A crowd of mostly union supporters fills a Rhode Island State House hearing room on March 10, 2026, for a hearing by the House Committee on Education on a bill by Deputy Majority Leader Mary Duffy Messier that would prohibit the approval of new charter schools or their expansion. (Photo by Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)
Latest anti-choice legislation in General Assembly seeks moratorium on new charter schools
Rhode Island has yet to help its schools face two growing storms, one natural – demographic decline — and one cultural — the booming demand for school choice. Neither is going away.
These new realities could push the state onto one of two paths: One direction will continue winning the battle to use schools to benefit and protect adults, at kids’ expense.
The other would establish, morally and legally, a new, true north star dedicated to giving every student an equal opportunity to pursue a sterling education, which is not what we’re doing now.
Storm number one is the international historically unprecedented demographic crash, now exacerbated by our national hostility toward immigrants. The U.S.birth rate is roughly 1.6 live births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.
Rhode Island’s overall population has stayed steady at about 1.1 million people, largely buoyed by immigration up until now.
But already, from 2019 to 2025, our public schools lost 8,652 students. Losses are spread unevenly among the 36 school districts, with tiny gains here and there.
During the pandemic, some families turned to private and parochial schools and homeschooling. Others created their own educational alternatives — microschools, learning pods, collectives. Statistically, they did not return; enrollment kept dropping.
The Rhode Island Department of Education’s (RIDE) data regarding non-public students is squishy because the numbers of students known to be homeschooled or attending private and parochial schools are self-reported by each district. For example, districts have little incentive to be fastidious about collecting the required homeschool applications, given the nominal enforcement. Some kids never appear in the data at all.
Only public school numbers are reliable. That data tells two very different enrollment stories — district and charter — that will each be buffeted by the second growing storm differently.
The second storm, thundering across the nation’s economic and political spectrum, is driven by families demanding school choice. (See Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.) Unlike demographic decline, choice doesn’t reduce overall enrollment. In fact, some families would use Rhode Island’s public system if they felt they had a shot at a school they wanted. Choice only shuffles where the enrollment rises and falls.
Charter schools will not experience any effect of the demographic decline, unless and until the demand for more options is satisfied. Last year 9,372 unique families submitted 30,202 applications for a mere 3,170 available charter seats. Families had less than a one in 10 shot at getting the education they want. Giant waiting lists backfill any vacancies.
Nationally, Rhode Island’s charters are standouts because they outperform the kids’ home schools by at least a year of learning, according to Stanford’s CREDO report. Of course they’re popular.
The public school enrollment is draining exclusively from the district schools. Mind you, many district schools, including some in the urban core, are themselves popular, effectively choice schools. But many are not.
You would think that districts would ramp up efforts to change how they do business, perhaps looking to charter success. Instead, districts protected by unions wage fierce battles fighting to stay the same. For the second year, they are fighting reforms recommended by the Senate’s 2024 education commission, the subject of a bill by Sen. Sam Zurier, a Providence Democrat, that would end moldy, anti-education 1960s laws. Zurier’s bill eliminates mandated hiring by seniority in the case of enrollment decline, partly to avoid wiping out district efforts to recruit and keep a diverse staff who are often the most recently hired (LIFO, last in, first out).
But this was the email reply last spring when I asked her opinion of that legislation, then-Senate Majority Leader and now Senate President Valarie Lawson, also president of the state’s National Education Association: “These bills… undermine longstanding, collectively bargained rights and roll back critical statutory protections that teachers have fought hard to secure.” Wait. You mean that once unions have won rights that badly disadvantage students, that’s the end of it?
On March 10, over 900 people either showed up at the State House hearing or wrote their legislators to oppose a bill introduced by Rep. Mary Duffy Messier, a Pawtucket Democrat and the deputy majority leader. The bill aims to shut down the public’s demand for new charter seats, including those already approved by the Board of Education. Messier’s bill would stop the Council on Elementary and Secondary Education from granting approval to create or expand a charter school beginning operations in the next three school years and bar the state from approving or appropriating funds to a new charter school not approved before July 1, 2025.
Anti-choice vindictiveness doesn’t stop there.
State law requires school transportation for private and parochial students, but leaves charter students in the lurch. Charters do not receive their full per pupil expenditure as districts hold back at least 7%, although often much more, for dubious reasons. Even rich districts get robust housing aid compared to the pittance allocated to charters, who must buy and maintain their own buildings.
In general, districts and their unions respond to losing popularity by vilifying the charters as if they were the culprits for lowering district enrollment, even though we know (see above) many families left for whatever better option they could find.
And no one makes a stink when students go to a career and technical school like Davies Career & Technical High School in Lincoln, whose 900 students transfer with their full per pupil expenditure and state student transportation privileges from 12 home districts. Davies is unionized and thus free of the anti-choice warriors, even though it is in all ways a choice school.
These wasteful, embarrassing skirmishes are not just crimes-in-progress against kids, but they also degrade the quality of our workforce, which is key to attracting business, jobs, philanthropy and opportunities for young people to thrive in good jobs.
Public service unions are justly proud of their histories, having significantly improved certain conditions for workers. But unions are not above reproach. Unions fail when, as the private businesses they are, they behave like any other self-serving corporation profiting themselves at the expense of their tax-supported mission.
Literally all developed nations have versions of school choice so that their people, rich and poor, will be as well educated as possible. Parents opt for the best education for their kids. Most have no idea if their kids’ school is private, public or something else.
In our case, districts must pay union officials, and release them from some or all classroom work, to be the organizing power behind discriminating against certain, mostly urban kids.
This must stop.
First published: RI Current News, March 23, 2026
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