A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal lays out what has been on the minds of many (or at least mine) for some time. The traditional education establishment that was in charge of all things K-12 in the last century is crumbling. In the last decade, millions of children have exited their assigned public schools in exchange for a scholarship that is a fraction of what was spent on them by the education blob. It is becoming clear—parents want to be able to choose from a range of options when it comes to the education of their children.
Decades of surveys find that more than 70 percent of voters are in favor of open enrollment, charter schools, and education scholarship accounts. Similar surveys find that only about four in ten parents would choose to send their children to their assigned district school if they could choose from among a list of options. Public sentiment could hardly be stronger or more consistent.
This isn’t a fad or a temporary political moment, as teachers’ unions might have hoped. Having school choice is a sticky, pervasive expectation of raising children in the twenty-first century. And because union leadership has lost the battle of convincing parents that the establishment knows best when it comes to how to educate their children, they’ve turned to their last-ditch option—lawsuits.
Missouri is no exception in the teacher union legal battle. The Missouri National Education Association (NEA) is now suing to stop the MOScholars program. MOScholars gives parents around $7,000 in scholarship dollars to spend on alternative education options such as private school, a micro school, or homeschool, to name a few. By comparison, the average Missouri school district spent over $18,000 per student last year. Yet there are waiting lists for families willing to take less than half that amount to send their children to a school of their choice.
Over $15 billion was spent on Missouri’s 850,000 public school students last year. Yet the union representing the teachers in those schools is spending union resources to prevent $50 million (roughly one third of one percent) of the state’s education dollars from going to families who want out. It feels like the Missouri NEA is afraid the tide is turning. It feels like desperation.
