The 2024 choice on education: Trump sides with families, Harris with the teacher unions

Of all the policy issues where the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is stark, perhaps the most surprising is education: He’s all-in for parental choice; she’s committed to serving the interests of the teachers unions.And polling shows a majority of Americans are on his side, after decades when the Democratic had a strong edge on education.But the pandemic was a huge eye-opener for millions of us: Not only did we see the unions and their office-holding pawns vociferously demand to keep schools closed as fully and as long as possible — long after all the science showed that it posed zero risk of spreading COVID — the “remote learning” offered in the place of real schooling gave us a window on what our public schools were teaching.Strong supporters of public education in the abstract saw how badly it served their own children, as so many teachers didn’t even try to actually teach online.The bitter result: US kids lag their peers around the world.On the 2022 math exams by the Program for International Student Assessment, for example, American 15-year-olds ranked 28th out of 37 industrialized (OECD) nations, even though we spend far more per-pupil than peer countries.To be clear: Public schools still host lots of dedicated educators — but also far too many who are only in it for the paycheck and the benefits.Thanks to union power, it’s near-impossible to fire even terrible teachers.Their eyes opened, hundreds of thousands of families did what was best for their kids, and chose something else — a public charter school, a private school (including Catholic and other faith-based institutions) or even home-schooling.From the 2019-20 school year to 2021-2, US public-school enrollment fell from 50.8 million to 49.4 million — even though that includes public charter schools, which saw an increase.Meanwhile, private school enrollment rose from 4.65 million to 4.73 million.The exodus would be far larger, but many families lack the means to flee...