivery system for information. It is inseparable from a view of the human person, the family, moral formation, and the purpose of education itself. What begins as concern over administrative compliance — staffing levels, special-education mandates, reporting obligations, and similar requirements — can easily become a broader pressure to accept public-school assumptions now being advanced or imposed as part of a larger progressive education agenda. If religious schools are required to conform to such expectations in order to receive public funds, their mission would be compromised. The danger is not simply bureaucratic inconvenience. It is the gradual loss of the freedom to teach from a distinctly Christian understanding of truth.

For that reason, supporters of school choice should insist not only on parental freedom but also on institutional freedom. A voucher system that expands access while binding Catholic and Christian schools to secular governmental norms would be a poor bargain. It may help families in the short term, but it could weaken the very schools those families are trying to preserve. We should be wary of public funding, for it can, through government-imposed homogenization, slowly erode the very benefits of the private-education ethos. For religious schools, that distinction may prove decisive.

Dennis Archambault

Hugo, Minnesota

Lewis M. Andrews does a superb job of weaving in economic arguments that do not rely on simplistic “market mechanisms.” Unfortunately, his stats about states with school choice aren’t quite right. Eighteen states have so-called universal choice, but a total of 34 have some form of private-school scholarships, through education savings accounts, vouchers, or tax credits. Many of the nonuniversal programs are means-tested or special-needs based.

Ashley Rogers Berner, Director

Institute for Education Policy, Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore, Maryland

What determines the quality of schools? The children who enter each day. Good public schools are located in affluent communities. Children raised in those communities have been socialized to attend school — that is, they are motivated to engage in behavior that leads to learning. More parents in these communities are college educated than in poor communities. These children’s adult role models, as well as the older children with whom they interact, create a social environment that encourages learning.

As regards school choice, many public school teachers, especially those who take their cues from teachers’ unions, object to school choice because, they say, it would harm public education by removing critical financial support. My objection to school choice has nothing to do with any harm it could do to public education but to the long-term harm it could do to private education. I assume that most choice programs are financed by giving taxpayer-funded vouchers in an amount based on the cost incurred by individual students in public schools to parents to pay for private schools. Taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools? Aye, there’s the rub.

How many vouchers would it take before they reach a predetermined limit? The public schools would still have to be funded, so some students who want vouchers would be unable to get them. Cue the union lawyers angling to sue based on the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment. As the economists say, “Tax money is fungible” and is exacted for the benefit of all. This assertion is a foot in the door for progressives and their harmful ideas about education.

Here’s another objection. There are many parents of limited means who make great sacrifices to finance the private education of their children. That sacrifice creates highly involved parents and highly motivated students, and that involvement and motivation create high-quality education. Suppose parents who have the means to finance private education don’t make use of that disposable income because they would rather use it on a second or third auto, a boat, a beach house, or a ski trip to the mountains? Vouchers eliminate the need for sacrifice and, therefore, involvement and motivation. The chance to rip off taxpayers for personal benefit is irresistible.

Here’s how to deal with bad public schools: (1) move, (2) find a good private school, or (3) homeschool (probably the best option). Don’t use the excuse that some parents don’t have those options as a reason to ruin private schools.

Phil Chesser

Crossville, Tennessee

As a former public school teacher and someone currently homeschooling his kids in one of those very places Lewis M. Andrews describes as a “high-priced” location known for its good public schools, I very much appreciated his extensive explanations why school choice offers an opportunity not only to significantly improve American education but to save taxpayers potentially billions of dollars and weaken the political influence of teachers’ unions.

I’d like to ask Dr. Andrews a few questions: What is the most commonly cited argument against school choice, and what would be his response? And, perhaps more interesting, what does he think is the best argument against school choice, and how would he counter that?

Casey Chalk

Reston, Virginia

I was intrigued to read Lewis M. Andrews’s article in conjunction with Pieter Vree’s column “The Death Throes of Democracy? The Revolt of the Elites at 30” (New Oxford Notebook, Sept.). Dr. Andrews outlines the ways widespread adoption of school-choice policies could transform American society. Mr. Vree discusses the “cult of diversity” and its deleterious effects on said society.

You might think that adherents of the cult of diversity would embrace school choice. After all, at my institution (I am a UConn professor) the diversity crowd has promoted racially segregated housing and racially segregated professional development. So, why not racially segregated schooling? And what better way to get it than using school choice to free schools from those pesky legal requirements prohibiting “separate but equal” treatment of the races? Surely, those with a “tourist’s view of the world,” as Vree describes them, would want more types of schools to visit.

