Introduction to Volume 18: A School Choice Revolution?

My last election had more voters who were over 90 than under 30.

A school board member

Some activists hailed 2021 as the (U.S.) year of school choice. More accurately, we might call the 2020s the decade of school choice, at least so far. In 2020 no U.S. state had universal school choice. Today, pro-choice EdChoice (2023) proclaims that in just three years “the number of states with universal or near-universal private school choice programs has grown from zero to ten” with additional states like Texas waiting in the wings. Charter schools keep growing, now accounting for more than 7% of public school enrollment, as new JSC editorial board member Jamison White (2023) points out. As ESAs expand, some charter networks quietly consider opening private schools to diversify. Homeschooling rose rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic (Duvall, 2021), and post-pandemic has receded less than expected. Relatedly, see Angela Watson’s call for manuscripts for a special issue on homeschooling. Hybrid homeschools, a recent innovation, have grown quickly, as JSC book review editor Eric Wearne (2020) shows in his pioneering book on the subject. As Watson (2024) reports, the same holds for a more recent pandemic-based innovation, parent created microschools. And of course, the traditional means of school choice, Tiebout choice of residence, continues to work for those with sufficient wealth to afford a range of housing options. Moving to “better” school catchment areas is the least politically controversial, least studied, and least equitable form of choice.

What do parents want?

As an observer of school choice for a quarter century, I offer three broad thoughts about where all this is going. First, as we have known for some time, parental choices reflect safety, academic rigor, and academic fit (Holmes Erickson, 2017). As my work shows, other factors such as organizational trust also play a role. Where administrators (and school boards) treat teachers and parents like numbers, with no personal attention when issues arise, then some will exit when they have options (Hess et al., 2001; Milliman & Maranto, 2009). Racism exists (e.g., Buckley & Schneider, 2009), but generally, more legitimate motives dominate parent decision-making. In part, the growth of school choice since COVID-19 reflects less trust in U.S. public schools (Ritter, 2023). Many school districts closed physical schools despite scientific evidence of the modest health benefits and substantial negatives for student mental health, achievement, attainment, and equity, with the least advantaged students suffering the most, both in the U.S (works within Maranto & Marshall, 2024). and internationally (Jakubowski et al., 2024). Yet respected researchers and AERA leaders (e.g., Milner, 2023, p. 59) call it racist to even consider that COVID-related school closures disproportionately harmed minority communities. In short, elite institutions and many policymakers seemed strangely isolated from and indifferent toward parents and children, a theme I’ll return to below. If alternative, smaller, publicly funded schools arise from existing social organizations like houses of worship or ethnic communities (e.g., works in Fox & Buchanan, 2014), this could increase subsidiarity and schools’ social capital, rendering elite indifference less damaging to nonelites.

Though conservative activists overstate it, what Matthew Yglesias (2019) called the upper class “Great Awokening” has influenced curricula and teaching in many places. Many parents learned of this during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it certainly increased support for schooling options, particularly but not exclusively among conservatives. The widespread abandonment of academic rigor, enabled by the pandemic but in accord with the equity revolution supported by Ed Schools and other institutions in both rich (Nomani & Eden, 2020) and poor neighborhoods also encouraged parents to seek other options. Regarding the latter, working with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), new Mayor Brandon Johnson, himself a former CTU organizer, declared his intention to close the city’s successful, well-integrated magnet schools because when Black students in those schools succeed academically “what ends up happening is that all other Black students who didn’t meet those same standards get shamed.” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates agreed, while sending her own son to a private school (Wall Street Journal, 2023a).

Their views may not represent nonelite Chicago parents but do reflect dominant thinking at schools of education since at least 1918, when the National Education Association (NEA, then an administrator’s organization) issued the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, which marginalized academic subjects and prioritized life skills. This sets up my second observation. As I argue elsewhere (Maranto & Wai, 2020; Maranto, 2023), demands for a greater range of education alternatives in part reflect the century old failure of the U.S. schools of education which influence curricula, and train teachers and school leaders. While enjoying the trappings of science, Ed Schools too often reject scientifically and historically validated knowledge on matters ranging from backing “three cueuing” to teach reading to support for Antiracism, leaving American schools (and America) worse off in the process. Until around 1970 Ed School failures mattered little because discriminatory labor markets enabled schools to hire highly capable women and African Americans whose prodigious talents overcame both defects in their training, and poor treatment from educational leaders who viewed teachers as factory workers. Those talented people now take jobs where their talents are valued, leaving schools less able to meet parent demands for safety and rigor.

The birth dearth and school choice

Third, America is suffering a birth dearth unlike any before in U.S. history, though resembling recent trends in post-industrial Japan, South Korea, parts of Europe, and even some developing countries (CIA, 2023). As Vlad Kogan (forthcoming) shows, this means that increasingly, those voting in school board (and other) elections governing public schools are older and whiter than parents. More importantly, those voters lack recent experience in schools. They instead base their votes on nostalgia or ideology – left in blue places; right in red ones – undermining already weak electoral accountability systems that in theory reward or punish office holders based on school performance. One school board member in a district with roughly 8,000 students lamented that few voters had children in district schools since “my last election had more voters who were over 90 than under 30” (personal communication, September 28, 2023). Discouraged by educational administrators, few nonparents volunteer in schools; thus, voters “judge” schools they do not understand. In short, we face a serious disconnect between frail accountability systems disconnected from school performance and smaller family size, with parents investing more in the success of each child, and thus more likely to demand school choices, whether within public schools (such as via Advanced Placement classes), outside via different schools, or no schools at all.

The fact that fewer Americans have firsthand knowledge of and skin in the game in their local public schools could open the door for more school choice, as happened in ideologically conservative states like Iowa and Arkansas. On the other hand, it could decrease school choice in liberal states: 2023 saw the first major erasure of a public scholarship program for impoverished children, in Illinois (Wall Street Journal, 2023b). Voter disconnect from how schools serve (or fail to serve) low income families could enable a school choice recession.

Certainly, reduced public experience in public schools will make school choice policies more partisan. Just a decade ago prominent liberal Democrats including President Obama and U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein supported charter schools and had at least nuanced views toward vouchers enabling low-income children to attend private schools. For Obama, this reflected his frustration trying to improve Chicago Public Schools (Maranto & McShane, 2012). A decade later, such experiential knowledge is less common among the public, the politicians, and elite media (as regards the Washington Post, see Maranto & Cheng, 2023). On the flip side, less experience in schools may lead conservatives and libertarians to zealously back school choice even when their own local public schools work very well.

The birth dearth also means a declining market for all schools. This will affect how public schools view their charter and private competitors, and how those competitors view each other. The toughest school choice battles will likely occur where the number of five-year olds declines the most. These battles will likely pit politically powerful public schools against schools of choice, but they will also pit different schools of choice against each other. In Philadelphia, for example, the district schools have taken over regulation of the city’s charter schools, using that power to close politically weak, Black-run charter schools (regardless of quality) while leaving politically connected white-run charter schools untouched. The newly elected mayor seems to want to halt this inequity (Marshall & Maranto, 2023).

Meanwhile, back at the journal of school choice

These are fascinating topics. I hope to see submissions to the Journal of School Choice addressing these and related subjects in the U.S. and across the globe. I also hope to see more such research presented at the annual International School Choice and Reform Conference (ISCRC), which is associated with JSC. Our just concluded 2024 conference in Madrid had a record turnout, nearly 200 researchers and practitioners. We believe ISCRC-2025 in Ft. Lauderdale will be equally successful.

Here at the JSC, we have continued to keep turnaround time from submission to initial decision at around 9 weeks for most manuscripts – far better than average for an academic journal. Our acceptance rate remains around 35%; our impact factor hovers around 1.0—not quite where I want but respectable, nonetheless. This year I have thanked twelve longtime editorial board members for their service, while welcoming ten new, ideologically diverse members with fresh perspectives. We continue to invite ideologically diverse reviewers, a requirement for good social science (works within Frisby et al., 2023). Alas, I cannot control who accepts my invitation to review. If I or another editor asks you to review a manuscript for this or any journal, please do it.

Also feel free to suggest a Journal of School Choice special issue. Our 2022 special issue just came out as a book edited by me and JSC consulting editor David Marshall, COVID-19 and Schools: Policy, Stakeholders, and School Choice. In 2023 Tommaso Agasisti, Rodrigo Queiroz e Melo, and I edited another special issue on School Choice in Europe, which might also become a book. As mentioned, for 2024 Johns Hopkins University researcher Angela Watson is editing a special issue on changing homeschooling research. See her call for manuscripts, which follows.

We are starting Volume 18 with a remarkable set of papers, particularly the Patrick Wolf et al. study finding that more state level school choice is associated with greater achievement gains, and the fascinating manuscript by Paul Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel ranking state charter sectors by their academic performance. This is the sort of work we exist for.

With that, enjoy Volume 18 (no. 1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).