What Could Huge Waiting Lists Mean?

An article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times provides some very telling statistics about educational demand in the City of Angels. To get into L.A.’s magnet schools, there is a waiting list of over 28,000 students!  For admission to charter schools run by the Inner City Education Foundation, the waiting list tops 5,000! And it’s not just magnets and Inner City Education Foundation schools that have waiting lists – most charter schools in the district, according to the article, are over-subscribed.

What does this mean? For one thing, that Angelenos would love to leave the public schools to which they are assigned. Perhaps more importantly, though, it demonstrates that quasi-public schools like charters and magnets – which require approval of government entities to exist – will never be able to meet the huge demand for good schools that’s boiling over nationwide. School districts and state education departments that approve charters and magnets are simply too dominated by special interests such as teacher unions – which love the public school monopoly – to ever permit enough real choice to satisfy monopoly-busting demand. Of course, even if an explosion of magnets and charters were allowed, the bureaucratic hoops through which school founders would have to jump would almost certainly ensure that new schools would never pop up fast enough to meet growing demand, nor would schools be able to alter their offerings quickly enough to provide for ever-changing educational needs.

What this means, then, is one thing: Without full school choice, in which public education funding is controlled by parents and schools must respond to their demands, a whole lot of people will never be able to access the schools their children need. The failed system will simply never allow it.