General notes:
Summary:
Bio
Matt Welch is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of âfree minds and free markets.â He served as Reasonâs editor in chief from 2008-2016. He is co-author, along with Nick Gillespie, of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix Whatâs Wrong With America, which Tyler Cowen called âthe up-to-date statement of libertarianism.â Welch also wrote the 2007 book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.
Reason has been a Western Publications Association magazine of the year finalist every year under Welchâs leadership, winning five first-place Maggie awards, as well as another 18 first-place notices from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Welch himself has won eight first-place L.A. Press Club awards over the years, for work on subjects ranging from Jackie Robinson to Cuba to the âbanal authoritarianismâ of Thomas L. Friedman and David Brooks. From December 2013 to January 2015 he was co-host of the nightly Fox Business Network program The Independents.
Before assuming editorship of Reason in 2008, Welch worked as an assistant editorial pages editor for the Los Angeles Times, media columnist for Reason, California correspondent for The National Post, political columnist for WorkingForChange.com, and regular contributor to the Online Journalism Review. Before 1998, he lived for eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the regionâs first post-communist English-language newspaper, Prognosis, worked as UPIâs Slovakia correspondent, and managed the Budapest Business Journal.
Welchâs work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, ESPN.com, The Hardball Times, The Columbia Journalism Review, Salon.com, Commentary, LA Weekly, Orange County Register, and scores of other publications. He is a frequent guest on MSNBC, Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, public radio, and AM radio stations from coast to coast.
Welch lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two daughters.
Blurb
Parents Voting With their Kids' Feet
The American taxpayer has long accepted that education is a public good â something worthy of funding with the common purse. Until recently, a majority of Americans, including parents, have also believed that public schools are a generally the right vehicle for that funding. However, opinion has changed rapidly, and the response by school administrators to COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of that change. A new survey finds that more than 80% of parents believe that taxpayer funds should follow students to whatever schools they attend, rather than defaulting to the defective public school system.
Even more tellingly, Matt Welch reports that "Families are Fleeing Government Run Schools" â voting with their kids' feet, as it were, against the sudden and unpredictable closures and suspensions of in-person learning. Welch, an editor at large at Reason Magazine, has been reporting on the shift taking place among the population â with an increasing number of both upper and lower-class progressives suddenly embracing school choice when the dysfunction of government-run schools became too glaring to ignore. He joins me LIVE this Sunday to explain why parents are taking their kids out of public schools, and where they are all going.
Have the teachers' unions overplayed their hand in demanding indefinite virtual learning and protections for their members at the expense of learning outcomes for children? Find out, this Sunday (8-9 am PACIFIC) on the show of idea.
Links & Summary
Main article:
Matt's article focuses on NYC schools.
Why are people fleeing?
Unpredictable schedules â about-faces by the administration.
New York City, despite being mistakenly held up by Democrats and teachers unions as a model for school reopening, rattled parents' nerves all 2020â21 with repeated school-year delays, capricious shutdowns, hybrid scheduling, and hair-trigger building closures. Meanwhile, private schools, and public schools as close by as Long Island, remained open all year, without ever becoming "superspreaders."
This is a version of Robert Higgs's "regime uncertainty" â where changes in regulations (rather than the regulations themselves) are the biggest hindrance to entrepreneurs, since it prevents them from planning ahead.
Schools with fewer pupils get less funding from the state.
Because school funding is pegged to enrollment, that means four teachers had to be reassigned within the Department of Education (DOE), while four others found new jobs. (As per usual in personnel proceedings involving a strong public sector union, it's the longest-tenured teachers who get to stay, and the freshest blood shown the door.)
Meanwhile, New York charter schools, which were about as physically shuttered as their government-run counterparts last year, are increasing their popularity in part because parents of lesser means disproportionately prefer having a remote-learning option.
COVID Insanity is another reason â masks, testing, and closures when one pupil gets an infection.
Unvaccinated kids (which is all of them in elementary schools) will be subject to semiregular testingâ10 percent of the unvaxxed population every other week. If there is a positive case in a classroom, all the other unvaccinated kids have to quarantine for at least seven days. So what might that look like in practice?
Most of the school will have to be isolated at times.
