Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

A new school year is underway, but what's making headlines is where a number of students are not going.

Extending what has become a multi-year trend now, more families are opting out of public education, choosing instead

alternatives like private schools and homeschooling. Most news coverage attributes this exodus

to things like low birth rates, lingering effects of the COVID pandemic, funding issues, and families

leaving cities. However, a recent episode of the New York Times podcast, The Daily, offered a more clarifying take.

According to education reporter Dana Goldstein, there's been a notable change in how parents think about educating their children.

Rather than just sending their kids to the assigned public school and their zip code,

parents are choosing options that better meet the individual needs of their children and ensure a positive

culture for learning and growth. And to find such settings, they're turning to private and religious

schools, homeschools, and micro schools, a new kind of one-room school that's been popping up

ever since the pandemic. And now, since 18 states have advanced school choice policies, more parents are able to consider other options.

Now, Goldstein sized up the shift away from government education this way.

Quote, if you see education as an issue of parental empowerment and parental rights, you're going to love the moment we're in with the expansion of vouchers and private school choice. However,

it's worth pointing out that this is in deep contradiction to some of the fundamental founding

principles of public education in the United States. End quote. The idea of public education,

she went on to say, is to bring children together from across demographic differences to forge

common skills and values for civic life.

And of course, she's right in that. But what she fails to mention is that parents have just had enough of being removed from the process

and treated as if their children somehow belong to the state, not them.

Simply put, public schooling no longer recognizes the fundamental role that parents have

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