Why don’t progressives embrace school choice? Crass political considerations are surely part of the reason. Teachers’ unions are a key part of the progressive political coalition, and they seek to maximize the number of public school teachers who pay union dues. However, there is a deeper reason. Progressivism (at least in its original form) is dedicated to centralizing power in the hands of experts. Progressives believe in applying the principles of science to running society. Thus is created “social science.” As the diversity cult is downstream from the progressive movement, Vree is correct in noting that “diversity is largely a top-down initiative, not a grassroots movement.”

U.S. education policy for at least the past 60 years has been dedicated to the progressive vision of society. Hence, in 1979 the federal Department of Education was created. In 2002 the Institute of Education Sciences was created to “provide scientific evidence on which to ground education practice and policy.” Once science has determined the best way to run schools, a centralized education system is by and far the best way to disseminate these “best practices” throughout the nation. The Common Core State Standards movement is a good example of the kind of top-down education system envisioned by progressives. School choice is anathema to this vision.

Yet, while modern science has proven adept at driving medical, agricultural, and technological innovation, it has shown itself to be woefully inept at improving civil society. True (hard) scientists tend to understand the reason for this failure. The Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman put it best when he characterized social science as a kind of “pseudo-science.” Social scientists “follow the forms, they gather data, but they don’t get any laws…they haven’t got anywhere…. I can’t believe that they know [anything].”

Andrews provides another rather surprising answer to the question of why modern proponents of diversity (a.k.a. segregation) don’t support school choice. It turns out that public-school lunchrooms are more segregated than those of private and parochial schools. Why? Andrews suggests that “by choosing their children’s schools, families are effectively giving them something other than a racial identity with which to build relationships.” Vree asks, “Is there no diversity of opinion within each [identity] group?” The answer, of course, is that there is a diversity of opinion within identity groups, but the cult of diversity ignores this diversity. Andrews suggests that public schools suppress this diversity, while private and parochial schools are more likely to let it flourish, allowing friendships to bloom on bases that transcend group identity.

Though Andrews’s article is wide ranging, he fails to emphasize the most important way school choice might transform society. The potential for this transformation is found by examining the most surprising fact he mentions: that even “marginally religious” and “religiously unaffiliated” parents prefer to have their children educated in religious schools if given the option. We also learn that parents participating in a school-choice program in the State of Indiana were more likely to choose “a more religious environment” than “better academics” as the primary reason to send their children to a private school.

How are we to understand this preference for religiosity even among religiously unaffiliated parents and at a time when (until very recently) religious identification was in decline? I postulate the following. As our country has aged, education has moved from being the exclusive purview of parents, churches, and local communities to an enterprise funded and directed by the federal government. The same progressive movement that was working to centralize education was also insisting that our schools teach “facts” and not “values.” Over time, the constitutional prohibition on “an establishment of religion” morphed into a prohibition against teaching religious mores at all. Education was forced to focus on “better academics” to the exclusion of “a more religious environment.” This worked out well for the progressives seeking to apply the principles of science to our education system, as modern science might be able to tell us how to get schools that produce “better academics,” but its techniques do not help us answer the most important questions of human existence. Hence, our educational policymakers view maximizing test scores as equivalent to optimizing the education system. Questions like “How can I live a moral life?” are believed to reside in the realm of values, not facts, and so are believed to be outside the purview of the education system.

In the past few decades, young adults have experienced a dramatic increase in rates of “internalizing disorders” like anxiety and depression. Why? There are many interrelated causes. However, an education system that refuses to engage with the most important questions of human life is not helping. Andrews suggests that even nonreligious parents are noticing the problems. School choice just might be the solution.

Christopher Rhoads, Associate Professor

Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut

Storrs, Connecticut

LEWIS M. ANDREWS REPLIES:

I share Dennis Archambault’s concern that a government subsidy of private education, thoughtlessly designed, could end up with secular mandates that defeat the purpose of both a religious and a private education. I feel good about the 18 states that have adopted universal school-choice policies, almost all of which give parents their own budget (via so-called education savings accounts) and wide discretion over how it can be spent (everything from private-school tuition to homeschooling). I’m far less enthusiastic about efforts to let a charter school, which is technically part of a public school district, become a parochial school. This is unfair to the school’s students (for the reasons Archambault gives) and to the nonreligious and those of other faiths, as a school that was supposed to provide an entire community with a widely desired academic specialization (i.e., science, the arts) would now benefit only those of one faith.

Ashley Rogers Berner is correct. Though only 18 states have universal school choice, others have privately funded scholarship programs and more targeted programs — for example, city-specific or experimental. There is also a growing movement to create what has come to be called “collaborative homeschools” or “church-based learning centers.” As the names suggest, this new academic form involves homeschooling families pooling their resources to run conventional classes and nonacademic electives within a local parish (whose space would otherwise go unused during the week). The Massachusetts Family Institute has been a pioneer in this area, providing guidelines to Boston-area churches on how to create their own homeschool collaboratives. To learn more, go to mafamily.org/resources/education-alternatives.