As the check-clearing deadline for private school approached, the calculation went mostly like this: Do we actually trust the New York system to devise rules that will keep classrooms reliably open? The answer, even in those preâdelta variant days, was hell no. Yesterday's protocols confirmed that suspicion.
Unions have overstepped â their decline is imminent.
With the prospect of a third school year disrupted or rendered unreliable due to Covid, Iâm a lot less confident about this take than I was sixteen months ago. Mounting evidence suggests that parents are becoming more likely not just to say they support school choice, but to actively choose an alternative to their local public schoolâat least the school their kids attended when the pandemic hit.
Kindergarten enrollment has fallen by more than 50 percent. âSchool sources said some families have abandoned the city outright while others are opting for local parochial or private schools with consistent full-time schooling,â the Post reported.
Even liberals are becoming disillusioned:
Of particular note is the unaccountable behavior of the teachers unions, most notably the American Federation of Teachers, whose President Randi Weingarten has been on a public relations suicide mission for months, brazenly insisting she has been working to reopen schools, despite lobbying the CDC to manipulate school reopening guidance. She seems blithely unaware that parentsâ patience is not inexhaustible, and bizarrely determined to alienate her membersâ most stalwart supporters: parents like those in Park Slope who pride themselves on being good progressives and public school parents.
"As white parents increasingly insist on in-person school, leading them to enroll in private options or move to the suburbs, at the same time that many parents of color are reluctant to send their children back in person, it's exacerbating the inequities that already plague urban public school systems," wrote Lauren Camera for U.S. News & World Report this month, in a piece with the unsubtle headline "Angry White Parents vs. the Public School System."
Minority parents are also now craving school choice.
Democrats have prevented charter schools from giving them an alternative:
New York City parents who want their kids to learn remotely this fall now have three lanes: homeschooling, private instruction, or charter schools. But that latter option has been deliberately limited by teachers unions and their Democratic allies, who have successfully enforced a charter cap at the state level despite parents being overwhelmingly in favor of lifting it.
The barriers for public schools to reopening include ridiculous distancing requirements that prevent all students from returning, to quarantining policies that force thousands of students home when one student tests positive.
Formerly coveted public school sees steep drop off in enrollment.
The boom in public charter schools:
[C]harter-school enrollment is up 31 percent, from 105,065 in 2017 to 138,648 last year.... For the last school year alone, public charter schools saw enrollment boom by nearly 10,000 even as DOE enrollment fell 4 percent â roughly 43,000 kids.
Private and Catholic schools are not gaining many of the pupils lost by public schools. Instead it's ad hoc groups and homeschooling:
About the only unambiguous growth categories in the entire field of minor education are learning "pods" (ad hoc groups of parents pooling their efforts either full or part time, to fill in the gaps left by school closures), and homeschooling. That latter category is absolutely explodingâup from 3.3 percent before the pandemic, to 5.4 percent in the spring of 2020, to 11.1 percent last fall, according to the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, which takes care to distinguish between genuine D.I.Y. education and remote-learning hell. ... If such deliberation continues to produce measurable exit from government-run institutions, the basic structure of American education will change in profound ways.Erica Pandey, August 31, 2021
Virtual learning schools saw much larger declines - especially in rural areas - than those that returned to in-person.
Resultant learning setbacks from remote learning.
Failed leadership is to blame. NYT also blames leaders who have not promoted vaccination, however, to make it safer for everyone to go back to school. This prompts the question of how effective those measures would have to be for progressive areas to keep schools open.
Childrenâs advocates at the United Nations got it right last month when they admonished governments around the globe for reacting to the pandemic by ending in-person schooling for long periods instead of using mitigation strategies to contain infection.
Rich schools were more likely to stay open.
Many students who didn't enroll in school didn't show up anywhere else.
Kids are missing many more days in school.
Videos & Podcasts
LINKS:
Related Shows:
- Students, Not Systems, with Corey DeAngelis, Nov. 11, 2019
- Lisa Snell on School Choice Experiments, March 19, 2017
- Jason Bedrick on Overregulating School Choice, April 17, 2016
- Robert Pondiscio on Californiaâs Common Core Test Results October 25, 2015
- Jeff Reed on Breaking the Governmentâs Monopoly on Education May 4, 2015
- Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic with Ron Jones, August 14, 2020
