In his new book The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis makes an optimistic case that our floundering education system is not beyond repair. Invoking the slogan “let’s fund students, not systems,” DeAngelis’s cause advocates allowing families to take state-funded education dollars to the education providers of their choice, whether a public school, a private school, a charter school, or even a home school. The idea is to allow all parents and students to do what wealthy ones already do: choose the educational pathway that best suits them, rather than being relegated to attending a school based on poverty or ZIP code. His is a compelling case that parents and advocates for educational freedom have already begun to win the day.
DeAngelis’s amply sourced book functions well as a recent history documenting the upheaval in education over the last several years that happened as a result of COVID and school lockdowns. The parent revolution, as DeAngelis calls it, began in earnest in late 2020 and 2021: schools were shuttered, and parents were forced to bear witness to the flimsiness of “remote learning,” the growing isolation and learning loss of their children, and the unrepentant hypocrisy of teachers unions and government bureaucrats. Even as the medical science around the coronavirus brought into clearer relief that children and younger adults were less likely to contract deadly cases of the virus, teachers unions and their ilk fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed while negotiating veritable hostage payments from the government for more money. Parents became fed up with online learning and appalled at the firsthand look they were given into what was being taught to their children. From school board meetings to the voting booth, parents and their advocates began to take matters into their own hands.
“The fight over school closures opened parents’ eyes to the fact that government schools were not really accountable to them. When the schools broke trust with parents, the parents didn’t just forgive and forget,” DeAngelis writes. In practice, this manifested as a great many parents all across the nation more actively supporting candidates and policies facilitating educational choice options such as school choice, education savings accounts, and vouchers. While the first third of the book recounts the pushback to COVID closures, along with a laundry list of malfeasance and self-dealing from teachers union mandarins such as Randi Weingarten, the middle of the book gives several case studies of parent reform movements in various states, including Iowa, Arizona, Arkansas, Virginia, and Florida.
As DeAngelis writes in his conclusion, “Not long ago, the idea that we should fund students, not systems, was considered radical and fringe. The way government schools handled COVID made Americans rethink their commitment to a one-size-fits-all system of government schooling. Now nearly a dozen states offer universal education choice, and several more states appear ready to follow them.” There is a clear trajectory: parents wanted their schools reopened, then became more tuned in to the education happening once they did reopen. From ideological and activist educators teaching critical race theory, the adoption of sweeping transgender bathroom policies, age-inappropriate books, and hostile school administrators, many parents did not like what they found. Once they were stymied and ignored by the upholders of the status quo, they were then driven to look for solutions outside the traditional system.
In chapter four, the book’s strongest chapter, DeAngelis describes the idea behind the “red state strategy” he and other education choice advocates worked to implement alongside the newly awakened parent constituencies in order to facilitate new choice programs. Rather than appealing to a bipartisan approach in blue or purple states, this was an intentional push to make policy inroads in heavily GOP states, to elevate school choice and parental freedom to something of a litmus test issue for Republican candidates and policymakers. First, the goal was to show frustrated families that school choice was the solution to their problem; then, they would help parents “turn up the heat on state legislators, especially Republicans.” This led to, in DeAngelis’s counting, the single most effective year in terms of policy changes in states in 2021, which was matched and even exceeded in 2023.
The book is a bit self-congratulatory, but there is good reason for that. As my former colleague Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute wrote for the Washington Examiner last year, the school choice movement made “more progress in the first half of 2023 than it made in the preceding 23 years.” The parent choice campaign that began in 2020, crested in 2021, and continued through the next year’s midterm elections has shown tangible and consistent successes in numerous states, red and purple, and even some blue states such as New York. Four states passed universal school choice in 2023, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida. Pro-school choice candidates have won consistently in statehouses across the country, as GOP candidates who buck their constituents on education freedom have lost roundly.
Each of the major success stories has several elements in common, beginning with strong GOP leadership from the top. In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds made passing an education savings account bill an explicit priority for her party. When her first push failed in 2021 after several Republican legislators defected, she went after them in the primaries, backing nine pro-school choice candidates, including several challengers to incumbent legislators who had voted against the legislation. She made her case to parents and voters across the state, hosting forums and rallies to hear from parents and share their stories of frustration. Eight of her nine endorsed candidates won their primaries, and the GOP majorities in the Statehouse increased the following year. Reynolds and Iowa passed a sweeping education choice bill, allowing all families to take their children’s state-funded education dollars to the education providers of their choosing, in 2023.
Strong gubernatorial leadership was key in several other states as well, including Arizona’s Doug Ducey, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, and Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Each of these Republicans elevated the issue of school choice and educational freedom to a partywide fault line, forcing recalcitrant members of their party to get in line. This approach has shown success, not only for the policies being championed but for Republicans’ electoral prospects as well. In both Florida and Virginia’s gubernatorial elections, education proved the pivotal role in Republicans winning those offices, due in no small part to typically non-GOP constituencies casting their ballots for the candidates who supported school choice.
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The book’s best strength, its thorough documentation, is also its greatest weakness, as often a case is made more than once. But consistency and clarity will cover a multitude of sins. DeAngelis, as anyone who follows him on X will know, is quite fond of pointing out when school choice opponents attended or sent their children to private schools. This habit carries over to the book, which is something one could find quite petty the first few times it happens. However, quantity has a quality all its own. By the dozenth or so time, the consistent pattern of “choice for me but not for thee” hypocrisy on the part of those who oppose others escaping failing public schools is too damning to deny.
DeAngelis’s book is a worthwhile record of what was a monumental period in schooling policy. The repercussions of the COVID lockdowns and school closures are and will continue to be felt for an entire generation of students, with the demonstrable, devastating learning loss being only the tip of the iceberg. The response of parents to that upheaval is tremendously important, and DeAngelis makes the case that their frustrations have been put to good use. Speaking of the 2022 election results, DeAngelis states, it is now becoming politically profitable to support education freedom. “School choice became a political winner because parents became a new special interest group,” he writes. “Voters just have to keep paying attention and hold [lawmakers] to account for their position.”
Grant Addison is a deputy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine.