Since our last update post in April 2021, Cato’s COVID-19 Permanent Private School Closures tracker has been rather quiet, with only eight total closures in the past three months, of which just four were explicitly linked to the pandemic’s effects.

Is no news good news?

There are certainly some encouraging signs that private schools have made it through the worst of COVID-19. That said, the pandemic’s effect on lower-income private schools, as well as uncertainty about the Delta variant as we enter the new school year, could temper one’s optimism.

The recent dearth of closure announcements may indicate that most of the schools in dire financial straits have already announced their folding. As you can see in the chart below, the vast majority of closure announcements came during the initial shock and uncertainty of the pandemic’s arrival, basically April through August 2020. There was a smaller wave early in 2021, perhaps as schools’ budgets revealed whether they could reasonably open for the 2021–22 school year. And since? Not much.

Many private schools may have stood pat on enrollment last year, or at least withstood enrollment declines. And some saw increases as the year went on.

For the coming school year, some – maybe many – private schools could be looking at increased enrollment. Our survey last year found that roughly a third of schools increased their K‑12 numbers between the 2019–20 school year and the start of the 2020–21, and a recent Forbes headline suggests that the pandemic may have “boosted private school enrollment forever.” Also, a few institutions, like Trenton Catholic Academy in New Jersey, have rallied to reverse closure announcements. Dissatisfaction with public schools, combined with the rapid increase of school choice options, could allow even more students to access private schooling.

Of course, not all private schools are on equal financial footing. As a previous post noted, the average tuition of schools on our closure list is below the national average. Families who can afford more expensive private schools may be able to sustain schools in higher income areas, but lower income families may not have as much freedom. Over half of our closures happened in areas with a median family income below the national average, including the four most recent.

The economic effects of COVID have disproportionately hurt those with less income, and private schools are no exception.

And all private schools may face more COVID-19 headwinds. As the Delta variant spreads, schools face, as an Education Week article put it, “a tangle of state or district rules, legal questions, and community pushback.” While many policies focus on public schools, there can be overlap. For example, an executive order on mask mandates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ may or may not apply to private schools, depending on legal interpretations. That said, there is no indication that private schools will face a similar closure situation to 2020, and the 9^th Circuit’s recent ruling in Brach v. Newsom may bolster the ability for private schools to remain open.

Ultimately, no news is good news when you are running a private school closure tracker. It strongly suggests that non-governmental education is weathering the COVID-19 storm.

If you forced two hungry people into an arena, especially who already disliked each other, and told them only he who emerged triumphant got fed, would you be surprised if they fought? The surprise, of course, would be if they did not.

That is, essentially, what public schooling does: Forces diverse people into political arenas called “school districts,” and increasingly “states,” to determine whose children will get the intellectual food they need. Yet education analysts and commentators have long ignored the distinct possibility that public schooling spurs constant conflict, and the corollary, that choice would foster peace in education.

The deafening debate over critical race theory (CRT), and to a lesser extent the treatment of transgender students, seems to be changing that. While I have written for years about how public schooling divides and choice can bring more peace, it has rarely generated much discussion. But now others are increasingly tackling those themes.

Of course, more writing does not mean more accepting the need for choice.

Last week, the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio weighed in on choice-as-peacemaker. He raised substantive objections, but also deemed the position as “naïve” and a “talking point.” That said, he linked to Cato’s Public Schooling Battle Map and wrote, “Cato notes, not insensibly, that ‘public schooling often forces people into wrenching, zero‐​sum conflict.’”

Pondiscio, it appears, thinks the Map may well be on to something: public schooling really might fuel social conflict. So what are his objections to choice-as-peacemaker? They are four:

1. We socialize the cost of elementary and secondary education – everyone, with or without school-aged children, must pay – so all have standing to help decide, through government, what is or is not taught
2. Education is at least partly a “public good,” and everyone should have a say, via government, in shaping the next generation
3. Many private schools are beset by “wokeness,” so private schooling will be no escape from CRT
4. We are far from universal school choice, so the choice “solution” really is not one

Too Little Choice

I’ll start with a concession – sort of – on number four. There is, indeed, too little choice right now for most people to select schools that share their views on CRT, or sundry other divisive issues. But the choice-as-peacemaker proposition is about explaining what needs to be done, not what exists. And, for what it’s worth, there is a lot of help on the way.

Forced funding

Now to objection one: Choice would not bring peace because we make everyone pay for education, so all should get a say.

