Donald Trump’s delivery was calm, but his proposal was bold. “There is no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly,” he said at the Cleveland Arts and Education Academy on September 8.

Trump offered an alternative: “I want every single inner city child in America who is today trapped in a failing school to have the freedom — the civil right — to attend the school of their choice. This includes private schools, traditional public schools, magnet schools and charter schools which must be included in any definition of school choice.”

As for funding, Trump explained, “the money will follow the student. That means the student will be able to attend the public, private, charter or magnet school of their choice — and each state will develop its own system that works best for them.” He plans to redirect $20 billion of federal education aid to this.

I support school choice. I grew up in the inner city of Dorchester, Massachusetts, in a blue collar home. My parents struggled to give me four years in a parochial school and then they moved, at great sacrifice and hardship, to make sure I attended a good public school. My wife and I raised five children and have seven grandchildren. We know how essential good schools are for the rearing of children.

Why School Choice

But why school choice? Why not just trust the system we have? Because school choice will “parentize” education. School choice will give every parent, no matter where they live or how much they earn, the choice of where to send their children to school.

The public school system began with families pooling resources in small community schools. At first, public schools were local community schools.  Until the 1960s, public schools believed in in loco parentis (on behalf of the parents). Teachers were the extension of the parents in the education of children entrusted to their care and respected the parents’ primacy in the education of their children.

Now we have a top-down, one-size-fits-all, federally-dominated school system that substitutes the decisions of distant bureaucrats for local teachers and parents. Distant bureaucrats don’t know the children and the town. They don’t know what kind of education the children need.

And this clearly doesn’t work. I don’t need to rehearse the criticism of our school systems. We all know something is woefully lacking in our entire educational approach.

School choice will return the leadership of our national educational endeavor to parents and the local community. Education outside of the home is an extension of the parental role as the first educators of their own children. The children being educated in our schools, to borrow a phrase from the Supreme Court’s landmark 1925 decision Pierce v Society of Sisters, are not “mere creatures of the State.”

School Choice recognizes that education begins in the home and applies the social ordering principle of subsidiarity. This principle affirms that governing should begin at the smallest level. All other levels of government should help that first government and not take away its role. The family is the first government and the first school house. The town is the next.

As a Catholic Citizen

Finally, I support school choice as a Catholic citizen — for reasons that apply to all other Christians. The Catholic Church supports what I’ve called “parentizing” education.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms (in number 2229), “As those first responsible for the education of their children, parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions.” It calls this right “fundamental.” The government has “the duty of guaranteeing this parental right and of ensuring the concrete conditions for its exercise.”

In Letter to Families, the late Pope St. John Paul II explained that parents have “a fundamental competence” in educating their children because they are parents. They can share the work with others, like a public school system, but those others must serve the parent’s love for their good and  the good of the family.

No matter what Christian tradition one stands in, his words ring true. Even if one stands outside them all, they are common sense. Parents need the ability to choose how to educate their children, for the children’s good and for America’s. On school choice, Donald Trump is right.