My Family Has School Choice. So Should Yours.

The pandemic showed me how many choices I have about my kids’ education, says Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward. Everyone should have the same options.

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Some families, including mine, have always had school choice. But until the pandemic, I hadn't had much occasion to think about what that really means.

After a disastrous spring of two kids doing spotty online learning through their Washington, D.C., public school, we knew we needed a change: We were contemplating a move to the suburbs, an in-person micro-school run by some friends, and an expensive traditional private school with the sort of fancy testing and hygiene plan that the public system could never manage. 

We even briefly considered starting a compound in West Virginia with some pals.

We were anxious and confused, but had the means to rebuild a proxy of a service that the government collects money for, and promises to provide.

We ended up organizing a pod of six kids from three families in a neighborhood full of overeducated, annoyingly high-functioning D.C. people. It worked out great, and the "governess" we hired—as he calls himself—is adored by our kids.

For us, the city's faltering efforts to reopen became just a mildly stressful inconvenience. But what about people who can't afford these options and are already grappling with massive uncertainties and a sense of powerlessness in their lives, such as parents who are out of work, homeless, or struggling with substance abuse?

A recent ProPublica investigation told the story of a gifted 12-year-old named Shemar attending a fully remote East Baltimore public school. His family's effort to access the free Wi-Fi provided by Comcast "foundered quickly in a bureaucratic dead end."

"No one made sure that Shemar logged on to his daily class or completed the assignments that were piling up in his Google Classroom account." His grandmother was on the scene, but she "attended little school while growing up in a sharecropping family…His great-uncle, who also lived in the house, had dropped out of school in South Carolina around the age of 8 and was illiterate."

In Baltimore, "citywide, about 80% of students had logged on," ProPublica reported, "but only 65% were reliably present, according to the district. Before the pandemic, the attendance rate was 87%."

In Los Angeles, kindergarten enrollment was down by about 14 percent; in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by 17 percent. And the prospects for kids who did enroll weren't great. According to one study, only one in three school districts required teachers to deliver instruction during the spring part of the lockdown.

Written by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Edited and graphics by Isaac Reese. Camera by Meredith Bragg.

Music: Killing Time by Stanley Gurvich; Just Before I Saw Her by Stanley Gurvich

Photos: Everett Collection/Newscom; Circa Images/Newscom; KEVIN MOHATT/REUTERS/Newscom; MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS/Newscom; Lev Radin/Sipa USA/Newscom; Johnny Louis/JL/Sipa USA/Newscom; Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Newscom; JOHN ANGELILLO/UPI/Newscom; Paul Hennessy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Lev Radin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Rafael Ben Ari/Dreamstime; Ales Utouka;Dreamstime