We do, indeed, make all Americans pay for public education, but that does not mean that the money must only go to government schools with uniform curricula and policies. Many countries, as Pondiscio notes, let families choose schools using public funds, and if families are similar in their beliefs and desires to taxpayers broadly, something like universal vouchers would result in education akin to what taxpayers would have chosen themselves. Net coercion would be minimal. That said, we have direct mechanisms to give funders freedom: personal use and scholarship tax credits, found in numerous states, that allow funders to choose whether to pay for school choices, and often which choices to fund.

A “Public Good”

Pondiscio’s second objection goes beyond the first by asserting that every American should have a say in education regardless of taxation. Education is a “public good,” and we should collectively form the next generation, through government, because “every American” has a “clear interest…in the education of the next generation.”

The most important response to this is that government shaping minds to engineer the next generation is fundamentally at odds with a free society. It gives government the power to homogenize society, potentially killing diverse communities and ideas by deciding which will – and will not – be reproduced.

More technically, Pondiscio uses the term “public good” loosely, basically meaning “something with more than private benefits,” or maybe just “something that is good for everyone.” But a public good, as defined in economics, has specific attributes that explain why government should intervene in its production. Such a good is one that people can use without reducing its availability to others, and from which no one can be kept away – something “non-rivalrous” and “non-excludable” – and which, by its open nature, can lead to free riders who use but do not contribute to it. The classic example is national defense, from which everyone in the country benefits whether they pay or not.

Education does not meet those criteria – schools can certainly keep out free riders – hence killing the rigorous justification for government intervention. Pondiscio’s use is much looser, more that education has positive externalities – benefits beyond those accruing to students and families – such as lower imprisonment rates or higher incomes and hence tax payments, and education would be under-consumed were it based only on private benefit.

Given that there are major personal benefits to education, especially increased earnings, the private incentive would almost certainly be sufficient to produce assumed positive externalities such as lower incarceration rates. And frankly, Pondiscio’s definition could be used to justify any potential government action: I’m happy when I’m eating barbecue, and when I’m happy I am less likely to have a car accident, hurting someone else. So subsidized barbecue is a public good!

But what about goods that do not logically proceed from private interest, such as becoming a well-informed, active citizens?

There may, indeed, be limited private benefit to learning about jury duty, or how a bill becomes a law. But if most people do not care about such things, there is little reason to believe that the public will demand that their schools teach them, or that even if taught kids will learn or retain them. Which is exactly what the evidence indicates is happening. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 14 percent of 8^th grade public school students were “proficient” in U.S. history in 2018 – the most recent exam – and in civics, only 23 percent were.

Ironically, Catholic school students – students those opposed to choice on “balkanization” grounds might think least likely to become good citizens because they attend not just private, but religious, schools – had much higher NAEP civics and U.S. history proficiency rates than public school students. And rigorous research comparing public and private students has repeatedly found a private school advantage in forming well-informed, tolerant, and active citizens.

Now let’s really throw the “public goods” objection for a loop: Superior private school results are quite possibly enabled by choice and autonomy. When a school gets to make its own decisions about what to teach and how to teach it, and families freely choose that school, it enables the teaching of rigorous, concrete material, and the energetic instilling of values such as tolerance of those who think differently. In contrast, public school teachers often downplay or avoid controversial material to avert conflict among diverse families assigned to their school, ripping out crucial substance.

Private “Woke,” Too?

Finally, Pondiscio argues that choice may not help with CRT because private schools may be just as “woke” as public, if not more so.

To make his point, Pondiscio points to anecdotal evidence of super-elite – and expensive – private schools embracing CRT-type ideas. But this does not indicate how widespread CRT and related ideas are, while at least one survey suggests many teachers want little to do with CRT. Meanwhile, most private schools are not preserves of the wealthy like Harvard-Westlake, but are affordable religious – and likely often conservative – schools.

But the real problem here is much deeper. The ultimate measure of an education system’s success should not be “does it keep out the things I don’t like.” Indeed, for your own good that should not be the measure.

Basic human reality is that no one is omniscient, and as right as we may be convinced we are on any given issue, there is always a chance we are wrong. And the more complex, or values-laden, an issue, the less likely we are to be unquestionably correct.

Given this, we should absolutely want as wide a sphere as possible for different ideas to be tried and compete. We should want it for our own protection, not just because we may not be the ones with political power, but because allowing lots of new things to be tried is how us finite-brained humans learn over time what works, what does not, and what may work for some people but not others. It is the key to societal evolution and progress.

