Americans have an enduring, though contradictory, fondness for local institutions. On the whole, it can be summed up as “it’s bad out there, but it’s fine where I am.” Polls have long shown Congress is held in low regard bordering on naked contempt, for example, but everyone’s own representatives are somehow immune from that harsh judgment. Your congressman is far more likely to retire or decline to seek another term than to lose a reelection bid. We evince a similar skepticism toward the health care industry, yet few professions are more trusted than doctors and (especially) nurses.

This same phenomenon has long been true of schools. For decades, Americans have given failing grades to public education at large, but we regard the schools our own children attend as the exceptions to the rule, with solid majorities giving local schools grades of A or B.

Because of this dynamic, when advocates for private school choice, charters, online education, microschools, homeschooling and other alternatives to traditional public schools were heralding the arrival of a “new normal” (or, more cynically, a crisis too good to waste) in the early days of the pandemic, I cautioned skepticism. Our enduring fondness for local schools suggested that public education would snap back into its old normal shape at the earliest possible moment. The overwhelming majority of American children — 85 percent before the pandemic — attend zoned public schools. This figure cannot be fully explained away by a lack of alternatives, or a failure of imagination or entrepreneurship. It suggests the persistence of a valued cultural habit. We simply like sending our kids to local public schools and mostly think they’re pretty good.

But here we are, deep into a third consecutive school year disrupted by COVID-19, or living under the threat of it, and the evidence is now mounting and irrefutable that Americans’ relationship with local public schools is not as solid, reliable or unshakable as it has been historically.

Read the full article about public schools by Robert Pondiscio at The 74.