I’ve talked with colleagues about both sides of the school choice debate, and I’m always conflicted. Will being able to choose schools really provide better opportunities for students, or will it end up hurting public education in the long run? If you're a public schoolteacher, how are you feeling about it? I'm about to retire in a few years, but this could push me out sooner. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-sign-orders-school-choice-antisemitism-white-house-says-2025-01-29/

School choice is the sort of idea that seems to make sense intuitively to people who have no idea how the educational system works.

The argument is that schools will compete for students and that will improve education. That seems to check out--competition is a quasi-religious belief for a lot of people. But when you think about it, for that to work, you'd have to have parents saying "Hey, my kid is getting all A's. But he's not really that smart. I need to go find a school that will challenge him instead of this one." Roughly 0% of all parents are going to do that.

Instead, what you get with school choice at the best of times is parents of kids who are failing or frequently suspended shopping around for a school that will pass their kid along, or at least keep them in school, no matter how many fights the kid gets in or how little work gets done. You get a school district that starts to see a little bit of demographic change and then suddenly White Flight takes over and happens in a year instead of ten, since you don't have to sell your house to flee if you can just switch schools. At the worst, you see charter schools spending a quarter of their budget on advertising, then kicking out all the kids they don't want after count day, once they've locked down the funding. Public schools in areas with lots of charters know to expect huge enrollment after count day--the money stays with the charters, but the public schools are legally required to accept the kids if they live in-district.

School choice is overwhelmingly destructive both to the educational system as a whole and to educational quality for individual students and schools. We've tried it. It's completely failed to improve things, and has in fact made them worse. If we were doing what's in the best interest of students, we'd abandon the idea. But far too many ignorant people support it, so it lives on as a zombie policy.

The "choice" is just a way to try to dupe parents into supporting vouchers, merit pay, and other terrible things. The right does not want to improve public education--just allow the better off folks to have a better school. Other kids be darned. Just look at the red states and state of public education in them. Why would I want that?

It will definitely hurt the 35-40 million kids that depend on those federal funds for services (Special Ed, 504s, Title 1- small group or one on one intervention for reading). I retired early in June of 24 bc of a change in our sped director and direct supervisor- I’m so very grateful I did. I wasn’t necessarily ready to retire and was initially sour about the entire situation (1/3 of our dept left by June of 2024), but now I’m just grateful. I have friends in sped who trying to figure out if it makes sense to them if they retire. In fact we have teachers retired from one district (getting their pension) and working at another district full time.

If the "other" schools receiving funding had to follow the same rules (accept special ed students, accept and keep discipline issues, transport students, provide meals, deal with same standardized tests, etc), and if the money received per student were pro-rated based on how long each student spent at each school they attended this year, then I might support it.

But, that has not been case. So I'm not able to support it at all.

It’s tough to know if school choice will actually benefit students or if it’ll end up draining resources from public schools. As a teacher, I feel like public education might suffer in the long run, especially if funds are diverted. I can understand why you’re conflicted though, honestly I go back and forth.

I’ve dedicated my career to public education because I believe in its mission, but watching resources shift away makes me wonder if we’re being set up to fail. If school choice means public schools get less funding and more instability, I don’t know how much longer I can stick it out. I want to finish strong, but it’s getting harder to see a future where that’s possible.

I was typically against school choice for most of my adult life. However, the last two years have made me a supporter of school choice. I don’t feel it should be for private or charter schools, but students should be able to choose the public school they attend if they have the means to attend.

When certain topics come up, leftist buzzwords float to the surface like fat and grease in a pot of soup. One of my favorites has to be “white flight.” It’s the left’s hypocrisy and incoherence in a nutshell. White people are to blame for every problem minorities face, and when they leave, they’re blamed again for making the schools worse. I know I’ll be the one reported for saying it, so I’ll leave you to analyze the message that sends for yourself.

Anyway, we as teachers act like we’re so open minded, but our heads explode anytime someone suggests a slight divergence from the status quo. The way it’s done now is the way it’s always been, and the way it must be for all eternity. “But this is our system! We have to save the SYSTEM!!!” Good grief. The “system” couldn’t give two yanks about you or me. When one of us retires, dies, or otherwise moves on with our life’s work, they just plug in someone else in our place.

People who claim to care so deeply about the poor and downtrodden are always, without fail, the loudest voices against giving them options. They’ll squawk about racism, class warfare, and red states until their hair falls out just so they never have to experience anything that resembles change. Meanwhile, the red states they hate so much also tend to be the most rural. Struggling schools with high percentage minority populations, on the other hand, tend to be in highly populated urban areas, putting them in closer proximity to other schools. In other words, the minority communities are more likely to be able to take advantage of school choice.

Public education is the flagship for “crabs in a bucket” mentality. We’ll accept alternative schools as long as they have the same impediments that we have. We’ll only accept school choice if we place additional burdens on the families. We sit and wring our hands over every potential flaw, big or small, real or imagined, saying that if it’s not 100% foolproof right out of the gate, we can’t make any changes at all. We’d rather make sure no one rises to the top than risk one person falling behind. Public education, where free thought and innovation go to die.

I work at a HS that is kind of a unicorn…a comprehensive HS that is also a Voc Tech with 15 different CTE programs, including biotechnology, which I teach. All incoming 9th graders are encouraged to do Exploratory their first semester, in which they rotate through each CTE shop. At the end of first semester, the 9th graders choose their top 3 CTE programs so they can enroll in one of them depending on shop capacity, or they choose to discontinue CTE and become regular HS students instead. There’s choices right there!
Over the past 10 years, the CTE teachers have worked hard to update and improve the CTE programs, and now the great majority of 9th graders pick a CTE pathway vs. a fine arts/ academic pathway. In fact, we don’t have enough spots in CTE to meet demand, and many students go on a waiting list. Our school certainly isn’t perfect and has drawbacks, but I can say I’ve been very happy and fortunate to teach CTE, which has provided many more opportunities for my educational career than than simple academics.