Opinion: Public School Failures Behind Demand For Private School Vouchers

By David Larson
Carolina Journal

North Carolina General Assembly voted this week to clear the Opportunity Scholarship Program waitlist. This will give over 50,000 more students in the state vouchers to attend the private school of their choice.

If you heard some of the reactions by progressive legislators and public school advocates, though, you’d assume the money was taken directly out of district budgets. But any loss of funds is due to families choosing to educate their children somewhere else, whether at home (with homeschooling in the state rising 5.7% since the 2019-20 school year) or a private school (up 26% in the state since 2019-20). Traditional public schools, on the other hand, have seen a 3.6% decline in enrollment over the same period, despite North Carolina being among the fastest-growing states.

All told, about a quarter of the state’s K-12 students are no longer educated in traditional district public schools. Those who would prefer otherwise want to blame legislators for this, but the decision to pull each of these children from the district school and send them elsewhere was made voluntarily by parents who no longer trust that these institutions are best for their children. The public schools have only themselves to blame for this shattered trust.

It’s not just that so many lessons are saturated with identity politics and the latest cultural fads — whether radical gender theory or climate alarmism. It’s not just that student discipline is in chaos or that this chaos can lead to student safety concerns. The final straw for many parents was learning, as many did during the COVID-era online and at-home lessons, that their children could not actually read.

You’ll hear some retort that it’s because of a lack of funds. But that’s nonsense. American schools, including here in North Carolina, spend more per pupil, about $12,000, than any other developed nation (other than oil-rich Norway). Yet we see little return on the additional investment in terms of comparative achievement.

No, the problem is we have an increasingly bureaucratic system (we’ve added 10 times more administrators than teachers from 2000-19, see below) that is prone to group think and resistant to change and outside correction.

There’s no better indictment on all these charges — kids not learning, falling for fads, resistance to change — than the failure of public schools where it matters most, teaching kids to read. Recent NC Department of Public Instruction data (below) shows some improvement since the lows of COVID, but still only about half of students are proficient or above in reading. For some groups, it’s far lower.

Our state’s public schools are hardly unique in this failure to teach students to read. The case was laid out in great detail in the 2022 American Public Media podcast, Sold a Story by Emily Hanford, which led to a national reckoning on reading and many changes in laws, policies, and curricula since.

The 10-part podcast starts by recounting all the stories from parents learning during the school shutdowns that their child, who they’d entrusted to the school system, could not read. Some parents paid for tutors, if they could afford it, while others tried to teach their children themselves.

Hanford traces the issues with reading instruction back to New Zealand teacher Marie Clay in the 1970s. Clay’s philosophy swept the Western world and gradually became the foundation for reading instruction across the United States since then.

If you’ve seen programs like Whole Language Learning, Reading Recovery, Balanced Literacy, Units of Study, or Leveled Literacy, which the vast majority of American elementary schools have used, then you’ve encountered lessons based on her work.

Briefly, the idea is that good readers do not sound out words phonetically. They recognize words by different context clues at a glance. So teaching these strategies, which they called “cues,” is a better way to teach reading than relying on “decoding” with phonics, like prior generations. A lesson based on cues might ask the student to guess a word based on the first letter, then ask themselves whether the word they guessed “makes sense” in context and whether it matches the picture in the book.

So the teacher might read the words, “We are going to the zoo to see a…” and show them a picture of an elephant, then show them a long word starting with the letter “e” and ask them what they think the missing word is. If the child shouts, “Elephant,” then they assume progress is being made.

The problem? Even though it worked for a percentage of kids (the ones that likely would have learned to read under any system), it didn’t work for most students. The later “Balanced Literacy” versions tried to incorporate more phonics while still leaning mostly on the cueing strategies. But, as the podcast shows, the cueing actually caused more harm than good, with struggling students who were given interventions using cueing doing worse over time than those who received no interventions at all.

Because the report was on NPR-style public radio (which is trusted by many of those who needed to hear), and because parents were suddenly paying closer attention to their children’s academic skills, it was the perfect storm to bring down cueing. The practice is now banned in about a dozen states and growing, including North Carolina.

In place of cueing, these states are putting in place curricula based on what people are calling “the science of reading,” which is largely phonics based in early grades but involves many other elements too, all of which are based on the latest cognitive research on how human brains learn to read.

It may be tempting to think, well, the science moved beyond what the public schools were doing, so they adapted. But that’s not true. Hanford’s documentary shows that all the evidence was there from the very beginning. Teachers, administrators, university schools of education, and textbook publishers had plenty of research showing that cueing went directly against what we knew about reading. Early readers really did need to put the work in to decode words before they could get to the later stages where they could capture words at a glance. They could not skip the early steps with these guessing strategies. All that did was make them good at guessing words while still being unable to read them.

It was so clear to President George W. Bush that he made replacing cueing with phonics his main domestic priority when he was elected in 2000, in a program called Reading First. As he was promoting the program, with a visit to a Florida school that focused on phonics for early learners, and as he was reading “The Pet Goat” to the students, two planes hit the Twin Towers in New York City. Much of his focus was shifted to foreign affairs after this.

Teachers unions and public school district administrators across the country fought tooth and nail to ensure his Reading First initiative failed, wanting to continue the cueing programs they preferred. And eventually, they won, as Bush was unable to dislodge cueing and bring back phonics.

But their success only ensured another two decades of reading failure for America’s youth and a further unraveling of trust in government schools.

It’s not just that they got reading this wrong for so long, but that something this basic is the kind of thing that they can and will get wrong again. A government bureaucracy, even one with as many dedicated public servants as our public schools, will never care as much about a child’s success as their parents do. So giving more power to those parents, like with expanded Opportunity Scholarships, can only lead to more accountability and academic achievement.