Looking specifically at CRT, it is not at all certain that Pondiscio’s view is the correct one. There is, for instance, good reason to believe that people have implicit biases – we all have instinctive reactions to lots of things – and that those reactions might contribute to racially disparate outcomes. Yawning black-white wealth differences, meanwhile, justify concern about systemic racism.

Of course, not being clearly wrong does not mean these concepts are right. But that so much is unknown does mean that it is very dangerous to have government choose winners and losers.

Conclusion

It is terrific to see people starting to grapple with the possibility that public schooling is a social divider, and school choice a bringer of peace. But the work of explaining why choice is essential is only just beginning.

Suppose you have an open patch of ground in your yard and you think, “I’d like some flowers. But which ones?” Suddenly a landscaper arrives and says, “Flowers? I’m a landscaper, and the truth is you need weeds.” An assistant then takes your wallet and gives the landscaper your money, telling you, “Be happy – you just got truth from an expert.”

Would your reaction be, “He’s an expert so he can keep the money and I should be grateful”? Or, “I didn’t ask for this, I still want flowers, and I am calling the police.”

Most people, I suspect, would go with the latter. But a response to my recent blog post looking at the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure dispute at the University of North Carolina, which highlights liberty and accountability problems when academic freedom is coupled with taxpayer funding of public universities, essentially says the right response is to let the landscaper keep your money, and be thankful for the enlightenment.

Taxpayers should have to fund colleges, writes Matt Reed, because professors are truth seekers, and academics publishing truth is a “public good” from which we all benefit. It should also be up to professors to decide how the money is used, and to police themselves, because other people do not always accept the truth academics proclaim.

“Academic freedom isn’t license to spout whatever you want,” he writes. “It’s a hunting license for truth.”

Let’s start with basic principle: Does a claim to truth-seeking justify government giving one group other people’s money? At the very least we do not think so regarding the field that makes the ultimate truth claims, and that often involves imperatives to share that truth: religion. Indeed, we go to great pains to keep government separate. Why? Because truth is often very hard to establish, and one person’s conclusions about what is true, even if arrived at after years of study, may be very different—contradictory, even—from someone else’s, even who studied just as much.

But religion does not use the scientific method – hypotheses and verifiable evidence – so it is not real truth-seeking. Academia does.

If only it were that straightforward, or as incredibly simple as the dangers from which Reed says academic freedom protects us: “two plus two is not six, no matter what a party currently in power says.”

If issues professors weigh in on were no more complicated than kindergarten arithmetic, establishing truth would be easy. But they are often extremely complex, with very difficult to unearth and interpret facts, and often involving values that cannot be proven “right” or “wrong.” The response to Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project is a perfect example of this, with hot debates both about the facts, and deeper, normative questions about the goals for, say, teaching United States history: Should we instill patriotism? Expose injustice? Focus on national principles?

Of course, rather than objective truth-seeking, academia could have biases. Indeed, what if the ivory tower is largely an intellectual monoculture? The process of becoming one is easy to imagine: people who share certain worldviews might be more inclined to become professors than other people. More than that, if academics police themselves, they may accept into the fold mainly people who think as they do – people who demonstrate their worthiness by sharing in what the truth-seekers believe to be the truth.

Data suggest that an overwhelming tilt does, in fact, exist, especially in the messy fields that tend to deal with issues – social sciences, humanities – that most directly impact the taxpayers being forced to fund academia. The National Association of Scholars recently found that in a sample of elite institutions, among the professoriate registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans overall, and in disciplines such as anthropology, English, and sociology, by ratios up to 42 to 1. Roughly similar imbalances have been found in other political-leaning measures.

Forced funding of colleges would be incompatible with freedom even if schools had “balanced” representation – no adult is inherently entitled to someone else’s financial support, no matter how much they say it is for the would-be payer’s own good. But the evidence suggests taxpayers may well be funding bias. This also undermines the assertion Reed makes that forced funding works out for taxpayers because in exchange for taxpayer dollars, academics must publish their findings, which constitute new knowledge.

Not only does publication not always happen, but academics’ leanings may well influence which new knowledge they pursue, and which they do not. Taxpayers might get the new knowledge academics want to have, not that some or even all of the taxpayers want. And in pursuing that knowledge, are we to assume that academics do not experience confirmation biases, or groupthink, or any of the other intellectual challenges that bedevil “normal” people?

But if we did not force funding, truth would not be sought, right? We’d suffer from “market failure,” which really means failure of free society. As Reed puts it, “Because we don’t know what will be found until it’s found, we can’t rely on the price system. Scholarship is inherently public; public funding is a perfectly rational response to what would otherwise be a market failure.”

Well, no. Just because we do not require taxpayers to fund inquiry does not mean inquiry does not happen, which Reed illustrates terrifically in his own piece. Discussing Hannah-Jones, he writes:

She’s already a Pulitzer prize winner and a MacArthur Genius, and her work has been circulated far and wide; in terms of the truths she has found, the horses got out of the barn some time ago. Making her a cause célèbre only spreads her message even more. She has already nudged the public conversation more than most tenured scholars ever will.

It is, indeed, hard to think of a more robust national debate than the one we have been having over the 1619 Project, and it started with a profit-making entity: The New York Times. Responses to it have come from all over, including National Review, think tanks, and many more parts of free society.

Of course, people can, and do, voluntarily fund free inquiry. Two of the nation’s premier research universities – the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins – were in the vanguard of research-focused higher education, and both are private. And even with hundreds-of-billions of taxpayer dollars going to higher education, philanthropists give tens-of-billions of their own every year.

Finally, let me dispel Reed’s basic misinterpretation of what I wrote. He asserts that I want “majority rule” of academia. “If the majority decides that two plus two is six, then six it is,” he suggests I argued.

It is rare to see myself portrayed as the “majority rule” guy because I typically argue to keep government – including democratic – out of education decisions, especially when pursuing truth. I put liberty over democracy almost every time.

In keeping with that, I did not call for government intervention in my short blog post, which defended academic freedom and was clearly about the problem of forced funding of institutions. Indeed, such funding invites political interference because the funder cannot refuse to participate. That leaves her only one avenue for protection – government – if she feels truth as she sees it is being ignored, or worse, propagation of falsehoods is being perpetrated.

The solution I offered, albeit imperfect, was to make “individual choice – not political power [italics added] – much more central.” The more voluntarism there is on both the funding and academic sides of higher ed, the better. But that does not seem to be what some academics want. They want government to give them your money, because they are uniquely trustworthy seekers of truth.

I take no position on whether journalist and 1619 Project impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones should get tenure with her new position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina. But from a public policy perspective, it is worth remembering that public colleges are government institutions that state taxpayers are forced to fund. In the case of the University of North Carolina, state appropriations came to nearly $535 million in 2020. That taxpayers’ representatives, which the board of trustees that blocked tenure for Hannah-Jones are a part of, would interfere in university decisions should be expected. Indeed, working with the board of governors, “control, supervision, management, and governance” is their job.

Fundamentally, academic freedom – the grounds on which it is argued that only university faculty should make academic decisions – is incompatible with forced funding of an institution. There is good reason that academics should be able to pursue ideas as they see fit – progress comes when untested and sometimes unpopular ideas can be explored – but academics must not be more free than everyone else; their freedom cannot mean others are forced to fund them.

If we want public financing of higher education, the only way to come close to reconciling academic and funder freedom is for public money to go to students, not be appropriated to institutions. Then the ideas explored and extolled in ivory towers would more likely reflect the people generally, at least to the extent that college attendees reflect overall society. It would not be a perfect match, but it would be closer while making individual choice – not political power – much more central.

This week we entered battle number 2,500 on the Public Schooling Battle Map, which now catalogs a total of 2,507 values- and identity-based conflicts in public schools. These are the most intense of conflicts because they have very personal stakes: whether your children are taught the moral and other values you think they should – or should not – learn, and how you see yourself – your race, religion, etc. – treated in school policies and curricula.

No doubt right now the two highest profile battles of the sorts we catalog on the Map are over the teaching of critical race theory, or other approaches that suggest racism is systemic and perhaps somewhat ingrained in people, and whether transgender girls should be able to participate in girls’ high school athletics. Both appear to be driving a trend that, as you can see in the chart below, may have been developing since 2016, but which seems to have exploded in 2021: state governments, not districts, deciding on policies for all.

Importantly, Map battles are not drawn via representative sampling, and our collections before 2013 have not always been of uniform intensity. That said, assuming we have not disproportionately excluded state-level conflicts in past years relative to district-level battles, the data suggest that many people are no longer trying to settle difference at the local level.

If true, it is bad, but understandable. While it is better to leave decisions to individual communities, which can be very different from each other, than impose a single answer on an entire state, communities also often contain significant diversity. If some people do not agree with policies their districts choose, or that they fear they might select, they have little recourse but to seek their way through higher government. And as the stakes of debates get higher – Will your kids be taught that they are racists? Not “real” girls? – the feeling that one must win grows.

Of course, we could avoid such high-stakes conflicts were we to do what we should have been doing all along: having education funding follow children to chosen educational arrangements rather than forcing all people to fund government schools. But for too long we have not done that, and we may well be looking at the consequence: state governments will decide whose values win and lose for everyone.

That is something no one who values freedom and diversity should want.

If you are like me, you are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer size, scope, and number of federal spending proposals that have been coming out of the Biden White House: The American Rescue Plan. The American Jobs Plan. The American Family Plan. The budget. It is too much to process, and the price tag – trillions of dollars – too gargantuan to conceptualize.

Unfortunately, because the stakes are so high, we cannot let these proposals go unscrutinized, even if we think all we can do is hunker down and hope we survive the tidal wave threatening to crash over us. Given their astonishing cost and expanse, if these proposals are enacted and do not work we will suffer.

Yesterday, I testified before the House Committee on Education and Labor and was able to zero in on what, at least in education, are the big thrusts in all this. You can read my written testimony for my thoughts on education spending broadly. What follows here is a relatively quick offering of research and data on what appear to be the major targets for funding: early childhood education and childcare, building and renovating K‑12 schools, and “free” community college.

This is not a comprehensive analysis or rebuttal of any proposal, but a quick collection of evidence to get you started on responding when someone tells you, “Of course Washington needs to spend more on these things.”

Constitutionality

I know this is no longer even an orange traffic cone in the way of the federal Mack Truck, but the Constitution does not allow broad federal spending for child care, schools, etc. And the rule of law should still matter.

This 2010 blog post remains the most succinct thing I’ve written explaining that nothing in the Constitution – not the “general Welfare” clause, not the taxing power, not the “necessary and proper” clause – allows the feds to go beyond the specific enumerated powers given to them, among which you will find nothing about education. I also recently completed reading these volumes, and there is almost zero mention of education except for a bit of discussion of a national university. And how was National U dealt with? As James Madison recorded Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania explaining, placing the creation of a national university among the enumerated powers “is not necessary. The exclusive power at the Seat of Government, will reach the object.”

Creating a specific, enumerated power to engage in education was turned down because another specific, enumerated power handled it, not because it could be done using the “General Welfare” or some other clause.

Early Childhood

I heard much yesterday suggesting the evidence is overwhelming that money spent on early childhood education and care is a terrific investment. What gets in the way is the early childhood research, especially the top-quality, random-assignment kind that controls well for unobservable characteristics like motivation, and allows for long-term tracking. What we often see is that whatever benefits there are soon fade out, and a lot of research cited as proof that early childhood funding pays off falls short of proving anything.

This 2014 Policy Analysis from Professor David Armor is a great overview and analysis of the research, both the methodologies and what the body of research shows.

I also came across this paper from the Institute for Family Studies, which discusses a lot of the child welfare research on early childhood. Not only is government child-care assistance not always positive, it can sometimes hurt.

K‑12 School Conditions

It is asserted that public school buildings are often in terrible condition and only the feds can spend enough to resurrect them.

There is some grounds for this conclusion, including a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report showing that about 41 percent of districts say at least half of their schools need updates or replacements of HVAC systems, about 28 percent improvements of their interior light fixtures, and more.

Matters, however, are not as simple as “districts say they’ve got problems, the feds have to fix them.”

For one thing, a federal report on school conditions based on a 2012–13 survey found that only 3 percent of permanent buildings were in “poor” condition, meaning they fell short of “minimum requirements for normal school performance,” and even in poor districts only 4 percent of permanent buildings were in such health. Despite the 4 percent finding, the crumbling building problem is thought to be especially acute in low-income districts, and perhaps it is. But if so, it is not clear that it is for want of resources. As a 2019 federal report shows (table 7), in the large majority of states the lowest-income quartile of districts spend the most per student. When aggregated at the national level they spend almost as much as the wealthiest districts, and if you include the second lowest quartile, the spending in the bottom half of wealth is more than $1,000 per student higher than in the top half.

Another problem, which the GAO report and others find, is that many districts do not want to pay for building construction or improvements, and when the public does want something it is not mundane stuff like maintaining a boiler, but building new, much bigger buildings, or buying the latest tech. As the GAO reported of a Rhode Island district, “Officials said participants in public forums told them they preferred educational enhancements over facility repairs.” Of course, money could also just get burned off in bureaucracy.

It is not clear that school districts have major facilities problems, and if they do, that a lack of funding creates them.

“Free” College

Nothing is free. Someone has to pay. And if we have learned anything in higher education it is that when students pay with someone else’s money, especially taxpayer dollars, it is a recipe for massive, expensive distortions.

The chart below strongly suggests that, ironically, what created skyrocketing college sticker prices – arguably the biggest problem in higher ed – were federal laws creating and expanding student aid to make college more affordable. It turns out the more you give people someone else’s money to pay for something, the more they demand that thing, the less they focus on getting it as efficiently as possible, and the higher prices go.

But we got a lot of additional, powerful learning out of this, right?

Wrong. We got a lot more degrees. But not all credentials are created equal.

We have two national assessments of adult literacy that we can break down by educational attainment, and both show declining average literacy for degree holders as degree-attainment rose. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, conducted in 1992 and 2003, found both “prose” and “document” literacy dropping substantially for holders of four-year and advanced-degrees, and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, administered in 2012/14 and 2017, also found falling literacy (though not statistically significant) among people with more than a high school education. And as the chart below shows — taken from this report — earnings for all higher education attainment levels dropped between 2000 and 2018.

Added to these pieces of evidence, we have long had about a third of Americans with bachelor’s degrees in careers – not just short-term employment – that do not require the credential.

Alas, what government breaks, it often “fixes” by making problems even worse.

Free college would further sever the consumer from the payment, encouraging even more overconsumption and fueling a cycle of even worse credential inflation – needing degrees for jobs that did not previously require them. The push is starting with community college, which is already essentially free: the average Pell Grant of $4,418 more than covers the average community college tuition and fees of $3,377.

Nor surprising, as data from the National Student Clearinghouse show, community colleges – typically two-year programs – have six-year completion rates of only about 40 percent. As I wrote about a defense of community colleges by Tom Hanks a few years ago, what the completion data suggest is, like a young Hanks experienced, community colleges may often be places to dabble in education, which is fine on one’s own dime, but not someone else’s. And there is no reason to believe “free” two-year colleges are the end goal: that is almost certainly free four-year public institutions.

That said, one thing about free college may prevent mass lingering and over-creation of degrees: rationing. If demand is goosed beyond what even the federal government might be able to spend, spaces would have to be rationed. As a paper from Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper at the American Enterprise Institute illustrates, at the very least there are tradeoffs between how much government funds colleges, the levels of resources those schools have, and how many people can attend.

Also, as bloated as America’s ivory tower is, ours is almost certainly the best in the world because, unlike most other countries, we primarily fund students instead of schools, and leave institutions a lot of autonomy to innovate and compete. England moved to our model over the last couple of decades, and wouldn’t you know it, the top ten universities in the world are all in the U.S. or England (granted, as rated by a publication in London).

Conclusion

The Biden proposals seem to be premised on one idea: we do not spend enough money. At the very least, the situation is not at all that simple.

In my report on the impact of COVID-19 on private schools released Tuesday, I wrote that permanent closures connected to the pandemic were less severe than many people feared early on. Still, we lost a minimum of 132 private schools at least in part due to COVID in one year, and have since seen closure announcements pick up, with 6 so far in April.

Is this all minor?

A little context may illustrate that while things have been better than worst-case scenarios, the loss of private schools – especially relatively low-cost ones – is not insignificant:

• The 141 closures we currently have catalogued enroll nearly 23,000 students. Were that a public school district, it would be larger than roughly 95 percent of all districts in the United States
• 141 is 2.35 times more schools than the average number of schools in the nation’s larger districts
• The cost of enrolling all those kids in public schools would be around $359,000,000, which is more than the total revenue of the nation’s 114^th largest school district – Chandler Unified in Arizona – in the 2015–16 school year

Considering that these closures are minimums – the ones we know about – and more seem likely to come, this is not minor. And considering that the evidence suggests private schools as a group were appreciably more responsive to COVID-19 than public schools, we should do what we can to preserve them.

What should that be? Not special favors, just equal treatment. Enact or expand school choice programs, as we see many states working on, so education dollars follow children rather than going directly to government schools.