Fairfield City Schools, a school district in the Greater Cincinnati area, must make $11 million in cuts for the 2027-28 academic year.
The cuts are old news. Fairfield cut 84.5 positions for the 2022-23 academic year. These additional, upcoming cuts are the result of a failed tax levy this past Election Day.
The debate over school funding can be heard throughout the Buckeye State. It has many components.
I’ve written before about the unintended consequences EdChoice has brought to Catholic schools. (EdChoice, ironically, has mostly served to make Catholic schools too expensive for working-class parents.) EdChoice also deprives the public schools of funding.
I’ve written about the growth of homeschooling—about which I have my doubts.
Finally, public schools also face a crisis of falling birthrates.
The larger crisis, however, is that a majority of parents and taxpayers no longer believe in the soundness of public education, or in the competence of the people managing and teaching in public schools.
This is not some “old Boomer” talking. (By the way, I’m not a Boomer. I’m actually a Gen Xer—though I’m occasionally mistaken for a Boomer.) It isn’t Boomers or Gen Xers who are withdrawing their kids from public schools and sending them to private schools or educating them at home. Do the math. Boomers haven’t had school-aged children since the 1990s. Most of my Gen X friends are now grandparents.
No—the abandonment of public schools is being driven by the choices of Millennial and older Gen Z parents.
These are the supposedly progressive, secular generations. And yet, they’re giving public schools a thumbs down.
This means an existential crisis for public education, at least the type of public education that so many of us knew as children. And though I am frequently conservative and grumpy, I make this assessment without any glee or schadenfreude.
On the contrary, I recognize public schools as a necessary leveling factor in our society. I was fortunate enough to attend parochial schools (decades before the voucher system or EdChoice, by the way). But my father and all four of my grandparents were educated in quality public schools. None of them would have risen far in the world without that opportunity.
How to fix public education from the inside out? That’s a much bigger question and a very long discussion. But it is a discussion that we need to have.
-ET