Let's Have Education Choice: Part I (Premises)

Here's the thing that you might not expect from me-- I like the idea of choice in education. A big part of my opposition to Common Core grew out of my belief that one size never fits all in education. I also completely get the idea that parents will sometimes wish that they had another choice for their children. 

I even agree that there's a certain inevitability to school choice. Since the first walkman was manufactured, since cable tv first exploded, we have been splintering into a culture where fewer experiences are shared and more are selected. I think this shift creates some real problems, but that toothpaste is not going back in the tube, and it seems unsurprising that people who have become used to personally curating most aspects of their life experience would want to extend that power to other aspects, including education.

So why am I constant critic of the modern school choice movement? 

Because, I think virtually everything about the actual modern school choice movement is not aimed at actual choice in education. Some of it is simply the counterproductive result of bad premises, and the rest is just a smokescreen for the goal of dismantling public education entirely.

So if we truly wanted to have choice in education (which is really what we want--"school choice" is itself a loaded misnomer), how could we do that?

The foundation of modern school choice is a set of faulty premises. Can we build something on a better foundation?

I'm going to tackle this in two parts. First, let's consider the premises on which we could build a program that serves students, families, and society as a whole. It's at the premise level that choicers and I part ways, so we need to sort that out first.

No Free Market

I think the free market is swell. I'm a fan. But the free market is incompatible with public education.

The free market is a perfect mechanism for sorting; it selects winners and losers both among sellers and buyers, and sometimes it takes years to do it. 

The goals of public education is not sorting students and schools into winners and losers; it is to equip every student to--well, I'm not even sure what "win" means in an education context, but the idea is to help each student become his or her best self, to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world, to give them the tools for a satisfying and productive life. 

Making schools and students compete for resources simply ensures (and excuses) that some will not have the resources they need. That is incompatible with public education.

Likewise, making education a marketplace commodity does not serve students. As we see with healthcare and with some of the for profit edu-businesses out there, commodifying education means that the interests of the business owners are directly in conflict with the interests of the people the business is supposed to be serving. 

The modern school choice movement has pulled off a neat slight-of-hand trick by treating the marriage of school choice and free marketeering is a done deal, not even up for discussion. If we are serious about education choice and quality for all students, the free market does not belong in the picture.

Public ownership and operation

This goes hand in hand with the previous point, but it needs to be said. Public schools should be publicly owned and operated. The school, both the building and the bulk of its contents, should belong to the taxpayers, and that school should be overseen by and accountable to elected representatives of the taxpayers. 

Is that system perfect? Not at all. It's in many ways the worst possible system, except for all the others. 

No religious education

Public tax dollars should not be used to support religious indoctrination. Period.

For one thing, the wall between church and state protects both sides. Once taxpayers are footing the bill for education, it's a short step to government deciding which religion deserves which pile of taxpayer money.

The absence of religion in a school setting is not equivalent to pushing some sort of atheist agenda. The fact that your folks are not trying to fix you up with a date does not mean they are pushing you not to date anyone at all. 

Total cost

Another false premise of modern school choice is the notion that it can all be done for the same cost as the current public school system. This is a silly idea.

Multiple schools increase costs. No school district (or business) facing a budget crunch ever said, "Our best strategy here is to open more schools." Multiple schools mean duplication of services, administration, etc. You cannot run several parallel districts for the same money that you used for one (doubly true in all districts where the one district is already underfunded). 

A choice system needs excess capacity. Otherwise, every student would be locked in place until a number of students with complementary shifts could all be organized to shift at once. The excess capacity need not be infinite (and therefor infinitely expensive). But there has to be enough slack in the system that students can move. 

Those capacity questions will be hard to navigate. If a district is committed to providing a particular choice, how much are they willing to spend to keep the choice available even if a low number of students are selecting it? That's never going to be an easy call.

Serving all students

The system must serve all students, with certain rare exceptions for extreme situations. That doesn't mean that all education options must be open to all students. But no school district should be able to say, as charter and voucher schools do now, that a particular student is not welcome and not their problem. 

Vouchers don't just privatize the work of providing education, but the privatize the responsibility for providing it. There have always been a hefty number of folks in this country who really dislike the idea of paying for Those Peoples' Children's education (or housing or health care or food). Vouchers are the wealthy's way of saying to Those People, "Here's a couple of grand--now go get your own education and don't bug me about it again." 

Modern school choice at its most severe calls for a shift in the basic philosophy of public education, turning it from a public good and shared societal responsibility into a private good and personal responsibility. It becomes a commodity that some people can afford and some people can't. Perhaps a voucher combined with pop-up schools or computer-fed microschools allows folks to get a bare minimum, or maybe they just wrack up the same kind of debt we now associate with college. 

Our current promise of a good education for every child in this country has been imperfectly realized, but at least it exists. Many modern school choicers would erase it entirely. I don't accept that premise.

So, if we accept all those premises, can we have education choice? That's what I'll try to answer in Part II.