With the ongoing exodus from government schools continuing to gather momentum, a new forecast by education researchers predicts that almost one third of school-age children will be homeschooled by the year 2030. Just half of the student population will remain in government education by then, the analysts found.
The organization behind the predictions, a research institute known as The Learning Counsel, considered a wide array of factors in developing its forecasts of looming “significant shifts in the landscape and structures of education by 2030.” Major elements include new “choice” programs and growing resistance to union demands by governors.
According to The Learning Counsel’s predictions, only 50.26 percent of American students will remain enrolled in public schools (including government charters and “virtual” schools) six years from now. That would represent a decline of 16 million students between today and 2030, the organization said in a report about “The Future of K12 Education.”
“This loss is despite massive new enrollments of new immigrants, and will be cataclysmic for traditional schools, politics, and the vendors that rely on sales to this sector,” the report said. “Some of this loss is due to lower birth rates. By far the majority of the loss will be due to inflexibility in both schedule and inability to be remote.”
The largest shift is predicted to take place in 2025 and 2026, with millions of students being removed from government schools. But incredibly, The Learning Counsel report predicted that the exodus from government schools would likely accelerate further after 2030 as more and more families seek out alternatives, encouraged by policymakers.
Lt. Col. E. Ray Moore (Ret.), who launched the Exodus Mandate over 20 years ago to save children from government “education,” was pleased to hear of the forecasts. While warning about the dangers of tax-funded “school choice” and the threat it poses to the independence of private schools and home education, he was optimistic about the future.
“Should K-12 private, Christian education and homeschooling continue to grow steadily over the next 3-5 years at the expense of public education, it could put the state-sponsored public education system in danger of being phased out,” Moore, who also serves as chairman of PublicSchoolExit.com, told The Newman Report.
“We could reach the tipping point where there is a sudden rush into the new free-market and Christian education paradigm,” continued Moore, who has been working for decades to bring about just such a tipping point. “With so many new organizations and churches now promoting K-12 Christian education, this is not an impossible dream.”
The Learning Counsel predicted the government school system would respond with several rounds of “consolidations” before attempting a broader restructuring to be more “consumer” focused. But that will fail as families inevitably pursue various homeschool and private school options. Online private education providers will do well, too.
Ultimately, the researchers said, the most significant drivers of the exodus will be “choice” legislation, a preference for remote and flexible learning, political and cultural distrust of government, rising violence and bullying, and impacts of immigration. However, they also warned the lines between “public” and “private” education are likely to become blurrier.
That has many advocates and experts concerned. The Honorable Diane Douglas, who served as state superintendent of public instruction for Arizona until 2019 but has since been urging parents to remove their children from government education, celebrated the predictions as “incredible.” However, she had a strong warning, too.
“I caution parents to beware of ‘homeschooling’ with government vouchers,” she told The Newman Report. “Arizona parents fought long and hard for the right to homeschool as they saw fit only to see many of today’s homeschooling families surrender true education freedom at the wave of government funded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) a.k.a. vouchers.”
Pointing to Arizona as a warning, Douglas said that when the state attorney general recently attacked the state’s ESA law and parents’ spending decisions, the current superintendent “conceded the fight.” “If it can happen here in Arizona, the first state to ‘fund the students instead of the system’ with universal vouchers, it can happen in your state as well,” added Douglas.
Douglas, who now works with Public School Exit after holding virtually every leadership position possible in public education within Arizona, sounded the alarm. “My biggest fear is that these voucher programs will be used to entice homeschoolers to surrender their educational freedom back into the hands of the government,” she continued.
Numerous major players in the emerging private education system — from online providers such as FreedomProject Academy to homeschool giant Classical Conversations — avoid taxpayer money for those same reasons. However, despite a recent scandal involving the lead spokesman for “school choice,” the movement marches on in GOP states.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has openly called for using taxpayer funds to impose a wide array of policies and controls on what it calls “non-state education providers.” As The Newman Report documented, the goal is to eventually bring all education under control.
The Learning Counsel is predicting the shift out of government schools will be into a “far more privatized-but-regulated industry much like what has already happened with most of the energy industry and hospitals that were once public works.” Chillingly, the report found education subsidized by tax-funded vouchers may create something similar to Medicaid.
The researchers also considered the fact that there would be resistance to these trends, including from powerful players. However, in the end, they predict the exodus will win out. “Policies and lobbying to avert the outcomes were considered in the predictions as highly likely to fail with the principal driver simple economics,” they said.
Part of it will simply be government seeking to pinch pennies. “State and local governments cause massive savings for themselves in the act of privatizing K12 education, saving upwards of 70% or more on all costs while retaining the same income from taxation,” the researchers said.
“That is billions of dollars for most States annually that is becoming increasingly difficult to argue against as traditional public schools continue to fail in their mission of educating the American public as seen on abysmal literacy and math scores from so much of the population,” the report found. “Negative sentiment has reached a fevered pitch.”
The predictions by The Learning Counsel are simultaneously beyond encouraging and yet extremely troubling. While the mass exodus from government schools is essential and urgent for civilization to survive, the blurring of the boundaries between government “education” and private schools or homeschooling is a grave danger to everyone.
At the end of the day, powerful forces including Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos, among others, are working to bring all education under the control of government using “choice” as the trap. For the sake of faith, family, and freedom, it is critical that the independence of home education and private schools be preserved — no matter the cost.
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