Not Choice, But Capture

There are people who really do support school choice, but over on the right, you will find those aren't really interested in school choice at all, and every once in a while, they say so. Take this post from Daniel Buck, former teacher and current Young Conservative Facer at the Fordham Institute (we've met him before here and here and here). 

This is not fond hopes for the day when dozens of different sorts of schools bloom and everyone can pick the one that best suits them. 

This is not about choice. It'[s about capturing the education system so that young humans can be taught the correct way to behave and think. It's about trying to eradicate a way of thinking and being that folks on the right disapprove of. 

Buck is certainly not the first or only person to make versions of this argument.

Parents Defending Education, an activist astro-turf group, has published viewpoints like an "investigative report" complaining that LGBTQ charters are "indoctrinating: kids at taxpayer expense. More than a few politicians who wave the school choice flag also oppose school choice involving Certain Viewpoints. And there's an absolutely ridiculous piece of "scholarship" from the Heritage Foundation trying to discredit charter schools for being woker than public schools, because choice is supposed to provide a variety of educational viewpoints, except not Those Viewpoints.

For large chunks of the choicer world, the whole "school choice" argument is a smokescreen, a mask, and a lie. There is no interest in any sort of robust educational ecosystem-- just an educational system that is full of their preferred worldview.

When someone like Ron DeSantis or Ryan Walters tells you that he favors school choice and he also favors making illegal all references to certain "divisive topics" and gender stuff, he is telling you that all his talk about school choice is bullshit. 

It's one of those times when you can tell what someone's goals are by what they don't say. A school choice fan who believed what he was saying would look at a city where Woke Academy was next door to MAGA High and say, "Look! This is working just like it's supposed to." Not "We have to either burn Woke Academy to the ground or regain control of it by restaffing it with anti-woke teachers. 

For many pretending to be choicers, the real goal is a two-pronged capture. One hand works at capturing the public system with rules that impose the preferred anti-woke values on public schools, while the other hand seeks to replace the public system with a system that follows only the preferred ideology. Neither of these hands is interested in actual school choice.

There are conversations and debates to be had about the topic of school choice and the topic of ideological "purification" of the country's education system, but it's hard to have those conversations when some folks insist on pretending that they're talking about one thing when they're really talking about something else.