Breaking up the big school districts' monopoly

The pandemic-related failure of local public schools to provide appropriate education to schoolchildren has greatly increased attendance at and interest in local charter/private schools. But does School Choice go far enough if it lets the structural impact of huge school districts continue? Howard Husock at the American Enterprise Institute explores.

For decades, those concerned about the quality of urban education have focused on increasing school choice through the advent of charter schools--with otable but limited su access. Butthe pandemic suggests an additional avenue to both competition and citizen accountability: Break up the big-city school  districts altogether to give city parents the sort of "vote with your feet" choice that suburban families have, and to deprive unions of the power to shut down school systems with hundreds of thousands of students, or, in the case of New York City, nearly 1 million. 

This is a call not just for "decentralization" of school management but rather for full-on local control whereby a district has its own elected school board that sets property taxes to support the schools. It would allow parents in the Bronx to have as much control over the hiring of superintendents as parents in Scarsdale have. Those who are running failing schools would be found not in distant downtown office but in the neighborhood--and they'd face local voters who would not be outnumbered and outspent by teachers' unions.

This article originally appeared in National Review. Read the whole thing here

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