School Choice Made Big Gains During the Covid Pandemic

In addition to fleeing traditional public schools for charter and parochial alternatives, thousands of families responded to the Covid crisis by creating “learning pods” or “microschools” for their children. This involved bringing together small groups of students who were taught by hired instructors or parent volunteers. The Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization based at Arizona State University, has been studying the phenomenon, and its findings are revealing.

In a report released earlier this year, CRPE noted that 58% of the families who created pods didn’t just prefer them to the remote-learning and hybrid-learning options during the pandemic. They also preferred them to their experience with traditional public schools before the pandemic. Nonwhite families were twice as likely as white families to say the pod improved their child’s overall happiness and attitude toward school, and they trusted the pod instructors more than they did the pre-pandemic teachers in traditional public schools.

During a recent panel discussion about the popularity of pods among black families,

Lakisha Young

of Oakland Reach, a parent-advocacy group, said the movement was born of necessity. “We saw our [school] system not responding to our families and our communities.” Another panelist, Maxine McKinney de Royston, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who co-founded a microschool, said the pandemic just “exacerbated the dissatisfaction that black parents already had” with their schools. “A lot of these hubs and pods are still going because once people got a taste that there’s another possibility, they want to stay with that.”

There is a long tradition in America of blacks taking education matters into their own hands.

Booker T. Washington

worked with the philanthropist

Julius Rosenwald

in the early 20th century to build thousands of quality schools for southern blacks. Black activists in California opened schools in poor sections of Oakland and Los Angeles in the 1960s.

Marva Collins

started a school for black kids in Chicago in the 1970s, and Geoffrey Canada did so in Harlem in the 1990s.

Pod learning, like charter schools, has been criticized for contributing to school segregation. A public-school official in Atlanta wrote in the

New York Times

that pods “exacerbate inequities, racial segregation and the opportunity gap within schools.” But where is the evidence that black children need to sit next to white children to learn? Some of the highest-performing public schools in the U.S. are public charter schools with student bodies that are overwhelmingly black and Latino. If racial diversity is so essential to classroom learning, how do children in countries with essentially no such diversity, such as Japan and South Korea, regularly outperform American students on international tests?

In any other use of the word, these pods and charter schools wouldn’t be considered segregated to begin with because nothing besides personal preference is at play. If you go to the symphony and see few black people in attendance, you don’t conclude that the concert hall is segregated. But if someone starts a charter school or a pod in a heavily black neighborhood and nonblacks don’t enroll, school-choice opponents would have you believe that something nefarious is afoot.

Black parents who embrace education alternatives understand that a school’s quality doesn’t depend on the racial makeup of the classroom. For today’s Democratic Party, however, racial balance is the highest priority, even if it means keeping low-income minorities trapped in violent, low-performing schools with the least-experienced teachers at the head of the classroom.

The Biden administration and progressive lawmakers, with the approval of such activist organizations as the NAACP, have spent the past two years trying to undermine charter-school expansion. It’s no coincidence that the teachers unions, which oppose school choice, are among the largest donors to the NAACP, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and Democrats in general.

Don’t be surprised if the political attacks on learning pods not only continue but escalate. Their popularity, particularly among black parents, won’t win them a pass. For protectors of the education status quo, they represent a threat.