Arizona parent Kristina Okafor didn’t set out to become a political activist. She was a school nurse, a church choir member, a soccer mom in the conventional sense. Then the pandemic happened, schools closed, and she spent eight months watching her children’s education on a laptop screen in the kitchen. By the time schools reopened, she had a different view of the relationship between parents, public schools, and educational bureaucracies.
“I saw what was being taught. I saw what wasn’t being taught. I realized I had spent years assuming the system was working for my kids without ever actually checking.” She became one of thousands of parents who flooded school board meetings in 2021, and one of the smaller number who kept showing up after the news cameras left.
From Kitchen Tables to State Capitols
The school choice movement did not invent itself in 2021. Its intellectual architecture was built over decades by researchers like Caroline Hoxby and economists who studied the effects of competition on educational outcomes. Its political theory was developed through decades of legislative experiments in states like Wisconsin, where Milwaukee’s voucher program launched in 1990 and spent years in the courts before producing measurable results.
What the pandemic did was transform a wonkish policy debate into a mass movement with a constituency. Parents who had been broadly satisfied with the status quo — or at least not motivated enough to fight it — had a radicalizing experience. For the school choice advocates who had spent decades in the policy wilderness, this was the opening they had prepared for.
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