Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom

In the fall of 2021, a politician told the truth and started a movement.

Glenn Youngkin, the underdog candidate for Virginia governor, defended parental control over children’s education in a debate. To which Terry McAuliffe, the front-runner, replied: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Some called it a “gaffe”—a mistake. But mistakes don’t inspire a million angry social media comments. Mistakes don’t upend elections. Mistakes don’t spark a prairie fire of parental dissatisfaction.

Only the truth does that.

Terry McAuliffe meant what he said. And parents across America knew he did. That’s what started the movement. He said the quiet part out loud.

Parents were patient at first when COVID-19 hit. They cooperated when schools were closed, doing their part to “stop the spread.” But as schools remained closed for months and months—well after it was clear that children could safely go back—the mood among Americans began to shift. I heard echoes of it repeatedly when I met with parents. They were frustrated. More importantly, their children were suffering. And the children suffering the most were the children who could least afford to be out of school: the poor and the disadvantaged. In other words, the very children the people who run our public schools claim to care about the most. In an egregious display of hypocrisy and ruthlessness, the school union bosses and public education establishment made every excuse to not open schools. They shifted goalposts. They made endless demands—few of them related to the pandemic or public health in any way—before they would even think about allowing children to return to the classroom.

They treated our children like bargaining chips. Like hostages. Pawns in a fight for power and resources—and ideology.

But the Terry McAuliffes of the world miscalculated. History will judge the prolonged closure of American schools as one of the biggest public health failures of our lifetime. It also opened parents’ eyes. When children started to “learn” remotely from their homes, parents saw firsthand what their children were being taught in America’s classrooms. Suddenly it was right there, on computer screens resting on kitchen tables. Far too many parents saw their kids learning very little at all, beyond how to mute and unmute a Zoom conference. Many awakened to all the things their children should have been learning, but didn’t. At worst, parents saw their children being taught to hate their country, and even to hate themselves. They saw lesson plans labeling the foundation of the American dream—of hard work and achievement—as a racist conspiracy, purposefully designed to oppress certain people. COVID-19 laid bare the failings of the system. What parents saw when their children were sent home fed the movement.

As 2021 went on, upset parents at school board meetings would be the subject of countless viral videos, news reports, and campaign commercials. Parents were feeling disempowered when it came to their children’s education—and they showed it. The object of their frustration morphed from school closings to mask mandates to critical race theory. But the central power disparity on display at every school board meeting remained unchanged: Parents stood behind microphones and begged public school officials to think about their children. And officials sat opposite them on daises and pondered what their price would be.

Horace Mann, the creator of America’s industrial-style public education system, once wrote: “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

Mann argued that parents could not be trusted to raise their children appropriately, and thus the children must be sent to compulsory public schooling. The school system he created—one that emulated the model of rigid, mass education developed in eighteenth-century Prussia—was intended to enforce conformity. Everyone learning to do the same things, the same way, to prepare them to populate America’s factories. It was a system where trained educators, not parents, knew best.¹

Mann was open about students being held “hostage” to his statist vision of education. Today the school union bosses and the education establishment are still using our kids as hostages to a cause, but they’re not as open about just what that cause is. Most parents take them at their word that they are dedicated to educating children, which many, many teachers are. But teachers are not the ones who hold the power in education. The real cause for which the education establishment has been willing to sacrifice the education of so many American children has little to do with educating students and empowering parents and much to do with enriching and placating adults. The jobs, the pay, the bloat, the power of the education system is their cause. The students are merely the means to that end.

The growing awareness of parental powerlessness in the face of the public education establishment has brought us to a pivotal time. Suburban parents have learned what urban parents have long known—even the “good” schools care more about the people who run them than the children and teachers within.

Those parents who can afford to have begun voting with their feet. They have moved to different cities or switched their children to private schools that they know will be reliably open. Others have opted to homeschool their kids because of the poisonous messages being taught in public schools. School choice, long demonized by the education establishment, is being transformed in the public’s eye from an interesting experiment to an absolute necessity. And more and more parents are wondering why education freedom, by which I mean the ability for a family to choose when, where, and how their child is educated, isn’t the norm for all kids instead of the privilege of the wealthy.

This age of parental enlightenment couldn’t have come at a worse time for the public school establishment. It’s not just that they kept schools needlessly shuttered and kids needlessly masked during the pandemic. It’s not even the fact that they were caught trying to supplant academics with racially charged indoctrination. Even before COVID-19—before critical race theory—America’s schools were failing, and American students were falling further and further behind. The system has become a giant albatross for families nationwide.

