Teachers unions and education bureaucrats hail public schools for being open to all children while condemning private schools for limiting access. But most “public” schools aren’t public at all.
In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.
The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.
Yet unions, bureaucrats and their political allies continue to insist not only on keeping kids in the public system but restricting them to a single assigned “public” school, even if it is failing to educate children or keep them physically safe.
Parents have been charged with stealing public education, fined and sentenced to jail time. Sixteen parents in Maryland and Virginia were charged for providing fraudulent addresses for their children to attend a public school other than their specifically assigned school without paying nonresident tuition of $10,000 to $14,000 a year. A recent report found that in at least 24 states, parents can be criminally prosecuted for providing false home address information to enroll their children in a “public” school.