What Happens If All Kids Must Attend Public School: A Classroom Teacher’s Perspective
Last Tuesday, I was wrapping up parent-teacher conferences at my suburban Ohio 4th grade classroom, the coffee pot had been empty since 1pm, and a stray goldfish cracker was stuck to my dog-eared lesson plan book when Mia’s mom pulled me aside after her slot. She’s been leaning toward pulling Mia out for a private gifted academy next year, and she’d just heard a local city council candidate talk about eliminating school choice entirely, making public school mandatory and the only option for every child. “What would that actually change for my kid? For this school?” she asked. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Right now, our district has lost 12% of its student population to private schools, charters, and homeschooling in the last three years. Most of the kids who leave are from higher-income families, the ones whose parents have the flexibility to pay extra tuition or rearrange work schedules to homeschool. That leaves our school with a student body that’s 68% low-income, down from 42% a decade ago. Funding is tied directly to enrollment, so we’ve had to cut one part-time aide, our librarian is shared with two other buildings, and our gifted intervention specialist only comes to our school once every two weeks. Last semester, I had a student named Leo who was reading two grade levels above 4th grade, and he spent most of his independent work time grading my students’ spelling tests because I didn’t have any extra prepared curriculum for him. He told me it was “better than doing the same reading I did in 2nd grade.” That’s what we’re working with right now.
If public school was the only option, and every kid got the same base funding (adjusted only for special needs, per the hypothetical), the first change you’d see isn’t some big curriculum overhaul. It’s small, boring, important stuff that makes every day run better. Two years ago, our school needed new mulch for the playground after the old rotted and gave three kids splinters. The district didn’t have money in the budget for it, so the PTA had to raise the $8,000 themselves. Half our families can’t afford to give more than $10 a year, so we did three bake sales, a silent auction with donated oil changes and kid artwork, and barely scraped it together. If all the families that currently send their kids to the private academy 10 minutes down the road were at our school, that $8,000 would be raised in a week from parent donations, and we’d have enough left over for new soccer goals and a fresh set of graphic novels for the library.
The bigger shift is who shows up to care about public education. Last year, we had a school levy on the ballot that would have raised teacher pay by 5% and added three full-time school counselors for our district of 4,000 kids. It failed by 12 percentage points. Most of the no votes came from homeowners who don’t have kids in our district—many of them have kids in private school, or already graduated, so they didn’t see the point of a small property tax increase. If every kid has to go to public school, every parent of a school-aged kid has a stake in that levy passing. That doesn’t just mean more money for teachers and counselors. It means parents show up to school board meetings to push for better lunch options, safer bus routes, and updated science labs, not just when it affects their own small group of kids.
Mia’s mom’s big worry was that if all kids learned the same things and had the same expectations, her gifted daughter would get bored and held back. I get that worry, but right now, Mia would be bored anyway if she stayed—we just don’t have the staff to challenge her. The hypothetical says we’d spend the same per kid, which means we’d have enough staff to go around because we’d have all the kids, and all the funding that comes with them. Right now, I spend 8 days a year doing benchmark testing to sort kids into different reading and math groups. If we all learned the same grade-level content, we could cut that testing time and use it for 15-minute small group check-ins every day. Kids who need extra help with fractions get extra practice with me right there, while kids who get it can work on an extension project—like designing their own mini golf course to practice geometry, instead of grading spelling tests. That’s the kind of adjustment that works for everyone, regardless of skill level, that we just don’t have time or staff for right now.
It’s not all positive, of course. There are families who want a specific religious or cultural education that public schools can’t provide, and making public school mandatory would erase that choice. That’s a real loss for those families. Some kids do need a radically different pace than what a one-size curriculum would provide, even with extra support. I have a neurodivergent 5th grader of my own who struggles with whole-group instruction, and I know there are days he’d thrive in a smaller setting that just wouldn’t be possible for every kid in a large public district.
Last night, I picked my son up from aftercare and we stopped for vanilla ice cream on the way home. He was complaining that his friend who goes to the local private school has a 3D printer in his classroom, while our school has one that’s broken and no one has time to fix it. If all kids were in the same public system, that 3D printer would be fixed, and my son would get to use it. Would that fix every problem in public education? No. There would still be bad days, crowded hallways, kids who struggle to keep up and kids who wish they could move faster. The coffee pot would still run dry mid-conference day. But the biggest change would be that public education wouldn’t be a system for other people’s kids anymore. It would be everyone’s problem, and everyone’s priority—and that’s a bigger shift than any curriculum change could ever make.
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