Higher Education Must Serve a Higher Cause

Dulles, Virginia – Scott Zangas is in his junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, studying cyber security, but like most college students in America, he is doing so from home this semester. Scott’s father used to tell him to “hang on to your dreams.” It’s one of the few memories Scott has of his dad, Robert, a Marine who lost his life in Iraq 16 years ago. And the dream Robert had for his children, before he gave his life for our country, was that they would earn a college education that would help them realize their aspirations.

This week Freedom Alliance began our annual process of renewing college scholarships for nearly 500 students to whom we provide educational assistance. These scholarships will help students like Scott pursue their degree in the Fall semester, either on-line or on campus, depending on how their institutions respond to the coronavirus. But just as important, each scholarship honors the student’s parent who gave life or limb for our country.

Clearly, this has not been a typical spring semester. It was a major disappointment to students when they were told to pack up and go home in February and March. To be fair, it’s hard to fault schools for taking such drastic steps when the fear of community spread clashed with the reality of the dense population of students in classrooms, dorms and dining halls.

But since the initial decision to clear campuses, higher education trustees and administrators are sacrificing student interests and instead opting for self-preservation tactics, defending billion-dollar endowments, and instituting professor protection programs.

At Freedom Alliance, our scholarships are awarded to students like Scott – the sons and daughters of America’s military heroes. Their eligibility for our scholarship is the sacrifice their parent made for our country. Their parents lost limbs in vicious explosions. They lost motor skills as a result of traumatic brain injuries. They lost their lives defending us.

No promise was made to these heroes – they didn’t need one. They put their faith in us, their fellow Americans, that their families would be cared for should something happen to them. And for those whose kids are now in college, a better job can be done on their behalf as institutions of higher education progress on the COVID-19 front.

First, online instruction has its limits and should be viewed only as a temporary fix. In an informal survey Freedom Alliance conducted with our scholarship students, 81 percent said online classes have been implemented at their school “for the remainder of the school year.” But for many, virtual classes are an unwelcome change. “I hate online classes,” one student said. Another confessed web-based courses “are making life miserable,” and a third reported, “online studying is causing stress.” These comments align with a College Reaction/Axios poll conducted in April which found that 77% of college students say distance learning “is worse or much worse than in-person classes.”

Students want a quality education and value for their investment. “I did not sign up for online curriculum for good reason,” a displaced student explained in our Freedom Alliance survey. “The lectures are harder to follow, and it seems like professors are going through the motions. I do not feel like I am receiving anywhere near the quality of education I would normally receive in a classroom setting.”

Second, the frustration of having to take lower quality online courses, is compounded by being charged full tuition for a lesser product. Taking classes from their parents’ living room doesn’t provide the campus experience they paid for like office hours, access to professors or teaching assistants, study groups, libraries and labs.

At least a quarter of Freedom Alliance’s 500 scholarship students have majors which require lab work – subjects like nursing, engineering, biology, and others. The loss of lab time frustrates their ability to learn.

Third, students are being denied refunds for campus housing from which they were forced out. Clearly, at universities across America, Business and Ethics Departments are failing to coordinate with one another. Schools won’t refund room and board fees because administrators treat them the same way Congress treats Social Security – as a Ponzi scheme – spending the fees on unrelated costs. Instead, schools should deposit room and board fees in a reserve or escrow account until the service has been provided.

COVID-19 is forcing change on college campuses. As schools implement these changes, they should give customer service a higher priority. Is that such a hard lesson for academics to learn?

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Bring education into the 21st century with flexibility for families

The COVID-19 crisis has severely affected the lives of virtually everyone, and K-12 families, students, and teachers have not been spared. It has become abundantly clear during this crisis that America’s K-12 system lacks the necessary flexibility and parent choice needed for our students to be successful in today’s world.

Homeschooling has become increasingly popular over the years. Before the pandemic, more than 2.5 million K-12 students were being homeschooled, and that number was growing at around 5% per year. Because of quarantines, millions of parents and students became instant homeschoolers, which was made more difficult because too many public school districts were slow or even reluctant to transition to online learning.

Initially, many school districts cited disability laws as a reason they couldn’t ramp up and conduct online learning. To her great credit, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos very quickly said that districts could not use disability laws as an excuse to avoid educating students and issued clarified federal guidance.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest school districts with 190,000 students, schools were closed on March 13. The district announced online learning would not even begin for another month. On April 14, the day it was to begin, the system crashed, and online learning was postponed.

It isn’t just the public school districts’ inability to transition effectively. According to the Pew Research Center, 15% of households with school-age children do not have high-speed internet at home. That number is 30% for lower-income households. Overall, 17% of teenagers are unable to do some or all of their homework because they don’t have reliable access to a computer or the internet. This is known as the “homework gap.”

The CARES Act that Congress recently passed included a $30 billion Educational Stabilization Fund, with just over $13 billion for K-12 and the rest for higher education. Sadly, only a portion of the funds are intended for K-12 distance learning for students, although governors will have $3 billion in discretionary funds that can be applied in a number of ways to help directly with student learning.

Congress was right to appropriate funds for education during this crisis, but a substantial portion of those funds should have been in the form of direct aid to families, including lower-income families whose children attend private schools. Families could be using these funds for education technology and materials and ideally for summer courses so students will be better prepared to advance to the next grade in the fall.

It’s important to note that private school families should be a bigger concern for policymakers. There are 5.5 million students in private schools today. If all of these students were in public schools, the cost would be at least $75 billion annually. Of these 5.5 million students, conservatively, about 1.7 million are in lower-income families. Many of these families will struggle to pay tuition, putting the survival of too many private schools at serious risk. The closure of hundreds of private schools would be an absolute tragedy for families and students. Moreover, it would be a financial disaster for school districts that would have to spend billions of dollars absorbing additional students into the public system.