The Nation’s Report Card, which lists the results of the only nationally administered assessment of student learning, showed the first recorded decline in math and reading scores for thirteen-year-olds in the fifty-year history of the assessment before the pandemic.² Some examples of just how bad things are:

Not even high-performing students saw any measurable achievement gains pre-pandemic. There wasn’t a single bright spot to be found anywhere in the data. No student group, of any age, of any ethnicity, saw their performance improve since 2012. Most saw declines.

Again, this was before COVID-19 shut down schools and learning.

Some say the solution is more money, but the data tells a different story. Per-pupil spending has nearly tripled in constant dollars since the 1960s. Today the United States spends, on average, 37 percent more per pupil than every other major developed nation.³ Yet math and science test scores aren’t improving. According to the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), American students rank thirty-seventh in the world in math.⁴ We rank in the teens in reading and science. In fact, the United States does not rank in the top ten globally on any subject tested.

Doing the same thing—and more of it—won’t bring about new results. Albert Einstein famously called such an approach the definition of insanity.

I made a long journey—thirty-plus years of working in the states to promote school choice, advise governors, and drive reforms—to come to Washington to champion a different approach: freedom.

Freedom defines the United States. But for most of the people on the daises at school board meetings, education freedom is an unthinkable concept. The establishment is organized against freedom because powerful groups are threatened by it. Overcoming these forces on behalf of America’s schoolchildren has always been a titanic struggle. Now the moms, the civil rights activists, the religious educators, and the visionaries who have fought this fight have gained potent new allies: the millions of American parents who are fed up with being considered nuisances and dismissed by the public school establishment.

Americans have never been as receptive to fundamental change in our education system as they are today. But decades-long experience in the education freedom trenches has taught me that this new receptivity must translate into political will—bipartisan political will. That means Democrats have to rethink their role as the political arm of the school union bosses. And many Republicans have to reevaluate their reluctance to act boldly to advance school choice.

The time has come for a truly new approach. We tried throwing truckloads of money at schools. That didn’t make them open any sooner during the pandemic. We tried banning poisonous ideologies like critical race theory, but that hasn’t—and won’t—stop the tendency to indoctrinate our children in government-run schools.

The answer is education freedom. It means empowering families to choose how and where the education dollars already designated for their children are spent—to fund students, not systems or buildings. It means giving teachers freedom to innovate and grow in their profession. It means reempowering the parents behind the podiums at school board meetings.

We have a rare opportunity to change the balance of power in our schools. And we can’t act quickly enough.

In late September 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to President Joe Biden likening vocal parents demanding better for their children to perpetrators of “domestic terrorism.” But the NSBA wasn’t acting on its own. It had been coordinating with the Biden White House. Five days after the letter was sent, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memo directing federal law enforcement—the FBI—to investigate perceived threats to school boards. American parents found themselves in the crosshairs of federal authorities for the “crime” of advocating for their children. The school board group later retracted the letter and issued an apology—albeit in the same disingenuous way a child apologizes for raiding the cookie jar after he gets caught. The DOJ, critically, did not retract its memo.

It was a truly frightening episode. Americans have been generally aware of collusion between the Democratic Party and the school union bosses to enforce union prerogatives in schools. But collusion between federal law enforcement and the education establishment to smother free speech is a new low that fundamentally threatens our freedoms. It compels us, as a nation, to act to restore the rights of parents in our schools.

In my decades working to help students, I have never before seen the kind of momentum for change we’ve seen in the last couple of years. The seeds we planted in state capitals in West Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, Arizona, Indiana, South Dakota, and Oklahoma—just to name a few—are bearing fruit with new or expanded state school choice programs.

This momentum is both a shot across the bow for politicians and a beacon of hope for millions of American parents. Our education system is controlled by adults who are using our children as hostages to their cause, be it more regulations on teachers, shutting down competition from charter schools, or the promotion of “woke” ideology. It’s long past time to affirm the obvious: Education must be about students, and not the special interests that control the system.

This is our movement. This is our moment. While the chapters that follow tell my story of fighting for education freedom, this is really a story of our cause: the cause of ensuring that every single child in America has equal access to a world-class education.

The cause of ensuring that our children are hostages no more.