A Washington Post op-ed published recently by Corey DeAngelis — a Heritage Foundation researcher and self-described “school choice evangelist” — makes a point worth acknowledging before we dismantle the rest of his argument.
He’s right that some Democratic lawmakers who sponsored legislation blocking school choice sent their own children to private school. That is hypocritical. We could write a whole op-ed angrily wagging our finger at all the progressive parents who advocate loudly for public education while quietly enrolling their kids somewhere else — especially when these people are LEADERS who have a HUGE hand in protecting or dismantling public education. Intellectual honesty requires we call hypocrisy what it is, regardless of who is engaging in it.
But here is where DeAngelis’s argument collapses: he uses some progressive politicians’ hypocrisy to claim that “school choice” is good education policy and that vouchers benefit everyone else by giving them the same access wealthy families have always had. And that leap, my friends, is not supported by evidence. It is, in fact, directly contradicted by it.
The “Democratizing Choice” Argument Doesn’t Hold Up
The central claim of the school choice movement — the one DeAngelis has built his career on — is that vouchers and ESAs give lower-income families the same options wealthy families have always had. It’s a compelling frame. It’s also wrong.
Here’s what the data actually shows:
In Arizona, which has the most expansive universal ESA program in the country, families in the wealthiest 10% of the state’s population participated at five times the rate of lower-income families. Approximately 71% of voucher users were already enrolled in private school before the program existed. The program did not rescue children from failing public schools. It subsidized choices wealthy families had already made.
In Indiana, when the voucher program expanded to universal eligibility, private schools raised tuition by as much as 25%. The families best positioned to absorb that increase were wealthy ones. The families who hoped vouchers would finally make private school accessible fell further behind.
In Ohio, 85% of voucher recipients in 2023 were from higher-income households. In North Carolina, 87% of voucher recipients were already in private school when the program launched. In Pennsylvania, a 2024 Keystone Research Center report found that 78% of voucher funds went to religious schools serving high proportions of affluent children — schools with no requirement to report student demographics or academic outcomes.
Private school enrollment is increasingly segregated by income. The share of middle-income students attending private schools has declined by almost half over the past fifty years, while the enrollment rate of wealthy children has remained steady. Voucher programs, in their current form, are accelerating that trend — not reversing it. And, while democrats in many states are standing up to this segregation-masked-as-freedom-of-choice argument, the cost is still significant.
The Market Logic Doesn’t Apply to Schools
DeAngelis’s second major argument is an economic one: competition makes everything better. When stores compete, customers win. Schools should work the same way.
This analogy fails for reasons economists themselves have identified, but let’s start with the most obvious one: when stores compete, customers can actually access any store. The school choice market has structural barriers that make it function nothing like a consumer marketplace.
Transportation. Families without cars cannot easily access schools across a district or county. Private schools that receive voucher funds are not required to provide transportation in most states. The families with the fewest options are also the ones with the least geographic mobility.
Selection. Private schools can and do turn students away. Students with significant disabilities, English language learners, and students with behavioral histories are disproportionately pushed out of or denied enrollment in private schools receiving voucher funds. Research has found evidence that private schools push out their lowest-performing voucher students — who then return to public schools. The “competition” doesn’t serve the students who need the most support. It offloads them.
Information. Meaningful market choice requires accurate, comparable information. Private schools receiving voucher funds in most states are not required to administer state assessments, report student demographics, or disclose academic outcomes. The “choice” being offered is, in many cases, a choice made in an information vacuum.
The market model works when participants have equal access, equal information, and equal power. Families navigating poverty, disability, language barriers, or geographic isolation have none of those things. Telling them that vouchers give them the same choices as wealthy families is not empowerment. It’s a sales pitch. A sales pitch for snake oil.
What the Hypocrisy Argument Actually Proves
Here is what DeAngelis gets right, and what Integrated Schools has always said: the private school choices of progressive, wealthy lawmakers — and of progressive, wealthy parents — are worth examining honestly. When people who say they believe in public education use their access and wealth to buy their children out of it, that gap between stated values and actual behavior is meaningful. It shapes public schools. It shapes political will. It shapes who stays and who goes.
But that truth does not lead where DeAngelis wants it to lead.
The fact that wealthy families have always been able to buy their children out of public schools is not an argument for extending that buyout with public funds. It is an argument for examining the following: First, why so many families with resources have decided they need to leave the system, and Second, why so many families feel that “good parenting” requires buying into an elite settings that concentrate resources and exclude families with lower economic means (and frequently different racial identities, not coincidentally). And finally, it’s an argument for protecting against the erosion of public education so we have schools where all children can thrive.
The problem with Democratic lawmakers sending their kids to private school is not their hypocrisy. It is that their departure — and the departure of families like them — drains public schools of the resources, political attention, and social capital that would make them better for all of us. And it precludes the experiences that actually prepare kids to thrive and lead in a vibrant, multiracial democracy — forming real relationships across difference, navigating difficult conversations and uniting communities to pursue transformative change.
Vouchers don’t solve that problem. They scale it.
There Is A Better Question
DeAngelis frames this as a question of individual freedom: shouldn’t every family have the choices wealthy families have?
We frame it differently: Shouldn’t every family benefit from well-resourced, accountable schools that teach our children to live and lead together?
School choice, as currently designed and implemented, does not close the gap between what wealthy families can access and what everyone else can. It widens it — by moving public funds into a private system with no accountability requirements, no transportation safeguards, no obligation to serve the students who need the most support, and a demonstrated pattern of benefiting the families who needed the help least.
The hypocrisy of individual Democratic lawmakers is real. It is not, however, a policy argument. And it should not be allowed to masquerade as one.
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