States are already hemorrhaging money because of the economic slowdown, and they should be thinking boldly about how they can maximize educational opportunity and quality during and after this crisis. For example, there are nearly 2 million available private school seats around the country, and the vast majority of these schools could successfully educate children for less than the average per-pupil expenditure in public schools. Providing a scholarship or an Education Savings Account for 80% of the per-pupil public school expenditure would save states tens of millions of dollars.

The teachers’ unions solution to the crisis is to ask for the moon and shovel a bunch of new money right into the status quo. Mind you, this is a status quo where nearly two-thirds of fourth and eighth-grade students are not proficient in reading or math and where families have to spend billions to remediate public high school graduates. The teachers’ unions have asked the federal government for an additional $200 billion in relief for education and another $100 billion for infrastructure. The more sensible approach for policymakers is to take the shackles off the K-12 system, pull it into the 21st century, and give families greater educational freedom, flexibility, and choice.

If additional federal funding for education is forthcoming, and if states want to ensure educational opportunity and quality in the face of budget challenges, policymakers must reject the status quo and consider bolder policies. What about creating federal or state Education Savings Accounts or microgrants controlled by families for educational purposes? What about tuition tax deductions for lower-income private school families? What about enacting Education Freedom Scholarships legislation and boosting the charitable deduction for individuals and corporations to fund them? What about taking a page from 2005, when Sen. Ted Kennedy worked with Republicans and the White House to provide vouchers for 150,000 displaced students as a result of Hurricane Katrina?

There are plenty of good ideas out there if policymakers at the federal and state level are willing to empower families in the face of this crisis. Now is the time to think boldly, put partisan divisions aside, and focus solely on what will help K-12 students.

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Advocacy Group Reflects on Why More Parents Are Warming to Homeschooling

As stay-at-home orders have been issued across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, many parents have found themselves in a role they never anticipated—serving as teacher.

Log on to any social media site and you are bound to run into parents sharing their wild tales from the sudden adjustment. And while it's been a shock to some, according to a recent survey by EdChoice, a majority now have a more favorable view of homeschooling, with 28 percent saying they have a "much more favorable" opinion and 24 percent having a "somewhat more favorable" view.

This is welcome news to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the oldest and largest advocate for homeschool freedom in America, which has seen a "tremendous amount of interest" recently, Jim Mason, HSLDA's Vice President of Litigation and Development, told Townhall.

To assist parents during this time of transition, HSLDA has created a resource called MomPossible.org to give parents the "tools, tips, and practical resources to create a positive growth-oriented school-at-home environment," according to its website.

Prior to the pandemic, the number of homeschooled children in the U.S. stood at roughly 1.8 million, according to the National Center for Education Statistics—a number that could grow after school lockdowns end.

"We hope in the long term many people being introduced to the idea of teaching their kids at home will actually discover the joy that brings, and for those interested, we'll be providing more practical help on how to move from being from home in this unexpected time to actually choosing to homeschool in the future," Mason said.

"There are a lot of people who will take a second look at homeschool who might not have otherwise," he added, noting the increased interest HSLDA's educational consultants are seeing.

Contrary to the stereotype that the homeschooling community consists mostly of a fundamentalist religious population, the movement is quite diverse, with parents choosing this education option for a variety of reasons.

According to a 2017 National Center for Education Statistics study, the highest percentage of homeschooled students had parents who listed a concern for the school environment, which includes safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure, as the reason for choosing to homeschool. Other reasons dealt with desires to provide moral and religious instruction, a non-traditional approach to their child's education, dissatisfaction with academic instruction, because a child has special needs, and more.

"Lots and lots of people from all kinds of ideological backgrounds choose to homeschool today," Mason explained, noting the rise in upscale urban families who are making the decision to homeschool, as well as an increasing number of black, Asian, and Hispanic families who are seeing homeschooling as a viable education option for their children.

And still, despite the increased interest and the fact that homeschooling has been legal in all 50 states for more than 30 years, there are always the outspoken detractors. Most recently, criticism has been loudest from Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet and a now-cancelled summit at the university that was supposed to discuss the "controversial practice" of homeschooling.

In her Arizona Law Review article, Bartholet "recommends a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool."

Mason narrowed such antagonism toward homeschooling down to "competing worldviews."

Bartholet's arguments present "the statist view of the parent-child relationship," he explained, which is most challenged by homeschooling.

"Homeschoolers have completely detached themselves from the oversight and control of the bureaucrats, not completely, obviously, but the notion that parents have the audacity to take on the raising, nurturing, and educating of their own children is an affront to the statist worldview," he said.

Indeed, HSLDA has been protecting homeschooling rights in courts and legislatures from such statist views since its inception more than 35 years ago.

HSLDA's team of lawyers are constantly monitoring legislation in all 50 states and from the federal government. Just last month, they argued a case in the Supreme Court of Virginia after a local school district passed a policy that added evidentiary requirements onto an existing statewide homeschooling statute, going so far as to threaten a family with prosecution for not complying.

"We asked them to strike that policy down," he said.

"There are legislative threats and then there are local bureaucratic threats," Mason added. "It's not uncommon that all over the country right now local school districts are attempting to impose requirements on homeschool that are not lawful."

While HSLDA doesn't always go to court over these issues, they do always push back, he said.

"Homeschooling is a challenging, fulfilling opportunity to experience the joy of watching your own children learn," Mason said.

And in a free society such as ours, no one ought to be able to trample on that right.

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