Cara Fitzpatrick on School Choice

Your Fellow’s Project is the forthcoming book The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. Can you share the origin of this project?

I covered education as a newspaper reporter in Florida for about a decade, with several years devoted largely to coverage of school segregation in one county. Florida has long been a laboratory for school choice programs, and I talked to a number of families who were fleeing some low-performing and under-resourced segregated public schools by using choice options, such as charter schools or school vouchers. I was curious about the origins of choice policies, whether they “worked,” and if choice could co-exist with traditional public education.

The book details the radical changes to American public education since the 1950’s. Looking ahead, what trends do you see in education and school choice?

It’s really hard to predict. When I started researching the book in late 2017, several people told me that school choice was all but dead. Now, school choice is having this huge moment. Many Republican-led states have expanded or created new school voucher programs, and Oklahoma has approved an application for the country’s first religious charter school. I’ll be watching a few things in the coming years. First, what the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority does with cases involving charter schools— there’s a looming question about whether charters are legally public or private—and what that means for the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Second, how much these universal school voucher programs cost. We’ve already seen wildly varying cost projections. Finally, I’ll be interested in the ongoing academic and social recovery from the pandemic, and watching to see if Republican-led culture wars ultimately backfire with voters.

Do you have an ideal reader in mind? Is there a particular group, policy makers, educators, that you’d like to reach?

As a reporter and editor, I don’t think it’s my job to advocate for particular policies. That’s what editorial boards do. My goal as a writer was to trace the rise of the school choice movement and to explain how the country has reached this point, where more and more tax dollars are flowing to private education. I hope that anyone who is interested in the future (and history) of American education picks up the book.

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