Educational Choice as a Life or Death Matter

The greatest moral urgency in K12 education today is the public health catastrophe of adolescence. While here I will focus on the shocking negative outcomes of our current system, the real goal is to shift to an educational system that will reliably produce confident, capable, resilient young people who can succeed in the 21st century economy.

The solution to both the need to address the public health catastrophe as well as to accelerate social mobility and purpose-driven lives is to allow parents and students to seek more personalized and humane educational environments in which teens flourish. Arizona’s recent universal Educational Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) provide parents with the greatest range of such choices.

Most educational policy debates are ultimately premised on the notion that academic performance is the goal of education. Thus advocates of choice often argue that choice results in better academic outcomes, opponents that it results in worse outcomes.

What they are not yet debating is whether or not the entire impersonal, bureaucratic system is a net harm. In short, they are not yet debating whether or not compulsory public schooling has become a public health catastrophe.

To begin to understand why this may be the case, consider the following data (N=7,705):

Compared with those…