Let's Have Education Choice: Part II (How To)

Could we have educational choice? Could we create a system in which students and families could find a best fit? And could we do it based on principles that, unlike modern school choicer ideals, honored the principles of a public school system for all? 

In Part I I took a look at the premises that we could follow (and which differ in important ways from the premises of modern school reform). Now let's consider how we could do it.

Schools within schools 

The easiest way to do education choice is under one roof. Choice under one roof in particular lowers student switching costs to pretty much nothing. It's hugely disruptive for students to switch schools entirely, with big costs socially and emotionally. New routines, new friends, new sets of rules. But in even the most traditional of schools, students can switch from a college-bound class to a vocational track class with just some paperwork and a schedule change.

Schools within schools have been done. New York City did teacher-led schools within schools in the 1970s (read about it in Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars), and that was accomplished in a time when nobody knew anything about how a charter school or a school within another school could work.

Besides making education choice easier for students, it helps manage costs by allowing the sharing of resources, from cafeterias to special area teachers. And it allows the schools to have different emphasis and cultures. Like many serious education programs, it requires leadership with vision and a willingness to trust the separate school within the school. I expect that many administrators, like the folks who sunk the program in NYC, would have a hard time resisting the urge to control the school within the school more tightly.

Schools within districts

Oh, heck. An education choice system could have charter schools in it, but--. District owned and operated. Led by actual educators. In their own space. Accountable to the elected representatives of the taxpayers. Not run for profit, either directly or indirectly. 

The classic refrain was that operation of schools had to be taken away from the districts because they were failing so terribly. But after twenty years, and every conceivable configuration tried, we know that charter schools don't generally do any better than traditional public schools, and in many cases quite worse. When they do get better results, it's not because of any special miracle sauce, but because they can select families, add extra requirements, or focus on test scores. Turns out that visionary businesspersons and wealthy edu-preneurs don't know any special secrets about education that are denied to educators.

This model would also allow for specialty schools similar to the magnet schools used in some districts. "But those schools don't take all students," choicers say. "How is that not just what you complain about with current charter and voucher schools." The difference is the district level. When a charter or voucher school washes their hands of a student, it's the same effect as a district tossing that student. It says, "Get out. Finding a school that will educate you is now your responsibility." But if Pat is rejected by the East Egg district's Basket Weaving Academy, the district's position is "We don't think the basket weaving academy is the right fit for you, but we recognize that we still have an obligation to provide you with a decent education somewhere somehow."

Somehow, the original vision for charter schools--teacher led, district accountable, innovative--was immediately replaced with the notion that charter schools should be privately owned and operated, and we've rarely stopped to question it since. But we could have charter schools within districts, with none of the fraud, scammage, instability and shenanigans that have marked charters over the past few decades.

Co-operative schools

Here is my smallish, ruralish county, we have offered a school choice for those who want to pursue a vocation. Nowadays we call these programs CTE, but 60-some years ago the school was set up as a Vocational-Technical School. It's a school where students can learn welding, automotive trades, building trades, food prep, home health care, and some other options. The choice is available to students at any of the several districts that run the school.

Structurally, the CTE school has its own board, which is composed of representatives of the elected school boards of the sending districts. It is an extension of those public districts while still being operationally autonomous. Students attend for a half day and spend the other half day at their "home" school for core subjects. Some seniors spend all or part of the half day in work study programs, a sort of internship. 

Programs are sometimes shifted in response to regional employment shift, and many of the instructors are experienced professionals in the fields in which they teach. 

It's a choice that's available to all students, and it doesn't require some sort of private ownership and operation to function. The existing traditional public schools have run this education choice program for over sixty years. Given demand, interest and commitment, there's no reason the model couldn't be used for schools with other sorts of emphasis. Simply have districts work across district lines.

The problem of district boundaries

School segregation creates a host of problems, not the least of which is that the segregation of students is usually accompanied by the segregation of resources. Public education has a history of not dealing with this well, but the modern choice movement hasn't done any better. Since the days of post-Brown segregation academies, some folks have seen school choice as a useful tool for segregation. And segregation academies demonstrated a one-two punch-- first get all the white kids out of public school, and then defund the public schools. 

Today, we also have gerrymandered districts, created by a variety of mechanisms (including district secession). Education, like every other societal program in our history, butts up against folks who just don't want to spend their own money to take care of Those People. Attempts to blur those district lines are routinely met with concerns about "lowering standards" and "student safety" and a dozen other ways to say "we don't want Those Peoples' Children" mixed in with our own. 

This is, and has always been, one of the major obstacles to education choice. Because there is always an element of "My choice for my child's education is to make sure that your child does not have the choice of being educated with my child." That's a hard thing to structure your way past; doubly hard because there is no structural version of education we can create that the wealthy can't use money to escape.

This is perhaps the single biggest obstacle to education choice, and I don't know how to absolutely conquer it. When choicers complain about how tying school funding to real estate locks in an economic and class element, they are not wrong.

So what could we do?

We completely eradicate the connections between local real estate and funding by using a different funding stream or by doing funding 100% on the state level. But there's no funding stream that eliminates a connection to wealth, and giving all the purse strings to the state seems like a recipe for all sorts of disaster. 

We could fatten the revenue stream, by using sales tax or some other revenue generation tool to fund schools on top of local real estate, thereby making up the shortfall that poor districts face. In other words, we could address the segregation of resources directly. This will push all the buttons for the folks who say "Don't take my money to go spend on Those People." But a part of the solution has got to be creating schools that people don't want or need to "escape." 

We can render district boundaries porous and easily crossed instead of jealously guarded. That doesn't mean we require a school to accept infinite incoming transfers, but it does mean that no schools in this larger education choice ecosystem get to put unrelated restrictions on transfers. And we can stop allowing small privileged neighborhoods to "secede" from their district. We could even redraw district maps on the state level to un-gerrymander them. And then, with a collection of shared co-op specialty schools, schools within schools, schools within districts, and an ability to cross district lines--all managed by the public school districts instead of some patchwork mess of public and private operators and concerns--we could do better. 

Accept there will be limitations

Not every desire for education choice can be met. You can't have a school that caters to the one family that wants a basket-weaving-centered school that is built for left-handed students and runs onlyu by consensus with a strong devotion to classical values. Not every school can be brought up to the level of resources enjoyed by the schools of the wealthy, because they will always have money to spend over and above whatever the system provides. And local control and ownership in the form of an elected school board will always have limitations because school boards are nuts. 

I'm a huge fan of local control, but local control comes with some real risks. Thing is-- I don't believe a giant mountain of rule-making on the state or federal level works. There needs to be oversight, especially of areas such as civil rights. But creating laws that try to govern, say, reading curriculum on the state is a bad idea. I don't care what instructional approach you're talking about--mandating it is a mistake.

So I'm not pretending that my rough model points the way to a perfect future that solves all the education choice issues. But neither free market-driven school choice nor burn-it-down and capture the ashes for God culture warfare move us one step closer to a better direction, and they do a lot of damage in the bargain. 

The Three Stumbling Blocks

There are three fundamental issues that stand in the way of choice.

One, people don't want to pay for it. The cheapest, most efficient version of education is not one with multiple schools. 

Two, some people are committed to a model of "I get my choice, and Those People do not." 

Three, some people are highly opposed to paying for an education for Those Peoples' Children.

Those will always stand in the way of real education choice. 

But it is possible to have real education choice in a public education system (in fact, in large and small ways, some places already have it). But we have to start from a better set of premises, and be deliberate about facing the stumbling blocks. It's not as sexy or shiny or profitable as market-based choice, but I'd bet it would do a better job of delivering education to all children in the country.