Tomis Parker, is co-founder of Agile Learning Centers, Operations Director at ALC Mosaic, and founder of Prism (prism.guide).

July 10th, 2025

In the 1960s, we saw the proliferation of Free Schools and Freedom Schools across the United States. Both existed (necessarily) outside of, and as a response to, the authoritarian, standardized, and oppressive nature of public schooling. While distinct in the communities they served and importantly nuanced in their motivations, both movements rejected the compliance and conformity that public schooling demanded and embraced self-organization, joy, free expression, and self-determination as core values.

In the 1970s, the concept of Unschooling was popularized by Ivan Illich and John Holt – furthering these common critiques of the institution of public schooling as a force for compliance and a killer of children’ s natural curiosity.

Virtually every aspect of these movements are reflected in today’s latest educational trends – now getting fancy terms and being talked about in teachers colleges as if they are brand new ideas. The anti-war hippies of the Free School movement already knew the value of self-directed project-based learning, student agency, social emotional learning, and design thinking. The courageous and committed leaders of Freedom Schools in the South understood the need for restorative justice, culturally responsive curriculum, anti-racist pedagogy, grit, and a growth mindset. The tens of thousands of parents, mostly mothers, of the Unschooling movement already knew that children were born curious and capable of learning everything they needed from out-of-school-time (my new favorite, Harvard-approved, EduTerm).

None of these nameless pioneers needed a graduate degree to know what was wrong with public schooling or to follow their intuition to build healthier alternatives.

So what happened?

If you look at these movements and wonder why they didn’t continue to expand and eventually become commonplace in our society, the most significant factor is obvious – funding. Still, without equitable funding, educators and parents who refused to raise and educate children in toxic environments have figured out ways to keep these self-organized, grassroots, and dare I say – innovative – alternatives alive for decades.

Fast forward to 2025. There are 30 states with some sort of school choice program and 14 of them offering universal (or near-universal) private school choice – programs that provide funding to families and educators to create and sustain education options outside the anachronistic and ineffectual goals of public schooling.

Yet, all of these programs have been implemented by Republican legislators and universally criticized by Democrats. So it begs the question: Why do Liberals hate school choice?

Inequitable Access

The first critique you hear from Liberals about school choice programs is that the vouchers or ESAs don’t cover the full cost of private school tuition, making these options inaccessible to many.

OK. That is fair. But does that invalidate the entire concept behind school choice programs? There are three ways I know of addressing this and folks with liberal social values could be advocating for all of them:

1. Seek to increase the size of the scholarships/ESAs for lower income families (many school choice programs are already structured this way, but could go further).

2. Advocate for local zoning and building code laws that make it easier for micro-schools to operate (micro-schools can operate at a much lower per/student cost than larger schools).

3. Encourage new and existing private schools to implement sliding scale tuition policies so the scholarships or ESAs are enough to access alternatives.

In 2013, I co-founded the Agile Learning Centers educational model and network with dozens of other passionate educators, parents, and social entrepreneurs. Since 2014, I’ve led business operations and admissions at ALC Mosaic in Charlotte, NC. Just like the pioneers from the 60’s and 70’s, ALCs believe that children and their schools should have the right to self-determination – embodied in their educational experiences. And, like those before us, we have embraced equity, inclusion, and access as core values.

For the first ten years at ALC Mosaic, we set our lowest tuition tier at $1,200/year, or $120/month for ten months. We never asked a family to leave for delinquent tuition payments. We regularly fundraise to close financial gaps when a family loses income and can’t pay tuition. We ask families with more resources to pay significantly more. We also believe that education should be accessible to all.

I can imagine a similar story arc for the pathfinders who came before us. When we started, we were young – full of passion and idealism, willing and able to live on very little, and uninterested in our financial future. Then the years begin to stack up – you pour your heart and soul into complex work that is often emotionally exhausting. You have a family of your own, and you’re constantly feeling the tension between being accessible to others and being responsible to yourself and those you employ.

In 2023, after nine years, we were burning out – too few people doing too much work for too little. At the same time, there was new legislation introduced in North Carolina’s General Assembly that would expand funding and accessibility of the state’s previously tame Opportunity Scholarship program. All of a sudden, the future of our 90-student, rainbow flag waving, racially and economically diverse school had a sustainable future without needing to sacrifice our commitment to accessibility. We changed our tuition scale for the first time in ten years – lowering our lowest tier tuition so that families could enroll for $800/year ($80/month for ten months) in out-of-pocket tuition, which was made possible by those families bringing in $7600 of publicly funded scholarship.

We now have half of our students that attend for less than their parent’s monthly cell phone bill. These families bring a $7600, publicly funded scholarship, that covers more than 90 percent of the already-discounted tuition that we set for their income level. Families who have a higher income get a smaller scholarship and pay a significantly higher amount out-of-pocket; understanding that we treat access to our school as a public good determined by fit, not finances.

Discrimination in Admissions

“Public schools have to serve all kids, while private schools can pick and choose who they enroll!”

