Op-ed: Even public-school advocates admit competition can help raise U.S. educational quality

Some media outlets love to sound the alarm over any competition to public schools from alternative education options, but occasionally you find journalists speaking the quiet part aloud.

For example, WVNews.com recently published an article on declining public-school enrollment in West Virginia and nationwide. The article bemoans the trend, but it also admits it’s forcing schools to improve. 

“For a long time, public schools treated families as almost captive audiences because they didn’t have any competition,” said Thomas Toch, director of the FutureEd think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. 

“We know from economic policy that competition can improve the quality of products for consumers, and we’re seeing that in education.” 

Bingo. Let’s explore the ways public schools have improved by facing their unwelcome, but much-needed, competitors. 

Innovative learning programs 

We don’t often think of public-school classrooms as bastions of innovation, and former schoolteachers explain why. 

“No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes,” said the late John Taylor Gatto, ironically in a speech accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award. “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” 

Those words from 1990 still apply today, perhaps with even more relevance given our students’ ever-declining academic performance. 

The latest educational scandal involves college-age students at elite colleges who lack reading skills, leading some to warn of a national “literacy crisis.” Adam Kotsko, a humanities professor at North Central College near Chicago, even calls this illiteracy a “crime” perpetuated by our educational system. 

“What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen,” he argues. “They are being deprived of the ability to choose — for no real reason or benefit.” 

By emphasizing standardized tests and other bureaucratic benchmarks over actual learning, public schools are “actively cannibalizing students’ education experience,” according to Kotsko. 

“The world is a complicated place. People – their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires – are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions.” 

Enter new programs and routes to learning, long enjoyed by students in alternative and usually smaller educational options such as homeschooling and microschools. 

Special-needs children especially thrive in these settings, which can more easily provide “a distraction-free learning environment (or) individualized reading instruction,” according to Vox.com. 

“These families are changing the face of education in America, diversifying the homeschooling landscape while creating what is essentially a parallel school system, one that can be especially attractive to other parents whose kids had a bad experience in traditional schools.” 

These innovative approaches didn’t happen inside public schools, but since they’ve been so successful, a few public schools are beginning to copy their methods. For example, Toch points to the rise of “public Montessori programs, dual language programs and other innovative offerings that traditionally public schools didn’t provide much of.” 

“They also worked really hard to improve the quality of their instruction so that families felt that they were getting a more competitive opportunity,” he said. “That’s a big part of it.” 

Schools and customer service – no longer an oxymoron? 

Dwindling enrollment has also forced schools to get creative and more in touch with their “customers,” according to Toch. 

“Some school districts reach out to families at the end of the school year to see if they had a good experience and ask if there’s anything they can do to improve the quality of programing or help the families educationally,” he said. 

What a refreshing customer service idea – which may never have happened without the added pressure of fewer students. 

Unfortunately, far too many parents receive little to no acknowledgment if they express concerns over their child’s public education. The article from Vox quoted Shawna Wingert, who said her child’s school in Southern California was “rigid” over accommodations for her special-needs 3^rd grader. 

“Even requests that seemed simple, like asking for more advanced reading material, were difficult to fulfill,” the article explains. “Ultimately, she made the difficult decision to put her career on hold and homeschool both her kids.” 

Wingert found homeschooling provided the ability to tailor educational approaches to individual student needs. For example, her child with dyslexia could practice sight words outside with the family’s dog instead of being stuck in a classroom setting. 

“Let’s just figure out what works instead of being so constrained by the way we’re supposed to do it,” she argues. 

Her 3rd grader had excelled academically before attending school, but a typical classroom setting proved too overwhelming for effective learning, Wingert noted. 

Her child “would panic every morning at the idea of going to school, panic about getting shoes on, panic about getting socks on, panic about leaving the car to go into the classroom. It was such a difficult environment for them.” 

Wingert now advises public schools to give teachers more freedom to choose the educational methods they think will best meet their students’ needs. 

“It’s frustrating to me that teachers, year after year, are in a position where they have less and less autonomy in terms of making the right decisions for their kids,” she said. 

Retaining and recruiting local talent 

Finally, some schools in these competitive environments are learning to rely more on local connections to help recruit teachers and serve their students better. 

“In some of our research, we spoke to administrators who said they are now in the game of preparing teachers, which has traditionally not been the work of the K-12 schools,” explained Dr. Erin McHenry-Sorber, associate professor with the School of Education at West Virginia University. 

“We also see principals spending time recruiting retired teachers or locals they know in the community based on relationships they’ve developed to try and satisfy those needs.” 

While the article couches this as a negative development – public schools competing for a “limited pool” of qualified teachers! – doesn’t it show the innovation and networking best suited to local communities, as opposed to a top-down centralized approach? 

As Toch mentioned, economic policy shows how competition for highly valued resources – in this case, proven and qualified educators – improves overall “product” quality. 

For all the handwringing over dwindling public-school enrollment, more media outlets should be acknowledging why it’s been shrinking in the first place: dissatisfaction with a system treating families as “almost captive audiences.” 

If competition outside this system is helping it improve, shouldn’t we celebrate – not criticize – the trend? 

Ultimately, we’re all aiming for the “product” of an excellent, high-quality education for our children nationwide. The more we can accomplish this, the better for everyone involved.