The Washington Post perennially contains misleading articles that paint a narrative supporting its leftist political and cultural views. For example, on topics like abortion, it spins baby murder as “reproductive care.”
Another Washington Post vendetta is its crusade against school choice.
School choice is needlessly controversial. You would think that allowing parents to have a choice in how to spend their own tax dollars for their child’s education would be viewed universally as a good thing. Yet school choice is criticized by the Left as an enemy of American society, as a menace to the viability of public schools, and as promoting racial segregation — not to mention defanging the teachers unions.
The most common theme that The Washington Post writers embrace is that school choice is racist. Why? Ostensibly, because the movement was rooted in segregation and circumventing the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
Citing a study, one reporter claims, “The rising segregation numbers ‘appear to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions,’ the paper concludes. ‘They are not the inevitable result of demographic changes — and can be changed by alternative policy choices.’”
The article also asserts that school demographics need to more equally match the wider region’s demographics. Ergo, if a school is majority white and only 10% black, then it’s not integrated enough.
Of course, school choice is available to everyone regardless of skin color, which means black families are just as able and willing to move their kids to better schools as white families. The term “segregation” has very negative connotations, and the author used that to her advantage.
Another Washington Post hit piece complained that school choice was the instigator for an Arizona district’s public schools being shut down. National Review’s Brittany Bernstein broke down the misleading information in that article:
Despite what the Post would have readers believe, that declining enrollment is not a result of students with [Empowerment Scholarship Accounts] leaving the district for private schools. More than 8,500 students have left the district — but only 102 of those students left for an ESA, according to Arizona Department of Education data. The rest have enrolled in public schools not operated by Roosevelt. It’s not hard to figure out why parents are pulling their kids out of Roosevelt schools en masse: Just 10 percent of students in the district scored proficient in math and just 17 percent scored proficient in reading on the 2024 state tests.
The school was failing on its own terms. Students were not learning. In fact, the Arizona example is why school choice is such an important tool that should be made available to every parent. Without it, parents of every demographic would have been forced to keep their children in a failing public school and watch their children’s chances of flourishing academically go out the window.
In contrast, a year ago, Washington Post opinion columnist George Will contradicted the paper’s narrative. He praised the state for being the model for how school choice should be done. Will wrote:
For more than 30 years, charter schools — non-unionized public schools, exempt from bureaucratic calcification and conformity that stifles pedagogical experimentation — have brought cultural and curricular diversity to 45 states and D.C. Doug Ducey, a Republican who served as governor from 2015 to 2023, made Arizona the nation’s school-choice leader, which is one reason he won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote when winning reelection in 2018 against a Hispanic opponent. (Hispanics are the fastest-growing charter school cohort. The affluent have school choice in their checkbooks.) Ducey says that if Arizona’s 525 charter schools were the state’s K-12 system, his state would lead the nation in math, reading and science.
Leftists are all about “choice” — unless you choose something they don’t like or take money and influence away from their supporters, such as teachers unions.
Advocating against allowing parents to choose the school they prefer is outrageous. Will The Washington Post figure out the error of its stance? Not until consumers stop taking it seriously and stop reading the rag altogether.
