The Pandemic That Changed Everything

Well, maybe not everything. But a lot. A whole lot.

The COVID lockdown was the most consequential event to impact education in my lifetime. It rapidly and profoundly changed the perceptions of public education in the eyes of millions of Texas parents. I know this to be true because of the work of Families Empowered.

Families Empowered (FE) is a non-profit that helps families navigate the education system. It was founded in 2009 by Colleen Dippel and me in response to the growth of the charter school sector, which gave low-income parents more choices but also made the education system difficult for those parents to navigate. Colleen is a remarkable force of nature and runs FE, and I’ve served as her board chair and thought-partner since its founding.

FE talks directly to thousands of parents through our bi-lingual call center and is in regular contact with more than 120,000 Texas families through our website, email, and text messaging programs. More than 80% of the families we serve are from low-income communities, and the majority do not speak English well (or at all). Our mission is to connect families with schools and schools with families, like a real estate broker would connect home buyers and sellers in a free and open marketplace.

Through the work of FE, Colleen has her finger on the pulse of poor and working-class families looking for education options for their kids. And as businesses started re-opening after the national COVID lockdown, that pulse was racing with anxiety.

Ending business lockdowns while continuing school lockdowns left many parents trapped: they were unable to go back to work because there was no school to which to send their kids. Poor and working-class parents, in particular, faced a terrible choice: go back to work and leave their kids unattended at home (often in dangerous neighborhoods where lots of adults were still not working), or stay at home and lose their job and their ability to support their family.

These parents began reaching out to FE for help in finding a school – any school – that was re-opening. Callers would have panic in their voice, and the number of calls from parents in this kind of situation continued to grow as more businesses re-opened while schools remained closed.

FE staff would also hear frustration from some parents who perceived that school staff were essentially getting a paid vacation while they were stuck at home with their kids, unable to work to support themselves. Some saw teachers lounging around their apartment complex, or taking trips and posting photos on Instagram, or otherwise enjoy their paid time off and vesting their pensions while they would lose their jobs.

Parents would also hear lots of excuses from administrators, school board trustees, teacher associations (Texas has “professional associations” not unions), saying that it was unsafe to re-open schools. These protestations, together with messages from employers that it was safe to return to work, made it clear to many families that the system was focused on the adults (a few of whom may have been at risk) not the children (who were at minimal risk).

Moreover, when classes started happening online, parents (many of whom were still trapped at home) began seeing in greater detail what their kids were actually learning. At that time, most parents still trusted their public schools and believed that the schools were helping their kids acquire the essential knowledge and skills they would need to flourish in modern America.

But with time to observe what was really being taught, many parents were alarmed at what they saw. Their kids were being taught ideas that were highly controversial and often totally odds with their own values and beliefs. And it wasn’t a situation where a large majority of parents objected to one subject or class or text. Instead, different parents had different concerns with different schools in different circumstances.

For some, race became a focus with the George Floyd protests, which also clearly demonstrated that the public health need for lockdowns was selective, based upon what was acceptable to the powers-that-be. For others, the concern was sexuality, gender, and the aggressive intervention between children and parents with respect to sexual ethics. Still others objected to the passive-progressive nature of teachers and administrators, with their general hostility to free markets and traditional American values.

For close observers of the public education system, none of these observations was surprising; many came from the natural continuation of trends that motivated Dr. Jim Leininger to fight for vouchers. But the scale of the disconnect between schools and families was news to many parents, who thought that there might be problems in some places but could not believe that this dysfunction was impacting their kids at their schools.

So COVID and its repercussions laid bare the reality of what was happening in many schools. In response, parents began to lose their trust in public education, a loss we observed directly and at scale at Families Empowered.

And this parental response was not limited to Texas. At FE, we observed similar reactions in Arizona (where we were brought in by Gov. Doug Ducey to help with a parental empowerment program he created in response to the pandemic), and in the growing homeschool and microschool movements around the US, where parents were demanding and taking more control over their kids’ education.

This national unrest led new and expanded choice programs in a dozen states over the past 36 months. This movement drew support from several national organizations focused on school choice, the most prominent being American Federation for Children led by former Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. School choice also became a top priority for other national conservative organizations like Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth, and Heritage Foundation, as well as state-based think tanks like TPPF.

This emerging alliance worked together in states like Arizona, Florida, Utah, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Iowa to pass new or expanded choice in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), a new and more flexible version of the Milton Friedman voucher.

But in Texas remained the big prize. The growing parent dissatisfaction with public education that started in 2020 and picked up momentum in 2021 created renewed hope among a small, committed band of Texas voucher supporters. These advocates never stopped believing in the power of full parental choice and saw vouchers as a way forward for many parents who had lost trust in traditional public education.

We will meet one true believer in the next post in this series.