the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 17, 2025
“Too many children do not thrive in their assigned government-run K-12 schools,” says President Trump. And so, in late January, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to prioritize “school choice” programs.
There is nothing new about schools of choice—a history that goes back 70 years, when there was a push to ignore the Brown v. Board of Education ruling on the desegregation of schools and give parents the “choice” to send their children to schools outside the districts where they live. Then and now, this has meant that per pupil funding followed the student—money from one school district to the other. It was, and is, essentially, a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation.
But this latest executive order ramps up the use of public funds to pay for programs supporting private, faith-based private, home school and other non-public educational alternatives.
For example, in Michigan, one in four K-12 students attend school at a charter or in a school choice district. That translated to nearly 200,000 students who left their district to attend another one during the 2023–2024 school year, and another 150,000 attended a charter school.
Why? Because there are real problems in many school districts. For example, in the 1970s, there were 370 public schools in Detroit. Today, there are 100. So for many families, there are NO public schools in their neighborhoods. And where there are, the schools may be crumbling; the class sizes may be out of control; there may not be enough teachers.
But when you break it down, public education has been in the process of being dismantled for years—where private interests have robbed public funds for the schools.
And so, yes, it’s only logical that many families have opted out for so-called “schools of choice,” or charter schools, because parents are doing their darndest to try to find some semblance of an education for their children and grandchildren—somewhere. In the words of one grandparent: “They call them schools of choice, but they don’t give parents a choice.”