After working in private schools that support Self-Directed Education for over 15 years, this is one of my favorites. Let’s be honest: public schools are required to accept and enroll all students – this does not mean they are actually serving all (or even most?) students. I mean, how could they? Everyone knows that each child is unique – every kid has their own interests, gifts, abilities, desires, and challenges to overcome. The larger the institution and the more monolithic its goals and intended outcomes are – the more ineffective it will be at understanding and responding to each student’s unique context.

The vast majority of families that find our ALC and come for an admissions tour have already tried multiple public schools that were required to enroll their child, but failed to serve them effectively. For many of them, we end up being a place where they can thrive. That said, there is not a single school that is a good fit for every child and we should not pretend this could or should be the case. Every so often, we have to come to terms with a family when we aren’t able to serve their child. Nine times out of ten, they find another independent school in the area that ends up being a better fit – many of them intentionally designed to serve kids with their specific profile of challenges and abilities.

Instead of pretending like public schools are the great and noble centers of equity in our society because they are required to enroll anyone that shows up, Liberals should acknowledge, highlight, and support the growing contingent of educators who love kids and have left public schools to create micro-schools where they can actually serve them.

Lack of Transparency and Accountability

OK, this is the best one.

Liberals argue – and hang in there because the psychological projection is strong – that compared to public schools, private schools lack transparency and accountability.

I can’t count how many admissions tours I’ve given over the last decade where the mother of a five or six year old recounts for me their traumatic experience of taking their child to the local public school for the first time. They grew this human, fed them, nurtured them, developed the most sacred bond as they witnessed their unique personality emerge and now it is time to drop them off at school and leave. I know this isn’t the case at all public schools, but many of them don’t let parents into the classroom, or even past the office in the front of the building. I’ve heard this story too many times.

Some public schools have legitimate PTAs that are involved and engaged and that’s certainly a step in the right direction. For others, the PTA is a bit of a show or formality. For all of them, the general ethos is that certified teachers are the ones capable of facilitating learning and you must be within the walls of the school to learn. Does anyone actually believe that anymore?

When critics of school choice programs talk about “accountability”, they are essentially talking about the fact that the curriculum taught in public schools is known to all (and also the same for all children) and that standardized test scores are used to measure the effectiveness of the school. To them, the fact that private schools can (in most states) teach whatever curriculum they want and in some cases opt out of standardized testing requirements, means they lack accountability. Yet, the same people, when pressed, would tell you that standardized curriculum and tests are the very thing that suffocates the life and joy out of learning and typically measures your socioeconomic status more than anything else (again with the psychological projections!).

Who are public schools accountable to? Getting all the funding and being the only accessible option is essentially a monopoly and the full embodiment of “unaccountable.”

Public Funds for Religious Schools

For me, this one is an extension of the transparency and accountability argument. While “separation of church and state” is an essential ingredient for any aspiring democracy and needs to be protected, it’s become a go-to argument for Liberals fending off policy that the other side of the aisle is promoting.

This concept comes from an interpretation of the First Amendment and is simply about the government not being able to establish or promote one religion above any other. It’s true that religious schools do become more accessible as a result of school choice programs and undeniably become recipients of these funds. However, the funds do not discriminate – they can be used by a family that wants to attend a Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu school. They can be used to attend a school that teaches mindfulness, serves gluten-free snacks, and hosts Reiki workshops, too.

A religion is itself an ideology, value system, and way of viewing the world. Critics of school choice are essentially saying that they do not trust parents to know what educational setting is best for their kids or to avoid indoctrinating them in ways that we should all be opposed to; instead, there should be one approach for everyone and the only way forward is to tinker with that one approach.

What Gives?

Why do Liberals continue to critique school choice programs that, while not perfect, are providing new opportunities for responsive and effective education options?

Liberals are clinging to public schools as a symbol of equity, despite having never delivered on it. Meanwhile, the real work of building inclusive, liberatory, and collaborative learning spaces has been happening outside the system – largely unsupported, underfunded, and misunderstood.

It’s time we stop treating the institution of public schooling as inherently “just” and start evaluating education models based on what they actually do for children, families, and communities. If we really care about equity, autonomy, and liberation – school choice isn’t the enemy. It’s a means of creating a future much closer to the one we’ve been imagining for decades.

We don’t have to abandon our values to embrace school choice. In fact, we can fulfill them more deeply if we do. If we believe all families deserve access to learning environments that affirm their humanity and potential, then we should be fighting for a world where more – not fewer – options exist.

Let’s stop defending a system simply because it’s the one we inherited. If there are aspects of school choice programs that are lacking (like transportation or universal school lunches) then let’s imagine something better and be willing to propose and support it.

The same liberal values that fueled the Free School, Freedom School, and Unschooling movements are alive and well today; they’re just not found in most public schools. They’re showing up again in micro-schools, homeschool co-ops, (post) pandemic pods, and hybrid models that often exist in legal gray zones or survive thanks to new school choice policies.

If Democrats and Liberals could look past who’s passing the legislation and start paying attention to what’s possible because of it, they might see the seeds of a more just, joyful, and human education system taking root.

The real question isn’t why Liberals hate school choice. It’s: When will they realize it’s one of the most legitimate tools we have to make good on our values?

Tomis Parker, is co-founder of Agile Learning Centers, Operations Director at ALC Mosaic, and founder of Prism (prism.guide).