It’s Time For The Left To Come to the School Choice Table

For too long, the political Left has allowed the debate over school choice to be defined, and dominated, by conservatives. In doing so, we’ve not only neglected one of the most dynamic levers for equity and innovation in American education; we’ve also alienated the very families we claim to represent. It’s time to change that. It’s time for the Left to come to the school choice table, not to dismantle public education, but to help reinvent it for a new era.

A System Never Meant to Work for All

The American school system, from the outset, was not designed to meet the diverse needs of every child. It was built in an industrial age, for industrial-age goals. The “fathers of American education” believed in factory-style standardization and that the role of education was to rank and sort its pupils.

Their vision for schooling prioritized uniformity, top-down control, and compliance, not the development of each child’s potential. Even today, the machinery of American education reflects that legacy. Children are grouped in age-based batches, evaluated with standardized metrics, and taught in large, factory-like buildings.

This structure has always failed some students, but in today’s rapidly changing world, it is failing more students than ever before. Post-pandemic data shows that fewer than one-third of American students are reading or doing math at grade level. In major Democratic-led cities, entire schools report zero students proficient in math. In education, the gap between progressive aspirations and progressive outcomes is staggering, and growing.

And yet, we still pour energy into defending the system itself, rather than asking whether it was ever built to do what we now demand of it.

We Need a System Designed for Students

If we want different results, we need a different design. That means embracing a 21st-century vision meant to modernize public education: one that is driven by innovation, focused on outcomes, and responsive to the unique needs of every learner, particularly those most in need. It means shifting from a system designed for standardization to one designed for personalization. From top-down mandates to community-led, bottom-up solutions. From empowering bureaucrats to trusting families.

School choice, properly structured, is one of the most powerful tools we have to make that shift. And we know it works. Study after study finds not only academic but also civic benefits when students enroll in non-district schools, whether public or private.

School choice policies give families the freedom to find an educational setting that works for their child, rather than forcing them into existing one-size-fits-all models that are based on outdated assumptions or geography.

School choice policies are also giving rise to a new and exciting movement. When designed well, school choice policies are helping to modernize education by catalyzing dynamic ecosystems of educational innovation, where entirely new bottom-up, community-driven, unbundled education models (like microschools) are emerging. Rather than forcing families to rely on established, slow-moving, bureaucratic systems, school choice is empowering families, educators and communities to create their own schools.

There’s nothing inherently conservative about school choice and community-driven innovation. On the contrary, they have deep progressive roots.

The Progressive Legacy of School Choice and Educational Freedom

School choice and educational freedom are tightly linked concepts, both rooted in the principle of trusting families and communities. Choice refers to funding models that allow public dollars to follow the child, opening access to a broader array of options: public charter schools, microschools, magnets, dual enrollment programs, hybrid models, and more. But freedom speaks to something even deeper: empowering communities to exert meaningful control over the kinds of schools and educational experiences available to them, rather than ceding that authority to distant bureaucracies and rigid school district boundaries.

For many families, especially those in historically marginalized communities, educational freedom means having the opportunity to build home-grown schools, to develop culturally relevant experiences, and to access specialized supports that reflect their children’s diverse needs. In this sense, school choice and educational freedom are about restoring agency to the very people progressives claim to serve, giving real power to parents and communities.

Progressives, of course, have long championed the aspirations of Black Americans and other historically marginalized groups. Yet when it comes to educational freedom, as Ashley Berner and others have pointed out, many modern progressives have lost sight of the fact that perhaps its strongest, most consistent voices have long come from precisely these communities.

As James Foreman, Jr. writes in, The Secret History of School Choice: How Progressives Got There First, the African American community has a long and deep tradition of fighting for educational freedom. During Reconstruction, newly freed Black Americans made education one of their highest priorities. Denied literacy under slavery, Black communities across the South pooled resources, built their own schools, and insisted on hiring Black teachers to lead them.

Some of these early schools received support from the Freedmen’s Bureau, missionary societies, and, eventually, state governments. But many were entirely community-run, early expressions of bottom-up innovation, rooted in the belief that schooling should reflect the values, culture, and aspirations of the families it served. As one contemporary observer noted, former slaves prided themselves “in keeping their educational institutions in their own hands.”

This belief in community-driven education persisted well into the 20th century. In the civil rights era, Brown v. Board struck down legal segregation but failed to deliver meaningful educational opportunities for many Black students, prompting progressive reformers and parents to once again call for bottom-up solutions. The 1960s community control movement in cities like New York demanded that local Black and Latino communities have the power to shape their schools, including curriculum, leadership, and staffing. Their goal was to transform public schools into something that both reflected and represented their values.

