No stranger to controversy, having served in the Trump administration, Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has also never shied away from taking on the powerful interests that don’t always put kids first. In a recent op-ed, DeVos writes about how advances in school choice are helping:

This fall, more students than ever before in America’s history will begin a new school year at a school of their own choosing. It’s a milestone to celebrate.

These students will learn and grow in a wide array of schools, with a wide array of adjectives that describe them — charter, micro, public, home, virtual, private, magnet, and religious, to name a few.

While the legacy media and education establishment obsess over those adjectives, that isn’t what matters to parents and students. What matters is the education fit and the quality of the experience for each student. And the truth is that every piece of credible research on the topic concludes all students are better off when families are empowered to choose where their child learns.

“Children are different,” she says of the obvious, and “they need different things.” Yet the one-size-fits-all model of education has been dominant in this country for too long.

The government school monopoly should not be protected at the expense of parents and their children. Rather, every single child in America must have the opportunity to learn in the way and the place that best ensures his or her unique needs will be met. And thanks to committed, consistent work across the states, we are much closer to that hope becoming a reality.

DeVos points to several states that have taken steps to provide more educational choice for parents and students, noting, “It couldn’t be a better time for education freedom.”

That said, there are serious and well-funded opponents to this progress. She points to their failed record, not just during the pandemic but in introducing harmful curriculum. Worse, these folks are working hard to keep keep parents “out of the classroom,” she says.

It may seem like much of this is a new phenomenon. But this was, in fact, always the design. The father of America’s government-run education system, Horace Mann, once wrote that parents should be viewed as having given their children as “hostages to our cause.”

You read that right: hostages.

The stark truth is that America’s students are held hostage to a system that assigns them to a school, teaches them what it wants, and does its best to keep what families want out of the conversation.

Let’s be clear: It is time to set the hostages free! …

Think about it in this context: Mann “invented” our system of government-run education 175 years ago. A long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that Mann died 20 years before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The “father” of the education model we use today never made a phone call — not even on a rotary phone, let alone an iPhone.

We must propel education into the 21st century in the same way telecommunications, and every other aspect of our lives, has been.

She concludes:

The fight to free the educational hostages, our children, is far from over. But with parents across the nation awakened and education freedom policies on the march, there are many reasons to believe this back-to-school season will be the best yet.

Read the whole thing here.