Ginny Gentles joins the podcast to discuss this month’s policy focus: Putting Parents in Control of Their Children’s Education. We discuss why school districts abandoned their educational mission during the pandemic, how parents are engaging in local school board elections, and detail what some states are doing to expand educational options.
Ginny Gentles is a long-time school choice advocate and former state and federal education policy leader. As founder of School Choice Solutions, LLC, she helps organizations with policy analysis and development. Ginny previously served as a senior political appointee in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement under President George W. Bush, and she led the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, we look at the August IWF policy focus: Putting Parents in Control of Their Children’s Education. We’ll discuss why school districts abandoned their educational mission during the pandemic, how parents are engaging in local school board elections, and detailing what some states are doing to expand educational options. And joining us is the author of this month’s policy focus, senior fellow at IWF, Ginny Gentles. Ginny Gentles is a long-time school choice advocate and former state and federal education policy leader. As founder of School Choice Solutions, she helps organizations with policy analysis and development. Ginny previously served as senior political appointee in the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, and she led the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice. Ginny, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Ginny Gentles:
Thank you so much for having me.
Beverly Hallberg:
And so this month’s policy focus, which of course is again on putting parents in control of their children’s education—which people can find on iwf.org to get all the details in it—and one of the things that you mentioned in the policy focus is that this pandemic just utterly disrupted the lives and education of roughly 50 million public school students. So, we know that most schools, whether it’s public or private, did close in March of 2020, and many public schools did not open fully for the majority of last school year. And here we enter the school session in the fall. The big debate right now seems to be about masks, but just give us a broad stroke of what the educational system has been like for children in public schools versus those who have school choice. How has the difference been between those educated publicly versus those privately?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, as you said, the start of the pandemic saw virtually all schools close and those public schools, unfortunately, just abdicated their responsibility to educate students in the spring in many places. Not everywhere, but in many places. So, over the summer last year, a lot of parents did start scrambling to find alternative education options when they realized that their public schools weren’t flexible and quick enough to get remote learning up and effective for their child. And in many cases, they enrolled their children in virtual schools or in private schools. And most of those private schools by the fall were open. In fact, 74% of private schools were open by November 2020. And remember, that was a tough time in the pandemic last year. So, you saw a lot of public schools close. You saw some private schools close in the spring. You saw the private schools open in the fall.
You saw virtual schools ready with trained teachers and existing curriculum ready to educate students, but unfortunately, public schools still struggling with remote learning and still struggling to figure out how to open. And the sad part of the story, certainly some of this is understandable. It was a pandemic. It was unclear what the path was going to be forward out of this, but the sad part of this story is the public schools continued to struggle. And by the end of the school year, you only had 54% of school districts offering full in-person instruction. 45% of the school districts were offering some kind of hybrid instruction, which might have just meant two days a week being open.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what has this meant for the expansion of homeschooling, of private school enrollment? What have we seen as we’re entering into this new school year?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, as I mentioned, parents early on in the pandemic started realizing, “Hey, this isn’t working for my child or this district is not training teachers, not getting curriculum together, not getting the technology together that’s necessary to ensure that there’s continuity of education.” And so, they researched these other options. Many of them shifted to homeschooling. And by homeschooling, I don’t mean overseeing your child’s remote learning experience, district-provided remote learning experience. What many parents called being a Zoom butler: ensuring that your child was logged in and clicking around properly for the district school.
I mean putting that district-issued iPad or computer away and finding robust curriculum or a co-op of other families and truly home-educating the child. By last fall, homeschooling had gone up to 11% of the nation’s students we’re homeschooling. That’s a significant drop. It’s increased, I should say. It doubled from the spring and already by the spring of the previous school year, it had increased. So, we see homeschooling increasing throughout 2020 significantly. And given the current messy situation with schools opening right now for the 2021-22 school year, we’re seeing a continued increase in homeschooling.
Beverly Hallberg:
And what’s been fascinating to me as I’ve traveled the country some in the past year and a half during COVID just to see the differences and how states have responded to things like COVID, for example, and schooling and education, but it’s also even within a state, how a private school will handle the situation very differently than public schools. And so, my question is you can be in the same city and have a private school that’s much more open, allows in-person learning, maybe masks are optional, and then a public school that still wants to stay closed. Is this come down to just the pressure and power of teachers’ unions? Is this where all of the decision-making has really been coming from?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I do say in my policy focus that there’s a definitive culprit in the school closure debacle and that is teachers’ unions. I think that they are absolutely a driving factor. The primary likely driving factor in schools remaining closed, not just closed, but also offering significantly less educational content and providing significantly fewer educational hours of instruction to students. So, we think about, okay, schools transitioned to remote learning. Many schools did that while also dropping an entire school day. They called it asynchronous learning, which was really a euphemism for ‘you got the day off, kids.’ You can log into the system and do what historically would just would have been considered homework. So, we’re down to four school days. And then, when you see some schools opening back up throughout the school year for two days a week for hybrid learning that that would be significantly reduced hours. So, you might end up having students only receiving 10 hours of in-person schooling, even when schools were “open.”
