Follow this authorGeorge F. Will's opinions

For more than 30 years , charter schools — non-unionized public schools, exempt from bureaucratic calcification and conformity that stifles pedagogical experimentation — have brought cultural and curricular diversity to 45 states and D.C. Doug Ducey, a Republican who served as governor from 2015 to 2023, made Arizona the nation’s school-choice leader, which is one reason he won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote when winning reelection in 2018 against a Hispanic opponent. (Hispanics are the fastest-growing charter school cohort. The affluent have school choice in their checkbooks.) Ducey says that if Arizona’s 525 charter schools were the state’s K-12 system, his state would lead the nation in math, reading and science.

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Today, more than one-third of all U.S. school children could participate in choice programs. Deep-blue Illinois, which recently killed its small school choice program (disproportionately used by minorities), spends 60 percent to 80 percent more per pupil than Texas, Alabama and Tennessee, where school choice is firmly planted and reading results equal those in high-spending Illinois.

Public schools’ educational results often move inversely with the spending that increasingly funds administrative bloat. Between 2002 and 2020, public-school employees increased by about 780,000, about three-quarters of them non-teachers, who in 2020 were 52 percent of schools’ employees. This occurred while the number of pupils plummeted, partly because of union-driven pandemic closures. In deep-blue Connecticut, between 2002 and 2020 public school staffing increased 14.1 percent while enrollments decline 8.2 percent.

Now, unions are demanding money to combat the learning loss their closures caused and talking about teacher shortages while pupil-teacher ratios reach historical lows, partly because of the flight from public schools. Not, however, in red Florida, where teacher pay has increased to cope with the growth of the under-18 population by 120,000 children since 2020.

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Because Arizona attained statehood in 1912 — a populist moment, with Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party presidential........

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