School choice is booming and families are winning as the education cartel crumbles

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Several recent headlines suggest that after decades of dysfunction and cratering student achievement, America may be getting education right again.
First came word that the U.S. Department of Education was transferring its $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department. Then came the announcement of the department’s downsize from its current location, which is now 70% vacant, to smaller space nearby. Not only will this move save taxpayers approximately $4.8 million annually, it will help make it harder for a future administration to revert back to the old, oversized bureaucracy.
These two actions are the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken to make good on the president’s promise to shut down the Department of Education before he leaves office.
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The cartel of special interests who run America’s public education system shrieked in outrage. The American people, not so much.
Student loan borrowers don’t care which agency manages their loans, as long as borrowers can have their questions answered and the agency keeps surprises to a minimum. Nor has President Trump’s downsizing of the Education Department over the last year registered so much as a blip on the public’s radar.
Why would it? The Department employs no teachers, runs no schools and sets no national curriculum (thank goodness). It was created by Jimmy Carter as a partisan sop to the teachers’ unions. In the five decades since, the multi-trillion-dollar education system the Department ostensibly oversees has become a national embarrassment.
America’s public schools were already a cluster of abysmal test scores, grade inflation and woke curricula before Cartel elites used COVID-19 as an excuse to take an 18-month vacation.
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So it should come as no surprise that as the president and Education Secretary Linda McMahon wind down the Department, no one outside the Cartel cares. Hardly anyone outside the Beltway has even noticed, so irrelevant is the agency to the success of America’s students and schools.
Contrast the nation’s yawning indifference to the shuttering of the federal Department with parents’ galloping enthusiasm for new school-choice programs being stood up across the country. Just in the last four years, 18 states have passed universal parental choice laws — empowering families to use taxpayer money to send their kids to private, religious, or other alternative schools.
Just recently, Texas’s new universal school-choice program — set to launch in the fall — announced that it had already received more applications than it has slots to fill. The state allocated $1 billion for its initial tranche of Education Freedom Account scholarships, enough for some 90,000 students. More than 240,000 applied in just a few weeks.
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Other states are seeing the same overwhelming demand.
Arizona’s universal choice program has grown more than 700 percent since 2022, to more than 100,000 participating students. Between 2024 and 2025, West Virginia’s program more than doubled, and Arkansas’s almost tripled. Florida’s massive program serves more than 440,000 of the more than 1.3 million American students now using school choice programs.
Thanks to the recent wave of universal reforms, nationwide private school attendance jumped 25 percent just in the last school year. What we are witnessing is not just a trend, but a revolution.
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These two stories — the unlamented erasure of the federal education bureaucracy and the national stampede toward school choice — are really one story. The American people have seen enough. The progressive interest groups who captured and ruined our education system have lost parents’ trust. Families are finally turning the page and voting with their feet away from Cartel-captured classrooms.
Three-quarters of Americans now support universal school choice. More than half (34) states have created at least some private scholarship options. Last year, Trump signed the first nationwide school choice tax credit into law. More than 20 states have signed up to participate.
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Meanwhile, some of the most improved traditional public schools in the United States today are in Mississippi, thanks to a miraculous turnaround due almost entirely to kiboshing elite-preferred pedagogical fads. Other states like Louisiana and Alabama are following suit, discarding woke gibberish for more classical approaches like phonics and times tables. And lo and behold, kids are learning again.
And this momentum is only going to accelerate over time. Seven of the states that have adopted universal school choice are among the 10 fastest growing states, including each of the top five. Real choice and real teaching are the future of American education.
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The era of the teachers’ unions is over. Parents are reclaiming their rights as their children’s primary educators. And conservative policymakers at every level of government are finally liberating families from corruption and incompetence.
Republics are only as strong as their citizens are educated. And for the first time in two generations, America’s school system is moving in the right direction.
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Kevin Roberts is the president of Heritage Action for America.