And even the U.S. Department of Education indicated that many schools offering remote learning were only providing two hours of direct instruction to students. All of that is driven by the teachers’ unions negotiating contracts, putting pressure on states and school districts to limit hours. I would like to think that there is not a principal out there, and I would definitely like to think, and probably can assume that there are many teachers out there that absolutely were, heartbroken by this restriction. So, we’re talking about unions exerting their power, their political power, to ensure that students were not receiving the instruction that they deserved last year. In stark contrast, you have private schools that are small, not beholden to unions, and flexible, and they could determine the hours and work with their families to figure out what was going to be the best given the COVID situation in their individual community. And therefore, many private schools were able to open.
Also co-ops where students might be going to, or a hybrid education model where students might be going to school two days a week, and home doing the homeschool curriculum three days a week. Those are flexible. They can figure those things out. You take the union out of the picture and the student’s most likely going to be getting much more instruction at a much higher quality.
Beverly Hallberg:
And because there have been so many people who have spoken up on this issue, especially parents that are showing up to school board meetings and speaking out, do you think that the unions are in any way trying to accommodate parents, accommodate children? Has the pressure that’s been put on them and calling them out, has that changed their behavior at all as we start the school year in 2021?
Ginny Gentles:
Oh, Beverly, I wish that it had changed the unions’ behavior. I think all that it changed was one particularly powerful union leader, Randi Weingarten is the head of the American Federation for Teachers, and it just changed her PR campaign. There was a very stark contrast in her Tweets and in her public statements that started in the spring when we were about a year in and parents were very clearly fed up and kind of onto the unions. There, she started a PR campaign to kind of pretend that she was always for opening schools. We absolutely know that’s not true. There was emails that came out between the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and union leaders, teachers’ union leaders, earlier this year, where it’s very clear that the unions were driving CDC decisions to recommend more restrictive constraints around opening schools.
So, the unions did not change their behavior. They just maybe changed their PR tactics a little bit. In fact, the New York City union, their UFT chapter, put out something just this week saying that the mayor of New York would have blood on his hands if he wasn’t careful about school reopening. That is exactly the rhetoric that we saw from unions summer of 2020. Where we might see changes, because I hate to be so doom-and-gloom and negative, where we might see changes is again in parents’ choices. They’re realizing, okay, never mind, I’m going to go find an educational alternative for my child. And then, parents exerting pressure on their local communities. They might realize I can’t control Randi Weingarten and the national unions, but I can have a say at the local level with my school board. And so, I think we’re seeing some really encouraging things with parent activism around their local school boards.
Beverly Hallberg:
And the activism has really been just astonishing to watch how many parents have been speaking up in school board meetings, not just on the issue of shutdowns or masks, but also things like critical race theory. And so, as we head into election season, at least in the fall, some school board officials may be up for election, reelection. What are we seeing as far as how many parents are running? Do we have account of what’s going on nationally when it comes to parents who are trying to vote out these school board leaders who have instituted these horrible policies for their children?
Ginny Gentles:
I don’t think that there is a definitive count on parents running for school board. I think often the school board candidates are parents. Historically, unfortunately though, they are union-backed candidates, and because school board elections typically do happen in what’s considered off years like this year, there’s very low turnout and the unions are able to have a great influence on who it is that is elected into office. There’s going to be low turnout, the unions pick and back candidates. And then, they encourage their members to go and vote and tada the school board members are reflecting the values and the policy goals of the union. So, again, I think parents are onto that and onto the unresponsiveness of their existing school boards. And so you have efforts going to recall existing school board members who might not be up for reelection this year.
Those efforts, those recall initiatives have more than doubled this year, over past years. And that means parents going and gathering signatures on a petition. And then, that triggers, in most states, not mine, Virginia, but in other states, that triggers a recall election. And then, you do have parents running for office. It’s not that easy to run for office when you’re typically running against a union-backed candidate. So, where you’re also seeing is parents forming political action committees to raise money for those candidates because you could run, but you might not win if you don’t have union funding. And so, they’re taking that extra step of forming political action committees to ensure that the candidates are funded and can advertise successfully and be elected into office. And this really does need to continue. I don’t think the parents need to feel stuck with what’s happened or perpetually irate. I think that they can recognize that they need to go vote this year, pay attention to your school board elections. They should run for office and they should join parent advocacy organizations so that they can stay informed on what’s going on.
