The prevalence
of remedial college courses represents an obvious failing of our K-12 public
school system. Increasing school choice could be a solution.
This September, millions of college students move to campus for
their first semester. Many will begin courses in engineering, calculus,
science, or another advanced field, but other incoming freshmen will be stuck
in remedial classes, reviewing material they should have learned in the ninth
or tenth grade.
According to
a 2016 report from the
Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, somewhere between 40 to 60
percent of first-year college students now require remedial courses in math,
English, or both. This means that millions of students across the country are
trapped in classes that only cover content they should have learned in high
school.
The prevalence of remedial college courses represents an obvious
failing of our K-12 public school system. Increasing school choice could be a
solution.
After all,
it’s clear that traditional public schools simply aren’t working. Americans
spend around $12,000 per student annually, nearly 30 percent more on average
than the other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), a group of 35 developed countries, yet U.S. students
rank 30th in math and 19th in
science.
Would
dumping more money into public schools bring about better results?
Unfortunately, no. The conservative Heritage Foundation measured
both spending-per-pupil and academic accomplishment from 1970 to 2004, and
found that while per-student spending nearly doubled, reading proficiency scores
stayed flat.
Additionally, high school graduation rates have remained fairly
consistent since the 1990s, despite increased education spending. At the very
least, it’s clear that increased taxpayer outlays are no surefire solution to
America’s academic woes. So if we truly want to start preparing students for
college, we need to offer them opportunities away from our broken public K-12
school system.
The best way to do that is through school choice programs, which
give families the opportunity to choose the best school for their children by
providing alternate options, such as publicly funded charter schools and
granting families taxpayer dollars to cover private school tuition.
The American Federation for Children (AFC) is one of the largest
school choice advocacy organizations in the country. I spoke with AFC President
John Schilling, and he told me that “the more opportunities that you give
families to choose the best K-12 educational environment for their child, the
better these students are going to do in college.”
There’s quite a bit of empirical evidence to back up his claims
that school choice could improve outcomes on campus. According to AFC
documents, “17 empirical studies examined academic outcomes for students
participating in private school choice using random assignment, the ‘gold
standard’ of defensible social science: 11 report positive test score effects,
and only 2 report negative impact.”
Standardized
test scores closely correlate to
first-year college GPA, so if school choice can help raise students’ scores, it
can help them succeed on campus too—and, hopefully, lower the ever-increasing
need for remedial courses.
Data obtained from AFC also reports that school choice programs in
Florida increased college enrollment by 15 percent, while high school vouchers
in Milwaukee increased college matriculation rates by 9 percent. Programs in
Washington D.C. led to higher high school graduation rates and reading scores.
In all three programs, many of these gains went to low-income students, who are
often members of minority groups. Such impressive results for society’s
disadvantaged youth should win support for school choice among progressives.
Yet critics on the Left insist that school choice programs,
particularly those involving private vouchers, divert crucial money away from
supposedly cash-strapped public schools, leaving the students that remain
enrolled even worse off. They also argue that private schools aren’t held to
the same standards as their public counterparts.
While it’s true that school choice programs do redirect some money
away from public schools, they also take students away. There’s no reason schools
should keep the same funding when educating fewer students. As far as the
notion that private schools are unregulated and unaccountable, the only true
unaccountability lies in the absence of school choice, wherein parents have no
option but to continue sending their children to a public school that doesn’t
meet their child’s needs. Parents’ power to choose is apt to check private
schools.
The
question, then, remains: Why won’t the Left support school choice? When I asked
Schilling, he gave me a two-word answer: “Teachers’ unions.” Public-school
teachers unions give more than $30 million to
Democrats every year, and unions oppose school choice because the status quo
reinforces their power.
Public school teachers have historically been required to join
teachers unions, leading to more union dues and thus power for the
organizations. School choice programs shift more teaching jobs over to private
schools, where teachers aren’t required to unionize, making the unions less
powerful—giving them an obvious organizational incentive to lobby against
school choice, regardless of what’s best for students.
Yet school choice does align with some of the Left’s other stated
goals, like helping poor and minority students get a leg up. Of the 500,000
kids participating in voucher programs nationwide, nearly 400,000 are
low-income or minority students, according to AFC. Additionally, minorities are
the group most poorly served by our current public education system, and set up
for the most challenges in higher education: that’s why 60 percent of black and
Latino students at four-year colleges have to take remedial courses. Repeating
classes puts minority college students at a disadvantage against their peers,
adds extra costs, and drives down the likelihood that they’ll graduate on time.
Shouldn’t Democrats want to avoid that?
While a few
liberal politicians such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) have
broken from their party and supported school choice, almost all of the larger
school choice programs implemented nationwide were put in place by Republicans.
If Democrats really want to help disadvantaged groups succeed in K-12 education
and beyond, they should be willing to break away from party orthodoxy to
support education reform, even if means turning their back on teachers’ unions.
Regardless of how much teachers donate to campaigns, it’s unacceptable
that our public K-12 system school is failing so miserably and leaving so many
students poorly prepared for what comes next. Colleges are meant to prepare
students for the workforce, but they can’t do that if students are showing up
to campus already a step behind.
Brad Polumbo
is a freelance writer. His work has previously appeared in National Review, The
Daily Beast, and USA Today. You can follow him on Twitter @Brad_Polumbo.
