It’s back-to-school season, with an estimated 47.2 million K–12 public school students and 3.2 million teachers returning to their classrooms. They come back to a K–12 system offering an expanding menu of public education choices for families (and teachers) that are leading parents to reshape public education. A Tyton Partners report dubs them “activated parents.” While Covid-19 accelerated this parent uprising, other longer-term forces set the stage for it.
Upheaval in the making
Three factors have fueled a slow but relentless wave of K–12-activated parent upheaval, one that began before Covid-19 but gained unstoppable momentum during and after the pandemic.
- Expansion of public school choice. Over more than 60 years, K–12 policy changes have created a variety of public school choices for families. They now include options such as magnet schools, charter schools, microschools, learning pods, open enrollment, dual enrollment, course choice, tutoring, homeschooling, and career pathways programs. Moreover, families can mix-and-match these options. For example, more than a third of homeschool families also use traditional district public schools, and another 9 percent have a child in a charter public school.
- Rising dissatisfaction with public education. A Gallup poll shows that satisfaction with public education has declined. Between 2017 and 2025 , the share of adults satisfied with the quality of public education fell from 37 percent to 24 percent, reflecting a broader erosion of confidence in U.S. institutions. The 2025 Phi Delta Kappan poll reports that Americans’ confidence in K–12 public schools is at an all-time low. Only 13 percent grade them an A or a B, down from 19 percent in 2019 and 26 percent in 2004. Adults have more positive attitudes toward their local schools, with over 40 percent grading them highly.
- Public funding for private school access. Policy changes over more than 35 years in 33 states have created 81 different K–12 programs that give families public funding to cover the costs associated with private schools. These programs include vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts.
Other factors, such as declining birth rates and shifting immigration patterns, have interacted with these three main ones to reduce enrollment in traditional K–12 public schools. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, public K–12 enrolment peaked at 50.8 million students in 2019 and is projected to drop by nearly 4 million students to 46.9 million by 2031—a 7.6 percent decrease.
These declines vary by race, grade level, geography and school types. For example, public charter schools have experienced consistent enrollment increases between 2019 and 2024. Nevertheless, policy analyst Tara Moon writes in a report on public school enrollment declines by FutureEd at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, “Today’s enrollment declines don’t seem like a temporary disruption.”
Beyond pandemic disruption
The pandemic’s forced experiment with remote learning exposed every K–12 public school parent to both the limitations of the traditional K–12 system and the possibilities of alternative approaches. But the changes underway are more than an aftershock. They represent a deeper shift in how families view public education.
Traditional district schools are no longer the default option for an increasing number of families. Parents are responding to perceived academic, cultural, or political shortcomings by seeking alternatives.
This dynamic mirrors the framework described by the economist Albert O. Hirschman in his classic 1970 book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Declines in Firms, Organizations, and States. Hirschman argued that when institutions fail their members, people can respond by exiting the institution, raising their voices to improve it, or remaining loyal.
Today’s parents are exercising all three options. In the past, loyalty to the neighborhood school was the norm. If it wasn’t working, the message was: wait, advocate, or move. Now, many are unwilling to wait. They’re using both exit and voice, moving their children to other education options while demanding changes to curriculum, culture, and governance.
Even loyalty is being redefined. It no longer necessarily means staying in a student’s assigned school. Instead, it means loyalty to the public purpose of ensuring all children have access to a quality education that meets their needs, even if that requires rethinking old delivery models.
K–12 public education must reflect a community’s commitment to opportunity, fairness, and preparation for citizenship and life for all its students. In practice, that commitment can be fulfilled in many ways: charter schools, microschools or homeschooling linked with traditional or charter public schools, district-run innovation schools, or a mix-and-match approach that blends these and other options to meet a child’s needs. The result is a shift from what education historian David Tyack called “the one best system” toward a pluralistic system of ever-growing options.
The paradox of parent choice
This new reality brings challenges. The Tyton Partners study of “activated parents” describes a paradox: “…while greater optionality empowers parents, it also increases the need for help in making good decisions [across] multiple decision points.”
Their research shows that activated parents rely on “informal and fragmented sources” for education decisions. The top five sources are search engines (52 percent), personal networks (43 percent), school activities and materials (31 percent), online databases (29 percent), and school ranking websites (28 percent). One parent summed up the need for better guidance: “[I want someone] to establish a complete model to help students’ parents with a one-stop service. Simplify the operation and effectively improve the choice of more parents….”
Some communities with charter schools—such as New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, D.C.—have created a unified application and enrollment systems with standardized processes and timelines. These could serve as models for broader parent support systems to help families navigate the increasingly “mix and match” landscape. As the Tyton Partners report concludes: “In the current environment, parents are not just looking for lists of schools—they need trusted, guided support to evaluate fit, compare trade-offs, and make confident, informed choices.”
The education choice journey
Patrick Wolf and Tom Stewart, in The School Choice Journey, offer a framework for describing how parents become informed consumers and proactive choosers of their children’s education. Though their research focused on a Washington, D.C., private school voucher program, the framework applies far more broadly today.
Parents are emerging as empowered citizens who help shape local civil society. What was once a niche phenomenon is now becoming widespread. Parents are no longer just consumers of education. They are co-creators of better opportunities for their children and their communities.
“Nothing about us without us”
As this school year begins, the moment is both hopeful and fraught. Parent energy can renew education. But it can also fragment it. To channel this energy productively, K–12 leaders and other community stakeholders should heed four lessons.
- Parents want agency, not just access. Offering families options is not enough. They also want a say in what those options look like and help in understanding them. That means treating families as civic partners, not just recipients of education services.
- Support the full spectrum of parent public school choices and needs. Recognize the diversity of motivations and circumstances families face. Support can range from classroom resources to broader community solutions.
- Invest in bottom-up innovation. Back parent-led education models. Philanthropy, policymakers, and business and civic leaders should work together to remove barriers to entry and scale, especially those linked to workplace constraints.
- Protect pluralism and common ground. As parents seek culturally responsive or values-aligned education, foster opportunities for diverse families to learn together and strengthen community ties. Having many different education choices does not mean individuals need to be isolated from each other.
Parents are no longer waiting for system-led reform. They are building the future themselves. This is not a temporary disruption. It is a growing movement where families are the central agents of educational change.
Families are exiting broken systems, raising their voices, and developing loyalty to new education models that meet their children’s needs. Policymakers, educators, and advocates would do well to listen. In the words of the National Parents Union, “Nothing about us without us.”
Editor's note: This was first published by Forbes.
