Op-Ed: Education choice benefits all – except teachers unions

A standard argument against school choice is that these programs unfairly deprive government-run public schools of money, to the detriment of the children who remain behind. A new study demonstrates that the opposite is true: while saving taxpayer dollars, education choice programs actually increase per-student funding for those who remain in conventional public schools.

The comprehensive study from EdChoice shows education choice programs benefit children in all types of schools and other education options, and the taxpayers as well, confirming what previous studies have consistently found.

Private-education choice programs in 25 states and the District of Columbia saved taxpayers an average of $11,000 per student who enrolled in a choice school in fiscal year 2022, the study found.

“In FY 2022, the average public funding per student for education choice programs was about $6,000, compared to $17,000 per student for public schools in states where choice programs operate,” writes study author Martin F. Lueken, Ph.D. “That is, students using education choice programs only received around one-third (36%), on average, of the per-pupil funding amount their peers received in nearby public school systems.”

That amounts to massive savings of taxpayer dollars. The 48 programs EdChoice studied “saved state and local taxpayers between $19.4 billion and $45.6 billion since their inception through FY 2022,” the study states. The programs saved taxpayers $3,300 to $7,800 per student, an average of $1.70 to $2.64 in estimated fiscal savings for each dollar spent.

As traditional public schools lose students when families are given a choice, the programs generally ensure that those schools retain some of the funding they were getting for the departing students. In states such as Georgia and Indiana, for example, school districts get to keep all their locally raised revenue, with only the state’s contribution following the child to the new school.

In addition, “many states have ‘declining enrollment adjustments’ or ‘hold harmless’ clauses in their funding frameworks,” the study notes. Such provisions “ensure that districts receive all or most of their previous basic education funding, based on figures from the prior year or another historical benchmark, regardless of any decreases in student numbers,” Lueken writes.

As a result, the traditional public schools often gain in per-student funding when states implement choice programs.

This gives public schools a windfall when students depart for better options. In addition to the fiscal cushion, the increased competition for students creates education benefits for the students who stay in the public schools. All the existing research shows that “students who remain in district schools that face increased competition from choice programs experience modest and positive learning gains,” the study states. “Contrary to claims that district school students are harmed by increased education choice, the evidence suggests the opposite.”

Education choice saves money without doing any harm at all to students whose parents choose to keep them in traditional public schools, Lueken concludes. It is in fact laughable to claim choice programs defund America’s government-run, union-dominated public schools. Just 2.4 percent of all publicly funded K-12 students attend schools of choice in the states with those programs, and these schools receive just 1.6 percent of those states’ taxpayer spending on K-12 education, the EdChoice study notes.

American taxpayers continue to deliver an enormous amount of money to the nation’s public schools, yet those schools are not responding in kind. While spending has increased rapidly since the 1980s, U.S. children’s academic achievement has declined.

Inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student in the United States increased by 280 percent from 1960 to 2020 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. Per-student K-12 spending in the United States “was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries” in 2019, the OECD reports.

For all that money, U.S. children scored below the average among developed countries in all three major curriculum areas – mathematics, reading, and science – in the OECD’s 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment.

Clearly, money does not determine academic achievement. Instead, “the ways in which financial resources are used seems to matter more for student performance than the level of investment in education,” the OECD reports. For example, “the mathematics scores of 15-year-old students in Japan are higher” than those of their U.S. peers, “even though Japan spends about 30% less,” the OECD notes in another study.

What’s so different in the United States is teachers unions’ control over our schools. Those unions gave more than $55 million in political contributions in 2022, plus more than $48 million in “soft/outside money,” according to Open Secrets. That amount of money buys a lot of political power.

Choice schools are generally not unionized, which helps explain the inaccurate complaints about public schools being defunded by choice programs and innocent children being harmed. If education choice becomes the norm and families take advantage of their new options, the teachers unions could lose tens of thousands of members – and their union dues.

That also explains Democrats’ intense opposition to choice. Democrats received fully 99.47 percent of the teachers unions’ political money in 2022, and only 0.38 percent went to Republicans. Democrats stand to lose tens of millions of dollars in currently reliable political donations if states expand education choice appreciably.

I stand corrected. It turns out that money does determine academic achievement after all.