There’s been a bit of a media freakout this week about the growing popularity of school choice programs nationwide.
The Children’s Scholarship Fund-NH confirmed this week that the Education Freedom Account program hit its 2025-26 enrollment cap of 10,000 students in early August.
“Record number of students matched with their preferred form of education,” headlines could have read. Instead, the tone of coverage was mostly one of alarm and concern.
Then The New York Times published a fascinating story Aug. 5 on public school districts’ (predicted) response to the growing popularity of school choice.
“Public schools try to sell themselves as more students use vouchers,” announced the headline.
In any other industry dominated by a single provider, the introduction of competition would be treated with cheer. In education, it’s treated as a crisis.
“A decline in the number of babies being born and a boom in private school vouchers and home-schooling have combined to create an enrollment crisis for public education,” read the opening sentence.
Crisis?
The nation’s declining birth rate is an economic alarm bell in general. But public schools exist to serve the students of their community, not to grow annually, like a private business. Nobody says declining birth rates present a crisis for the public library or the fire department. Like other public services, schools are supposed to expand or shrink along with the population they were created to serve.
The growing popularity of programs that let parents choose where their children are educated can be a crisis for district public schools only if the schools fail to provide a quality education to students. Otherwise, why would students leave?
This understanding that competition benefits both consumers and providers is not a radical right-wing concept.
“The central role of healthy competition is a core tenet of economic theory: Competition means more and better choices, lower prices, higher wages, and more innovation and productivity,” President Biden’s White House Competition Council Chair Lael Brainard said at an anti-monopoly summit in May of 2023.
The Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, pushed to expand competition in industries where a handful of big players were dominant. Biden’s White House laid out a lengthy case for promoting competition here. It’s a pretty good primer on how consumers are hurt when a single player dominates a market, but helped when markets foster greater competition.
This is a non-controversial “core tenet of economic theory,” as Brainard said.
Yet when it comes to education, the media act as though competition is some invasive species to be isolated, contained and killed before it can spread.
Some members of the media who advance this anti-competitive alarm work for (or even founded) small start-ups or non-profits created not long ago to compete with New Hampshire’s legacy media brands. Competition is perfectly fine in some industries, but not others, apparently.
The New York Times story captures just how novel the concept of competition is in K-12 education.
“The threat is so great that some school districts are trying something that would have once seemed unthinkable.
“School systems in Orlando, Newark, Memphis and dozens of other cities and towns have hired consultants who aggressively woo parents to convince them to enroll their children in local public schools.”
Earning business by demonstrating that your product will improve people’s lives is the very foundation of American dynamism. It lowers costs, improves quality and drives innovation. And yet in K-12 public education, according to The New York Times, this was until now “unthinkable.”
A consultant profiled in the story “argues that school districts must offer slicker tours, better customer service and a compelling argument that they are better than the growing number of alternatives,” the Times wrote.
“The monopoly is over,” he said.
The United States is not supposed to have monopolies. Subjecting monopolies to competitive forces is universally accepted as a good thing.
Yet in education some people continue to treat the creation of a competitive market that drives innovation and quality improvements as a crisis that leads to “unthinkable” changes. It is no crisis.
Our friends at EdChoice track studies of school choice programs. Of 30 quality studies done of public school academics after the introduction of school choice, 27 show positive effects, one shows no effect, and two show negative effects. Of eight studies done on school choice’s effects on school safety, all eight found positive effects.
None of this should be remotely surprising–because competition pushes innovation and quality improvements.
Driving those improvements is the ultimate goal of school choice. Introducing competition won’t kill district public schools. The need to compete for students will make them better.
This week, The New York Times reported that exactly this was happening across the country. Where districts are feeling the effects of competition, they’re improving to please families whose support they once took for granted.
In no way does this constitute a crisis. For both schools and students, it’s a tremendous opportunity.