Later, in the 1970s, progressives experimented with new models like “open classrooms,” which emphasized student choice, flexible learning environments, and hands-on learning. These approaches sought to liberate students from rigid, top-down schooling and foster creativity and agency.

In the late 1980s, State Representative Polly Williams, alongside civil rights activist Howard Fuller, championed what would become the nation’s first modern school voucher program, explicitly designed to serve low-income families in Milwaukee. Notably, the legislation passed with the support of nearly every Black legislator in Wisconsin. In the 1990s, longtime Cleveland City Councilwoman Fannie Lewis successfully pushed for Ohio’s first private school voucher program, insisting that children in her community deserved the same opportunities as wealthier families elsewhere. And in the early 2000s, Mayor Anthony Williams supported the creation of a voucher program in Washington, D.C. For all of these leaders, school choice was about equity and parent empowerment.

Over the decades, in cities from Chicago to Newark to Los Angeles, whenever real options have genuinely been made available to them, working-class Black and Latino parents have consistently voted with their feet to seek options outside of the traditional public schools. Public charter schools, in particular, have emerged as one of the clearest and most successful expressions of this desire for alternatives. For many communities, charters have offered not only higher expectations and stronger results, but also the chance to build schools that reflect the values, cultures, and aspirations of the families they serve.

This demand for something different helped to fuel the growth of public charter schools and is now laying the foundation for the next generation of innovation. Building on the same impulse for autonomy, customization, and innovation, an entirely new set of models is emerging, often outside the traditional policy structures most familiar to progressives.

Today, perhaps the most exciting developments in progressive education are, ironically, taking place primarily in “conservative” states. During the pandemic, homeschooling gave rise to informal learning pods, which have since evolved into more formal microschools. These small, nimble learning environments are allowing educators and parents to become educational entrepreneurs, creating new, community-based schools, and designing programs that are tailored to the specific needs of their students.

With the rise of new funding models like Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), these microschools are able to sidestep bureaucratic constraints and they now have a financially viable pathway to scale. While the microschool movement is still relatively new, these schools are offering families a rapidly growing array of highly personalized, community-driven options that are directly responding to the needs that district schools were never designed to meet.

For progressives truly committed to equity and self-determination, school choice and educational freedom are not a departure from our values, they are expressions of them.The fight to give communities more control over their lives has always been central to the progressive project, whether in labor, housing, health care, or civil rights. Education should be no different. Empowering families, especially those long denied agency, to shape their children’s schooling is a natural extension of that legacy. Rather than ceding this space to others, progressives should reclaim school choice and educational freedom as part of our own tradition: one that trusts communities, honors diversity, and fights for systems that serve people, not the other way around.

Choice, Itself, Is a Progressive Value

At its core, school choice should not feel foreign to progressive principles; progressives already champion choice in many other areas of public policy and personal freedom.

We defend reproductive freedom with the rallying cry: my body, my choice. We champion the right to love whom you choose, to marry whom you choose, to express your identity as you choose. As Ravi Gupta has pointed out, in areas like health care, we strongly support the right of Medicaid recipients to choose their own doctor or hospital, even if that provider is privately owned. With housing, we support Section 8 vouchers that allow families to rent apartments in privately-owned buildings rather than being restricted to public housing projects.

In higher education, progressives have never opposed Pell Grants or GI Bill benefits being used at private or religious universities. In early childhood education, we are perfectly comfortable with child care subsidies flowing to private, nonprofit, or faith-based centers. In all of these areas, we recognize that public dollars can serve public purposes even when delivered through private institutions, so long as those dollars are accompanied by guardrails that protect the public interest.

And yet, when it comes to K-12 education, the single most important engine of opportunity in America, many progressives suddenly abandon this commitment. We impose strict monopolies, limit parental agency, and treat any form of educational choice as a threat to our values. In doing so, we resist giving low-income families the same range of educational choices that wealthier families already enjoy.

The inconsistency is glaring. If we trust families to make decisions about their own bodies, their own partners, their own health care, housing, college, and child care, why not trust them to make decisions about their children’s K-12 education? Why defend a system that offers the most options to those with the most privilege, while limiting the agency of those with the least?

A Spectrum of Choice

One reason progressives should stop fighting school choice is that there’s no single model of what it looks like. Choice exists on a spectrum, and many of its forms are not only compatible with progressive values, they’re actively advancing them.

• Public Charter Schools: Publicly funded, independently operated, and subject to public accountability, charter schools serve almost 4 million students today. Research shows that urban charter networks, particularly those focused on underserved communities, have produced significant learning gains for low-income students and students of color.

