Chester Finn's heretical insights

Can we have both school choice and shared institutions?

That's not my question, but was actually asked by Chester Finn, Fordham Institute honcho emeritus and long-time fan of market-driven school choice. And now, it appears, one of the reformy crowd noticing that their most recent allies are not so much on the same page.

He leads by making sure we understand his bona fides:

I’m a decades-long supporter of school choice in nearly all its forms and likely to remain that way so long as traditional, district-operated public schools ill-serve so many kids, produce such widespread mediocrity by way of achievement, give parents so little say in so many matters, and cater to the interests and priorities of the adults in the system more than the needs and interests of children, taxpayers, and the general public.

This reads like a combination of false premises and versions of "I prefer bicycles, because a vest has no sleeves," because this is not the interesting part. He wants his peeps to know he hasn't changed teams, and it's useful for us to remember the same. 

Finn has always been a genteel kind of guy, and he admits to finding some current trends bothersome.

I’m getting seriously unnerved by how the country is coming apart, by how many people are putting pure self-interest ahead of anything smacking of the public interest, by mounting intolerance of those who are different or who disagree, and by diminishing confidence in the shared values, institutions, principles, and traditions that have held us together as a nation, most of the time anyway, for the better part of three centuries.

And now he's ready to admit the nearly-heretical thoughts. Gonna put these in bold:

Which forces me to wonder whether putting all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands” just might be contributing to—at least moving in tandem with—other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets that we inherited from earlier generations.

Well, yes. Yes, they are.

The free market and the invisible hand are really good at many things, but uniting people around shared stuff is not one of those things.

The market separates. It picks winners and losers, both among buyers and sellers, and in doing so, it highlights and accentuates those differences. Modern school choice has always insisted that the choice has to be welded to free market (yet taxpayer subsidized) forces. It has treated the endless stream of bad actors, fraudsters, looney tunes, and incompetents as flukes and outliers, when they are in fact a completely predictable feature of an unregulated free market. 

I suspect that folks like Finn figured there was some sort of gentleman's agreement, some sort of cultured understanding that the crew would take a carefully surgical sledgehammer to parts of public schools and not take a torch to Really Important Things like, say, the culture at large. Many of us have been saying all along that this was foolish, that some folks were in the choice camp precisely because they wanted to burn things down. 

When fans of subsidized choice decided to ally themselves with the culture wars, that shouldn't have been a surprise. Hell, the DeVos family was in the culture war camp before it was cool. Nor should anyone be surprised that they were never going to be satisfied by just burning a few careful, select corners of school and culture. The alarm among the more truly conservative choice crowd reminds me of establishment Republicans when they invited the Tea Party into the big tent. "Sure, we'll let you in to swell our ranks; you've coined some really effective rhetoric. Just take a seat quietly in the back and-- no, really just sit quietly and-- wait--no-- oh hell, they really mean all that stuff they said!"

What really got Finn's attention is that survey about Americans walking away from traditionally American values, and I don't want to head down that rabbit hole right now, either--there are many explanations for those results.

Finn nods to the probability that some of this is coming from the lefty side of life. And then, more heresy:

But maybe we who yearn for more and better schooling options for America’s kids should try to do our part. Maybe we should pause for three seconds and ask whether there are ways of furthering choice while also helping to sustain, even strengthen, the shared inheritance.

We’ve known—I’ve surely known—for years now that pure market forces in K–12 (and higher) education do not reliably yield more effective schools and better-educated children. Sorry, Milton F and Corey D and a host of other living colleagues. Too many things go awry in that marketplace, from parents who make bad (if understandable) choices to greedy school operators who don’t care about outcomes, not to mention kids who lack competent adult guides.

Yes, yes, and yes. Finn stops just short of calling public education the foundation of democracy, a phrase that has too many of the Other Team's cooties on it. But right here there is not a single word with which I would disagree. I could have written that--but it would mean far less coming from me than from Chester Finn.

Finn continues to argue for a regulated marketplace, including making sure that vendors are legit and that options produce results. Yet, he also worries that the Other Team is inclined to restrict the market too much. Regulation of the education market, he says, is a "necessary evil," though not one that will necessarily solve the shared culture problem.

It also has to be noted—this really hurts—that we’re seeing mounting evidence that increases in public-sector school choices, charters especially, are bad for Catholic parochial schools and perhaps for other “traditional” private schools that, on the whole, have striven to maintain some of that inheritance via faith, values, morals, and example. Will the spread of ESAs send more kids back into those private schools? Or will more choice result in more coming apart?

He already knows the answer. 

Yes, I want it both ways. I want a plethora of quality school options for families, but I also want our “education system” in its variegated forms to strengthen rather than weaken our shared inheritance and pull us more together than apart.

Finn is stuck because he can't bring himself to let go of that forced marriage between public education and the free market. The solution to everything that is bothering him is to end taxpayer-subsidized, market-based choice. We could have a robust school choice system without ever having to involve the invisible hand or turning education into a marketplace (how we do it is a whole other post that I swear I'll write soon-ish). We just build it all under the roof of the public education system we have.

No, it would not end the various battles over cultural values, but--spoiler alert--nothing will. However, letting everyone go sit in their own bubble will only make things worse. One cultural value worth preserving is the value of functional co-existence with people who believe differently. This is something that market forces are especially ill-equipped to do. The market does not ask us to get along; it promises that we can have things our own way.

Finn also believes that while allowing for curricular diversity, well...

it should be possible to develop a framework of shared curricula spanning big chunks of the main K–12 subjects, curricula that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Americans and could be taught in the vast majority of schools of all sorts. Schools would naturally add and embellish, and in time, perhaps two-thirds of the curriculum might be “common” across almost all elementary and middle schools, maybe half in high school. If it pains you to think of commonality across state lines, we’d get somewhere by pulling it off within them.

You know how I know something like this could be doable? Because we would have to argue about it endlessly, with non-stop eternal debates about what would be in that core. And in education, any time someone says, "Use this answer. It settles everything and we never have to talk about it again," they are absolutely full of it. 

The real solutions in education don't look like solutions at all; they just look like long heartfelt debates and discussions that never, ever end. 

That shared curricular core would be most doable in a shared public system, not a subsidized market ecosystem.

A regulated marketplace and partially-shared curriculum can’t be the whole story. I’m not so bold as to forecast a truce in the culture wars. But what else can we devise that might better balance our hunger for school choice and diversity with America’s need to preserve the best of its inheritance?

Yes, Finn too often seems like a guy yearning for the schools of 1962. But in this piece he makes some legitimate observations and asks some of the right questions. He needs to carry his train of thought through to a few more stations, and it's unlikely that he'll be heard over the culture war yowling of some of his colleagues, but it's still nice to play What If every now and then.