The economic concerns about “vouchers” that Phil Chesser expresses are exaggerated, because the administrative overlay of public education is so great that when a large number of parents take public money to educate privately, the total cost of education in a state actually goes down over the long run (after staffing adjustments). According to the EdChoice Foundation, the average per-pupil cost of public education in the United States in 2024 was $21,214, while the per-pupil cost of a student subsidized to use private resources was just $6,813. Also, most school-choice programs do not use “vouchers,” which was a late-20th-century model. Today’s school-choice families get a budget for each child — similar to a debit card — which they can spend on a wide variety of educational venues. The state cannot tell the family how to spend the money, but there is sufficient monitoring to be sure it goes to some form of education.

Casey Chalk asks for the most commonly cited argument against school choice. The arguments have changed over the years. One was that it is unconstitutional to use public money for parochial education, but the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). More recently, it is that school choice takes money away from public schools, although the reverse tends to be true. The per-pupil cost of public schooling is so much greater than many private options that when large numbers of students go private, a state’s overall K-12 spending is more likely to go down over time. I do have a concern about the provision in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which takes effect this January, that gives taxpayers a tax credit for donations up to $1,700 to a scholarship program that funds private education ($3,400 for couples). If taxpayers respond as enthusiastically as I suspect they will, fraudsters might set up phony scholarship programs. Fortunately, the U.S. Treasury has the same fear and seems to be establishing the necessary safeguards.

The most interesting question Christopher Rhoads raises is why more progressives don’t support school choice, especially as many prominent progressives through history have. In 1956 British Labour Party leader Anthony Crosland wrote a book called The Future of Socialism, in which he observed that the bureaucratic management of England’s welfare programs was turning out to be almost as bad as having no programs at all. He argued that the most efficient and effective way to provide social benefits, including education, was by distributing service-related vouchers. Here in the United States, the person most responsible for establishing America’s first modern choice program was a black activist and community organizer in the Wisconsin legislature named Annette “Polly” Williams. Among the many other American liberals who advocated for school choice are Martin Luther King Jr.’s chief strategist Wyatt Tee Walker, former Harvard Graduate School of Education dean Ted Sizer, and Senate icon Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In socially progressive countries like Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, school choice has been both legal and popular for decades.

Too Good

I have a serious complaint. The NOR is too good and way too interesting. The problem is that I eagerly await each month’s issue, and when it arrives, I can’t put it down. I generally finish it in one sitting. Then a whole month stretches before me! As a gesture of goodwill, is there any chance you could make the magazine less interesting? This can’t go on.

Eric Conway

Navan, Meath

Ireland

Could Be Better

The NOR would be better if it focused on good developments in the Church. There must be some somewhere!

Bill Creighton

Torrington, Connecticut

THE EDITOR REPLIES:

Of course there are good developments in the Church. And we haven’t ignored them. Since Bill Creighton wrote his letter, we’ve featured an article arguing that Popes Francis and Leo XIV’s seemingly novel pronouncements on capital punishment can, in fact, be read in continuity with tradition (“Pope Leo XIV, His Predecessors & the Death Penalty” by Christopher Zehnder, Jul.-Aug.). That’s good, right?

We published an article arguing that the priesthood is not collapsing, as has been widely speculated (“Why Some Priests Leave & Why Many Stay” by Ken Treece, June) — a good thing for all concerned.

We published a detailed examination of how advances in quantum mechanics might help demonstrate in scientific terms the substance/accidents distinction in Catholic teaching regarding transubstantiation (“Quantum Mechanics, Transubstantiation & Why Aristotle Was Right After All” Robert Kurland, June) — another good development.

We published Christopher Beiting’s review of My Confrontation with Hell by Msgr. Stephen Rossetti, highlighting the positive impact of this renowned exorcist’s ministry (June), a ministry that was, unfortunately, kneecapped that same month by Robert Cardinal McElroy, archbishop of Washington, D.C. — not good, but not our fault!

We published Lewis M. Andrews’s article on the tremendously good possibilities regarding school-choice measures (Sept.), including the benefits to Catholic schools (debated in the preceding letters).

We published a look at the positive relationship between recently beatified Fulton J. Sheen and Pope Pius XII, and the good they did fighting Nazism and communism (“The Blessed Archbishop & the Venerable Pope” by Ronald J. Rychlak, Oct.).

And, of course, Casey Chalk continues his column series on the “motives of credibility” — proofs accessible to the human intellect that the Catholic Church is precisely who she says she is. What could be better than that?

But alongside the good developments in the Church, new problems arise and old ones fester. These, too, must be acknowledged and addressed. If that necessary work is too burdensome, too bleak — and you’d rather have regular doses of the happy-clappy, smiley-face stuff — you may repair to your local diocesan newspaper.

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