Beverly Hallberg:
Before we continue the conversation, I’d like to take a moment to highlight IWF Champion Women profile series, which focuses on women across the country and world that are accomplishing amazing things. The media too often ignores their stories, but we don’t. We celebrate them and bring their stories to you. Our current profile is Elaine Chao, former U.S. Secretary of Labor. To check out her story, do go to iwf.org to see why she’s this week’s Champion Woman.
And Ginny, I want to ask you about that this final area that you delved into in the policy focus, and that was what states are doing to expand educational opportunities. So, we know that many parents are fighting for their own children, their own kids in order to ensure that they have the best education as possible. The states seem to be helping out parents as well. What are you seeing in some states as options for families who feel the public school system is failing them?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, this is the best news that I have to share. And I encourage listeners to read the policy focus and to pay attention to what’s going on in your state with school choice because most likely something good has happened in 2021. Many people are calling 2021 the year of school choice. State legislators respond to polls and they saw the numbers go up significantly throughout COVID in support for school choice across all parties. 74% of registered voters are now supporting school choice. 80% of public school parents now support school choice. And the legislators saw that, saw how frustrated parents, particularly mothers, were with the challenges over the last year, year and a half. And so they passed programs, including five new state education savings account programs. There are now 10 ESAs, education savings account, programs. And these are incredible programs where the state takes the funds that would be allocated for their child, puts it in an account, and a parent can draw down from that account for a wide variety of educational expenses.
It might be for tuition, but it also could be for therapies and services. And it could be for curricula and online learning if they so choose, but tutoring, all kinds of options for students. So, that’s an incredibly encouraging trend that’s happening, the expansion of ESAs. And that happened in five states. We had almost 20 states either expand school choice options or create new programs. And really, I think that this is going to continue. Parents are still frustrated, as you mentioned, not just over school closures, over significant learning loss. Students are four to five months behind on average where they should be right now, but also over CRT and mask mandates. And I think that legislators, if they hear from parents, are going to continue expanding school choice options so that parents can take their education dollars and ensure that funding follows their child to the education that best meets their needs.
Beverly Hallberg:
And final question for you is about the children themselves. So, there has been lots of coverage to what the negative impacts may be to children when it comes to their learning abilities. There’s the socialization aspect that was lost during the pandemic. And we’re not out of it yet, especially with the Delta variant, there’s more fear and concerns among parents. And we just don’t know what the future holds when it comes to more shutdowns. And so, my question to you is based on what we have seen since March 2020, how do you think children have responded? Do you think we’re going to see when we look back in history and assess this time, are we going to see significant lapses in education for children where it really impacted them even more than what we expected? Or are you on the side of kids are resilient and they’ll be able to work through it? Or has it just depended on where they live and what type of school they go to?
Ginny Gentles:
I feel like that’s a complicated question because you definitely see reports coming out of entities like McKinsey where they might project out what kind of lifelong earnings loss that these kids can expect based on this lost year or so. I don’t know if those will come true. I think what’s really important is where the kids go from here. I don’t buy into the kids are resilient argument. And I think a lot of parents were angered by the teachers’ unions repeated use of that phrase. You can’t keep doing what happened for the last year and a half and say, “Kids are resilient,” and think that they’re going to be okay. That’s not how it works. What has to happen is that schools have to open their doors. If they aren’t going to fully open their doors because of the Delta variant, they have to offer high-quality and consistent remote learning experiences.
And parents have to be given school choice and the option to let funding follow their child to an excellent educational option. If those things happen, then kids are going to get back on track, but I think that the significant learning loss that we’re seeing that particularly impacts minority and low-income kids and the things that we only know anecdotally, the significant impact to the social and emotional welfare of children, we don’t have data yet, but it sure anecdotally doesn’t look good. Things have to change if those things are going to turn around.
Beverly Hallberg:
And they do have to change. And that’s why this policy focus is so important, it is called Putting Parents in Control of Their Children’s Education. You can find it on iwf.org. And thank you so much Ginny Gentles, senior fellow at IWF, for joining us today.
Ginny Gentles:
Thank you, Beverly. I enjoyed our conversation.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you, and investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That is iwf.org/donate. And last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes, it does help. Also, we’d love it if you shared this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening.