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March 2025

Welcome to the March edition of The American Enterprise, and thanks for reading.

This month, we are featuring pieces from Robert Pondiscio <[link removed]> on the last days of public school, Roger Pielke Jr. <[link removed]> on the politicization of
expertise, James Pethokoukis <[link removed]> on whether transformational artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and Zack Cooper <[link removed]> on the Trump administration’s strategic choice between
prioritization or retrenchment.

Make sure to subscribe <[link removed]> and read the online version here <[link removed]>!
The Last Days of Public School <[link removed]>
By Robert Pondiscio

When the 21st century began, there was widespread belief <[link removed]> in and no small amount of alarm <[link removed]> over “peak oil”—the looming moment when global oil production would reach its zenith, after which it would decline. Not because demand would wane, but because we were racing headlong toward a tipping point at which we would have consumed all the easily accessible crude. Catastrophe would follow as oil prices skyrocketed; cars would become a luxury item. In the Northeast, homes would be too expensive to heat; in the South and West, they’d be too expensive to cool. Millions of people in the suburbs, built around cars, would begin to find it difficult and expensive to buy food and goods. Agriculture would suffer, since farming needs petroleum for fertilizer, running machinery, and shipping produce to markets. Store shelves would soon empty.

Malthusian predictions of peak oil dating back more than a century have yet to prove true, but, without question, we’ve hit and passed “peak public school.” A school choice revolution is rapidly reshaping how public education is organized, funded, and delivered in America.

The revolution has spurred surprisingly little public discussion or even awareness because, at least for now, it’s confined largely to red “flyover” states where millions of parents have been given the power to pull their children out of district-run public schools—taking with them the lion’s share of the money the state would have otherwise spent
educating their children. Across the nation, we’re rapidly approaching a tipping point in education. Soon, more than half of US families with school-age children will have the option to educate their children privately with public funds.

The potential effects of peak public school cannot be overstated. For generations, America’s K–12 public schools have been largely immune from the disruptive forces that have roiled retail, travel, entertainment, health care, and many other sectors of the economy and culture, but the reckoning has finally come. Public education is on the verge of an unprecedented crack-up. In fact, it’s already underway.

For more than a century, the dominant model of American education has been the geographically zoned public school—where you live determines where you go to school. To the degree school choice has existed, it has been governed mostly by real estate agents as families seek to buy homes in neighborhoods deemed to have good public schools. But today, nearly 40 percent of American schoolchildren are doing something other than attending their geographically assigned, district-run public school.

This estimate comprises not just private or religious schools but all forms of choice: charter schools, magnet schools, homeschooling, and online education; many states and school districts offer flexibility within the public
system. In sum, school choice in all its forms has been normalized. Even greater disruption lies ahead: In the last four years, over a dozen states have adopted education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow families to use public funds to pay for private school tuition, homeschooling costs, and other educational expenses.

The reckoning has arrived. What comes next, and the social and cultural cost of “peak public school,” is a question that demands serious consideration.

The School Choice Revolution

For decades, school choice was a boutique policy idea championed by libertarian economists like Milton Friedman <[link removed]>, who proposed in 1955 that government should fund education but not necessarily run schools. For most of the 20th century, school choice remained a niche experiment—limited to Catholic schools, a few experimental voucher programs, and charter schools concentrated in select cities. But in the past five years, school choice has gained more ground than in the past 50. The shift has been driven principally by two forces: the COVID-19 pandemic and America’s culture wars.

The pandemic exposed the fragility of the traditional public school model. Long after it became clear that children were at low risk from COVID, many public schools remained closed or imposed prolonged disruptions. Parents, forced to oversee “Zoom school,” got a firsthand look at what their children were being taught—or not being taught. This shotgun transparency, combined with ideological battles over curricula and the lack of in-person instruction, fueled an exodus from public schools. Homeschooling rates have tripled <[link removed]> from pre-pandemic levels. Private school enrollments surged. Parents who had never questioned public education began seeking alternatives, even if just to find a reliably open school. The demand for school choice exploded.

At the same time, public schools are facing mounting challenges: historic declines in student achievement, chronic absenteeism, discipline crises, and plummeting teacher morale. Even as schools return to normal, confidence in public education has suffered hammer blows. In 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed two decades of modest progress on reading and math scores had disappeared <[link removed]>. The most recent release of NAEP scores in January showed further erosion <[link removed]> of student achievement.

Culture war flare-ups have exerted a centrifugal force effect on education politics, aiding and abetting the public school crack-up. Until a decade ago, an influential education reform movement was marked by uneasy bipartisanship. Advocates on the left and right disagreed about the root causes of educational failure but coalesced around a suite of reforms—including charter schools, standardized testing, and school accountability for student outcomes—aimed at shaking public schools out of decades of lethargy and poor performance. That comity began crumbling in the mid-2010s, when education reform’s dominant progressive wing began adopting the arguments and slogans of the social justice left to explain away the movement’s failure to close achievement gaps between black and white students. The culture war had come for the education reform movement...
 
Read the full piece here > <[link removed]>
KEEP READING
The Trump Administration’s Strategic Choice <[link removed]>
<[link removed]>ZACK COOPER
The Politicization of Expertise <[link removed]>
ROGER PIELKE JR.
Is Transformative Artificial Intelligence Just Around the Corner? <[link removed]>
JAMES PETHOKOUKIS
THANKS FOR READING!
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