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and Tax Credit Scholarships: Though more controversial among progressives, these models offer families direct control over public dollars for approved educational services. ESAs can fund access to private schools, tutoring, microschools, online courses, and more. While the use of ESAs and scholarships is most associated with private schools, states are allowing ESAs to be used at traditional and public charter schools as well.

• Microschools and Learning Pods: Perhaps the most exciting development in education today, microschools are small, often community-run learning environments that blend personalized instruction with flexibility and autonomy. Many are being launched with ESA support, but traditional districts are now exploring them as well.

• Unbundled Education and Hybrid Learning: A growing number of families are customizing their children's education by combining multiple learning providers, such as community classes, in-person tutors, enrichment centers, and online courses, into a coherent educational experience. This “unbundled” model often operates through hybrid learning hubs, youth-serving organizations, or part-time microschools and is expanding rapidly thanks to flexible funding structures like ESAs. These approaches allow families to build highly personalized, dynamic educational paths and have been particularly attractive for students with special needs and/or unique talents and interests. As these new models mature, traditional and public charter schools might participate in these models as well.

• Magnet Schools, Career Academies, and Dual Enrollment: These district-run options offer specialized curricula, from STEM to the arts to vocational training, and allow students to pursue their passions and access college-level work. They are often popular with families who want alternatives within the public system.

• Open Enrollment: Policies that allow students to attend schools outside their assigned zone, even across district lines, are a simple way to expand access without creating new schools. These policies de-couple housing from education and they also seek to de-criminalize the practice of “address sharing.” Yet many districts still resist these reforms due to bureaucratic inertia or political pressure.

• District Schools: Traditional district schools continue to serve the majority of American students, and for many families, the neighborhood district school is their first choice, especially when it delivers a great education. A well-managed, innovative, and responsive district school must remain an important part of any equitable choice system.

Reconnecting With “Core” Democratic Voters

Support for school choice is not a niche position. It is a mainstream one, especially among the voters Democrats most need to re-engage. According to EdChoice, 65% of Americans support ESAs, including 76% of school-aged parents, 60% of Blacks, and 66% of Hispanics. Support for charter schools is similarly strong, with 62% of all Americans in favor, including 60% of Blacks, 62% of Hispanics, and 70% of parents.

Interestingly, the “purple” state of Pennsylvania has been engaged in a fairly unique conversation on choice since 2022 when then-candidate Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, expressed support for private school choice. Having been engaged in an active and very public debate on the issue over the past few years, Pennsylvanian Democrats’ attitudes towards choice are especially noteworthy. A 2024 poll by DFER and SurveyUSA provides an intriguing breakdown of where voters stand on choice in Pennsylvania.

This poll confirms what many others have concluded: support for private and public school choice is strong across the board. The vast gap between the support from voters and the lack of support from elected Democrats should be a deep concern for the party! Notice the markedly higher net support for choice among voters who have steadily drifted away from the party in recent years.

• Democrats earning less than $50k per year vs. Democrats earning more than $150k per year

  • Net support for Private School Choice: 48 to 14

  • Net support for Public Charter Schools: 48 to 19

• Democrats with only a high school degree vs Democrats with a 4-year college degree

  • Net support for Private School Choice: 49 to 18

  • Net support for Public Charter Schools: 44 to 28

• Black voters vs. White voters

  • Net support for Private School Choice: 57 to 19

  • Net support for Public Charter Schools: 58 to 20

• Hispanic voters vs. White voters

  • Net support for Private School Choice: 22 to 19

  • Net support for Public Charter Schools: 41 to 20

It would be simplistic to blame Democrats’ recent struggles with working-class, Black, and Latino voters solely on education policy. But it is no exaggeration to say that education has become ‘Exhibit A’ of what’s gone wrong with our party. Democrats’ misalignment on education policy is not only un-democratic and morally troubling, it is strategically disastrous for a party looking to reconnect with working-class, Black and Hispanic voters while trying to shed its increasingly elitist image.

We don’t need to surrender to Republican framing on choice, but we do need to recognize that the ground is shifting. Republican-led states have already moved aggressively to expand school choice, and many voters, particularly working class folks and families of color, are responding enthusiastically. Democrats must be careful not to be completely left behind.

Being anti-choice not only undermines Democratic values, it is also a political loser.

A Progressive Vision of School Choice

To reassert leadership on education, progressives must do more than say “no” to Republican choice plans. Democrats are rightly skeptical of an entirely hands-off approach to schooling, but continuing to reject school choice outright is a strategic mistake. We need to lay out a proactive, progressive vision of choice that can help modernize American education.

