For American families with children,
the days following Labor Day typically mark the return to the well-established
rhythms of school and work formed over generations. If things feel different
this year — a bit anxious, somewhat frayed, and with an air of unease hovering
over all of it — it’s likely because the school year getting underway is the
third in a row that has been either disrupted or is opening under a COVID-19-induced
cloud of uncertainty.

In many locales, even where schools are open for in-person instruction, there are divisive fights over mask mandates (or lack thereof) and quarantine rules. Divisive battles over critical race theory in school curricula continue to play out from statehouses to school board meetings. In all, there is a discernibly sour mood among American parents that may portend an increased willingness to rethink their relationship with local public schools — historically among the most stable and enduring institutional relationships in civil society.

“We haven’t been in a moment like this before where every parent in America had to ask, ‘What does my kid need right now and what resources do I have at my disposal to get them what they need?’” notes Alex Spurrier, a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, who along with his colleagues issued some intriguing new research, which estimates that one in five families are not getting what they want from their child’s school.

These so-called “overlooked” families fall into three categories: “Movers” (8.7 million) who had both the means and motivation to switch schools between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school year, beyond the ordinary progression from elementary to middle school; the “Missed” (0.6M), mostly kindergarteners, were eligible to be enrolled last year but declined to do so; and the “Muted” (1.5M), the children of “parents who are frustrated with their current schooling option and lack access to their preferred alternative(s).” These include, for example, families that would prefer a virtual school option, but live in districts that only offer in-person instruction.

It’s a fair bet that there’s a fourth category, likely a subset that cuts across the movers, missed, and muted. Call them “The Embittered”: those who are frustrated at the lack of predictability in their children’s school schedules, particularly when it interferes with work and child care arrangements. As I noted elsewhere recently, even parents with the luxury of working from home need to know that the plans they’ve made for their children’s education are stable, reliable, and not likely to change at a moment’s notice. In sum, it’s worth wondering if the general uncertainty and lack of a clear COVID-19 endgame may be something of a hammer-through-glass moment for school choice, which has long been beset by a dichotomy: The number of Americans who say they favor choice far exceeds the number that actually avail themselves of it.

Common sense suggests the
longer traditional public schools operate under a veil of uncertainty, the more
likely it becomes that alternate plans parents have made of necessity will persist
as new routines, plus time, become ingrained habits. Bellwether found,
for example, that
there are 1.2 million more homeschoolers today than before the pandemic, as
families simply took their children’s education into their own hands and homes.
Surprisingly, the
strongest growth in homeschooling was among Black and Hispanic families, historically among those
with the fewest choice options.

Meanwhile, on the policy side school choice has become a reliable political winner, at least in red states: According to the American Federation for Children, school choice legislature has passed in 21 states in this year already. An analysis in Education Next estimated that at least 3.6 million additional students are eligible to participate in new educational choice programs in seven states — and nearly 900,000 more in expanded choice programs in 14 others. If all of these programs are fully enrolled, this would nearly quadruple the number of children in private K–12 educational choice programs nationwide.

Before the pandemic, 85 percent of America’s 56.6 million children were in public schools; five percent in public charters; ten percent in private schools, homeschooled, or otherwise outside of public systems. There’s no reason to assume the cultural habit of sending our children to local district schools will be less than the dominant form in America anytime soon, or perhaps ever. But neither was there any reason to expect in March 2020 that we’d be looking at a third school year thrown into chaos by COVID-19, with no end in sight.

Whether driven by discontent or necessity, it’s increasingly clear
that American families’ relationships with local schools is in play to a degree
no one could have anticipated — nor school choice advocates would have dared to
dream — just 18 months ago.

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