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It analyzes how these “bets” produced current market-oriented models emphasizing parental control, alongside friction, opportunities, and threats affecting multiple education sectors.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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Conference Papers Series  \nMarkets and Monopolies: The Faces of School Choice in 2025  \nDerrell Bradford 1  \nPEPG 25-01  \nThis paper was presented at the School Choice Tradeoffs and Evidence-Based Policy Making conference held at the Harvad Kennedy School, May 8-9, 2025  \nHarvard Kennedy School  \n79 JFK Street, Taubman 220  \nCambridge, MA 02138  \nTel: 617-495-7976 Fax: 617-496-4428  \n[www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/](www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/)  \n1 Bradford: 50CAN  \nSchool Choice Tradeoffs and Evidence-Based Policy Making The Program on Education Policy and Governance The Kennedy School  \nMay 8-9, 2025  \nMarkets and Monopolies: The Faces of School Choice in 2025 By Derrell Bradford  \nPresident, 50CAN  \nThe Wall Street Journal declared 2011 “The Year of School Choice” citing that “no fewer than 13 states” had enacted school choice programs that year. It was a grand year for educational opportunity, but it was also the last bright light before an era of education policy malaise and disinterest. Understanding what occurred between then and 2022, the new “Year of School Choice,” is as important as examining the set of policy changes taking place across the country right now in all sectors and, for the most part, in all places. So what happened?  \nOne might call 2012 “the end of the beginning” as it was a year of education policy firsts and unrest. Mayor Rahm Emanuel lost his battle over contract reform with the striking Chicago Teachers Union. On the political left, teacher unions and suburban constituencies came together to oppose the standardized testing regimes of the No Child Left Behind era, along with the Obama administration’s push for teacher evaluation tied to state tests. On the political right, growing resistance to Common Core at the state level led to the ouster of such reform stalwarts as Tony Bennet in Indiana. And opposition to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s sweeping program of waivers, which many felt overstepped his authority, also frothed. These two separate thrusts met in the middle and damaged the narrow, bipartisan political consensus that held the reform work of the prior years together.  \nIf the consensus that supported the Clinton/Bush/Obama policy thread of the prior 20 years was fragile, the election of President Trump in 2016 smashed it, not for policy reasons but for political ones, as many reform leaders and organizations retreated to their partisan corners. It is also here, however, that the seeds of the current landscape were planted. Democrats, at war with Trump, reunited with the teachers unions–with which they had split on education policy–in an effort to regain control. At the state level, under the banner of Red for Ed, teachers unions disrupted the operation of entire states to arrest or accelerate policy change. In Kentucky, they shut down the state’s public schools to oppose an expansion of school choice and pension reforms, eventually throwing their weight behind a supportive attorney general, Andy Bashear, who later became governor. Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginia saw similar protests with varying degrees of success, but there were successes, with then Arizona Governor Doug Ducey adding $1 billion for teacher salary increases as an example.  \nThe Bad Bet  \nBut it was the support of democratic presidential candidates during the teacher strikes in 2019 by the United Teachers of Los Angeles, and later the CTU yet again, in Chicago, as well as broad support for these strikes by the media, that illuminated the two policy paths divergent in a wood. While many red-state politicians and right-of-center advocates had returned to working in states, which had been their tradition, democrats instead made a “bad bet,” with the onset of covid, that has delivered us the current policy reality. While many Americans, myself included, supported the closing of the nation’s public schools in March of 2020, the opposition by teacher unions and many democratic gove","cbCaiogwgIccrgPj","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiogwgIccrgPj","pdf",184155,"English","# Markets and Monopolies: The Faces of School Choice in 2025\n## Background to 2011 and the “Year of School Choice”\n## Policy disruption from 2012 through 2016\n## The “Bad Bet” during COVID-era school closures and reopening\n## Present landscape: moving beyond monopoly district systems","[{\"question\":\"What does the paper identify as the significance of 2011 and the “Year of School Choice”?\",\"answer\":\"It describes 2011 as a high point when multiple states enacted school choice programs, followed by a later period marked by education policy malaise and disinterest.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the paper explain the shift after 2012?\",\"answer\":\"It characterizes 2012 as a year of policy firsts and unrest, where opposing forces—left and right—fractured the earlier narrow bipartisan consensus.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the paper call the COVID-era approach a “bad bet”?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that political support for reopening hinged on assumptions about managing school closures, incumbent pressure, and federal aid, but the strategy failed, leading to major losses in trust, institutional influence, and student outcomes.\"}]","Markets and Monopolies - The Faces of School Choice in 2025 | PDF",1792060690,23]