As President Ronald Reagan famously said in his March 30, 1961, speech:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they, in their lifetime, must do the same.
And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.
When it comes to the education of children from age five to eighteen, American parents aren’t free unless they have thousands of dollars a year for private school tuition, or homeschooling is feasible.
In America, children are restricted to attending a government-run, teacher union-controlled school based merely on their home addresses. For far too many children, this restrictive residential assignment is a death sentence to their future.
As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago:
…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.
Children are often kept in failing public schools despite other schools in the area having room to admit them.
So why are parents so desperate to get their children out of one public school and into another? It is because the lack of academic learning in some public schools is far worse than that of others.
As just one example, in Baltimore Public Schools, there are 23 schools, ranging from elementary to high school, where 0% of students reached grade-level proficiency in math. In other words, not one student—among thousands—is learning math successfully.
Reading is not much different. Yet, these schools stay open, receive more funding each year, and the students continue to be restricted to attend them—even when it is clear the schools aren’t educating children.
The issue is not a lack of taxpayer money, as the Baltimore Public School superintendent made $445,000 in 2022, and the district spends, on average, more than $22,400 per student each year. That equates to more than half a million dollars per classroom of 24 students per year.
Baltimore is far from alone in high spending with no accountability for educating children in the basics. And parents who can’t afford an alternative are forced to send their children there year after year.
Maintaining the status quo cannot continue. There must be education freedom in our country by empowering dads and moms with their children’s education funding so they can exit the public education system and select an alternative.
[Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the author’s speech on April 16, 2025, to the Women of Washington.]