That starts by breaking the monopoly of the traditional, top-down system and making room for bottom-up, community-driven innovation. The point is to not only allow but to actively empower communities to create new and different school models, such as microschools, that are more capable of meeting the unique educational needs of each child.

Next, we must design choice programs that are actually accessible to the families most in need and that those families have the tools they need to make informed decisions. A choice program that essentially amounts to a subsidy for wealthy families and that locks out the working class, not only causes inflationary pressure but is a terribly regressive use of public dollars. Choice programs, even universal ones, should be designed to ensure that low-income families are also benefitting from these expanded options.

Just as we must empower families, we must also elevate educators. Too often, teachers are asked to work within rigid systems that limit their creativity and judgment. In a progressive vision of school choice, teachers are not cogs in a bureaucratic machine, they are trusted professionals, school founders, and learning designers. Many of the most innovative schools today, such as charters, microschools and hybrid hubs, are being created by former public school teachers seeking the autonomy to do what’s best for students. A reimagined education system should give more teachers the opportunity to lead, innovate, and build schools that reflect their values and expertise.

In addition, school choice should not be a free-for-all. We know that, in and of itself, choice does not magically produce better outcomes. Therefore, expanding choice must go hand-in-hand with reaffirming our commitment to accountability. This does not mean imposing the same heavy-handed mandates that have stifled innovation and tied the hands of educators in traditional districts. It does, however, mean ensuring clear reporting on student learning, equitable access, and the responsible use of public funds. Families deserve transparency about how schools are performing, and the public deserves assurance that investments are driving real outcomes.

Finally, we must also work to transform the traditional school system, not just offer an escape from it. Every family deserves access to great schools, and many will choose their neighborhood school if it delivers on that promise. That requires peeling back layers of bureaucratic, regulatory, and legal constraints that currently prevent even well-intentioned public schools from adapting and innovating.

In an ecosystem designed with equity in mind, the ultimate goal isn’t to dismantle public education. The point is to reimagine and modernize it, so that it works for every student, not just the fortunate few. If we get this right, the lines between “traditional” and “non-traditional,” “public” and “private,” will eventually disappear. What will matter most is whether students are learning, families are empowered, and communities are being served.

This vision isn’t hypothetical, it already exists and succeeds in other countries. As Ashley Berner notes, the U.S. is an international outlier in its insistence on uniform, government-run schools. In contrast, most democratic nations, from the Netherlands to Canada to Sweden, fund a range of school types, including community-based, faith-based and nonprofit-run schools, while maintaining high standards for academic outcomes and financial transparency.

These pluralist systems reflect a deep commitment to equity, personalization and community empowerment: they trust families with real choices and hold every school, regardless of model, accountable for results.

School choice is not about ceding power to markets, it’s about restoring power to parents and communities.

This isn’t corporate reform, it’s localism. That is the future of education, and it’s time for progressives to shape it, not shun it.

A Call to Action

This is not a moment for tinkering around the edges. We are living through a moment of profound transformation, not just in education, but across society, technology, and governance. As David Brooks recently observed, many Democrats “...have not fully internalized the magnitude of this historical shift. They are still thinking within the confines of the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview.” But the ground is shifting beneath us. And whether Democrats are ready or not, the “tumult of events” will propel us in a new direction.

Americans are looking for something different and yet, our education policy has been dominated by establishment thinking: more money to do more of the same, top-down mandates, centralized bureaucracy, and insider political alliances that disregard the interests of families, educators and communities. This has to change!

The post-pandemic landscape has laid bare the fractures in our education system: chronic absenteeism, widening learning gaps, and millions of students falling further behind. These aren’t temporary setbacks, they are the symptoms of systemic failure. Our existing education systems are fundamentally misaligned with the needs of our time.

A truly progressive education vision starts by inverting the current power dynamic. It means breaking with the old command-and-control model and instead, empowering parents, teachers and communities to build the schools they need from the ground up, schools that reflect their values, respond to their realities, and are accountable to their aspirations.

This reimagined vision of education must be based on the understanding that, as Robin Lake writes, “public education is a goal, not a particular set of institutions.” The point of public education is to meet the individual needs of every child, not to sustain the system itself. Rather than focus on the false binary between “public” and “private,” we should explore all options, regardless of governance type, that meet the diverse needs of families.

This is not a retreat from progressive principles, it is a return to them. The fight for educational freedom, family agency, and community empowerment has always been a central part of our story. When shaped by our values, school choice can be one of the most powerful tools in that fight.

It’s time to meet this moment with urgency and imagination. If we want a modernized education system that works for every child, especially the most marginalized, progressives should not resist this vision, we should lead in bringing it to life.

It’s time to come to the school choice table, not as reluctant guests, but as the architects of a better way.