“It is difficult to overstate what a sea change the last few years have been for educational choice in America,” write Nicole Stelle Garnett and Michael McShane in the latest National Review magazine, a special issue on education.

In “The School-Choice Moment,” the two scholars detail how “at the outset of the pandemic, just over half a million students participated in private-school-choice programs.” By the end of 2023, as many as 10 million students will be eligible for a variety of school-choice programs. “Even if only a small fraction of the eligible students take advantage of the opportunities,” Garnett and McShane declare, “we are in the midst of an education-reform revolution.”

And that revolution is spreading. Garnett and McShane report that Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Ohio have all “passed universal or near-universal school-choice programs in the last two years.” And 2023 alone has been “the most successful year in the history of school-choice advocacy.”

But of course, as we detail in our annual special issue on education, a major motivation for the move toward school choice can be found in the turbulent nature of a modern educational establishment that has been failing to get acceptable results for students and their parents. As Daniel Buck documents in “The School-Discipline Disaster,” the aversion to punishing misbehavior has caused immense damage, “sowing chaos and stunting students; and it has demoralized and depressed teachers, pushing them to leave the profession.”

There is, however, lots of good news out there:

As kids all over the country get ready to head back to school, be sure to read all eight articles in the special section on education. But as with any issue of NR, you’ll also get essays on an array of subjects, such as Dan McLaughlin’s on the very Trumpian dynamic of how, while not always treated fairly by his enemies, he has repeatedly given Democrats openings to pursue him; Kevin Hassett on how investors are beginning to lose confidence in the U.S. greenback; Dominic Pino on the unlikely rise of cricket in America; and Ross Douthat’s review of Barbie (his review of Oppenheimer was in the previous issue).

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