Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a powerful case for school choice during a recent event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
“We already have a choice system in education,” she told the audience. “If you are of means, you will move to a district where the schools are good and the houses are expensive, like Palo Alto, California.”
Rice explained that “if you go across the street from Stanford, Palo Alto High has a performance arts center that looks like a smaller version of Stanford’s.” In contrast, many public schools across California are struggling. The state ranks 37th in the nation for K-12 education, while many school districts are being forced to cut back on programs and lay off staff members due to inadequate funding.
“If you’re really wealthy, you will send your kids to private schools,” she said. “So who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids — a lot of them minority kids.”
Even left-wing publications such as The Atlantic have acknowledged that “in almost all major American cities, most African American and Hispanic students attend public schools where a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income.” As such, an expansion of school choice programs would disproportionately help these same groups. It is mostly white liberals who are supportive of holding minority students in worse schools, as 73% of Black voters support school choice, along with 71% of Hispanic voters.
“So, how can you say you’re for civil rights, how can you say you’re for the poor when you’re condemning those children to not be able to read?” Rice said. “By the time they’re in 3rd grade, they’re never going to read.”
The problem is actually worse than she stated. Students unable to proficiently read at their grade level by the end of third grade are much more likely to drop out of high school and have mental health problems later in life.
Furthermore, Rice rebuked left-wing defenders of the education system, saying that “if you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine, you write that editorial in the Washington Post. But then don’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends,” a private school in Washington often attended by the children of the political elite.
She is correct in her assertion that many opponents of school choice are hypocrites. Texas state Rep. Gene Wu sent his children to private schools while fighting to make sure that low-income students didn’t have the same opportunities, while Wisconsin statae Sen. Chris Larson is loud in his opposition to school choice despite graduating from a private school himself. Additionally, Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, faced controversy in 2022 for sending her son to a private school despite saying that school choice was for “racists.” This is not a new phenomenon, either. According to a 2000 survey from the Heritage Foundation, dozens of members of Congress who sent their children to private schools had voted against school choice legislation.
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School choice has consistently been proven to be one of the most effective ways to improve our education system, and voters overwhelmingly support it. While opposition from powerful teachers unions with a vested interest in keeping the quality of public schools poor keeps a tight hold on the Democratic Party, Republicans can make improving our education system a defining battle of the conservative movement.
Rice’s framing of school choice as a civil rights matter is brilliant and should be how the Right talks about it moving forward.