Cato's Failed Argument Against Public School

Colleen Hroncinch of Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom tried this week to plug one of the pro-public education arguments that the Libertarian think tank runs up against when pushing choice. 

Do public schools serve everyone, she asks. She does not make a convincing case for her answer.

For starters, it defies logic to think one provider of any service could “serve everyone”—or at least, serve everyone well.

The fallacy here is that public education comes from "one provider." It does not. There are thousands of public school districts in the United States, each different from the others, each owned and operated by a different group of taxpayers. 

Hroncinch's real point is that children have different abilities, skills, preferences and styles, and have parents who also have a variety of values, goals and priorities. 

No wonder that even in the top-ranked district in any state, many parents choose other options for their children. It’s unlikely they would pay twice for education—once in school taxes and again in tuition—if their assigned school was serving their children well.

Two problems here. One is that of course some parents choose private schools even when public school is serving them well for reasons as simple as status and additional features that are beyond the financial reach of public schools. Have you ever seen the library at Philips Exeter? The theater building? There are plenty of colleges that would be happy to have such facilities. 

The other problem is the repetition of a Cato favorite line--the "pay twice for education" line, But nobody in this country, with the possible exception of the very very rich, pays once for public education. The implication here is if you just give me back my tax dollars, I can go spend them on the private education of my choice. But the math doesn't hold up, and of course it doesn't, because if it did we wouldn't have school taxes in the first place. My tax dollars do not pay for my children's public education--no, not even if you count up all the tax dollars I'll pay over my lifetime. My children's public education is paid for by my taxes plus the taxes of my neighbors.

Nobody who is sending their child to a private school is paying for their education twice.

Hroncinch's other point here is that the public system doesn't serve all students well, and a mountain of ink has been spilled examining to what extent this is true and why and what can be done about it. But what the public system has that a voucher does not is a legal obligation to at least try. The challenge for any education system is to educate students who, for a vast panoply of reasons, are hard (and expensive) to teach. As Robert Pondiscio put it in his book about Success Academy, “A significant tension between public schools and charter schools is the question of who bears the cost and responsibility for the hardest-to-teach students.” Public schools do not always solve the issue well, but voucher schools solve the issue by simply washing their hands of those students and sending them on their way to find solutions on their own. Public schools do not have that option; that's what their defenders mean by saying that public schools take everyone.

Hroncinch cites Baltimore's test scores as proof that they are not serving all students well. The irony here is that if they were all private voucher schools, they could bring those numbers up by simply refusing to serve low-scoring students at all. Not sure that would be an improvement.

Hroncinch spends a chunk of her piece citing examples of parents who got in trouble for finding ways to get their kids into a public school outside of the district in which they lived. The aggressive prosecution of this kind of stuff is inexcusable, but it's not proof that the public system does not serve everyone. Every one of those parents had a place reserved for their child in a public school; they just didn't want it. But again-- if they were trying to get away from the school set up to serve their child and they wanted to go to a private school, that school wouldn't have to pursue them through legal means. It could just reject them.

Hroncinch does address this part of the argument, sort of.

What about the argument on the flip side that private schools don’t serve everyone? It’s absolutely true. No individual private school can serve everyone—just as no public school can. But in the private sector, no provider claims to do that.

This is a false comparison. It's true no individual school of any sort can serve all students, because any individual school has finite space. But a public school system does promise to serve all students, and a voucher system makes no such promise. 

Hroncinch lists a whole list of various "private education providers," arguing that surely somewhere in all that families can find what they're looking for, that parents can "customize their children's learning experience." But that doesn't really address the issue.

No school, public or private, can serve everyone—just as no restaurant, grocery store, doctor, or car dealership can.

That's a pretty good analogy. Because these sectors of the economy don't serve everyone. Some people get to eat at upscale restaurants and some get to eat at McDonalds and some don't get to eat out at all. Some people get to shop at a big beautiful grocery store, some shop at a lousy little one, and some live in food deserts. Some people get top of the line health care, some get bare minimum care, and some die because they can't afford health care at all. Some people drive a new Lexus, some drive a used Kia, some ride public transit if they can, and some walk. 

None of these sectors serve everyone. None of these sectors are a model for how the public school system would ideally work.

Now we arrive at Hrincinch's final sentence.

The best way to “serve everyone” is to enable each individual student to have options.

Well, yes. But. A voucher system doesn't really get the job done. The major obstacles to education choice remain discriminatory policies of private schools and the cost. While vouchers pretend to address cost, they're too meager; either taxpayers have to foot the (very high) bill of paying the cost of students attending the school of their choice, or individual families have to do it themselves, which really isn't any better than telling poor families they can exercise choice by buying a more expensive house in a wealthier community.

That's before we even get to the taxpayers' stake in oversight and transparency of a voucher system, in not paying to send students to sub-prime pop-up schools that produce under-educated members of society. 

Voucher policies change the fundamental nature of the education system, turning K-12 into a younger version of our post-secondary system, where some folks go to great schools, some go to mediocre ones, some go to terrible ones, and some don't go at all. Some can afford it, some borrow huge amounts of money, and some don't go at all. 

Most of all, the voucher system eliminates any promise by society that we'll get your child a decent education. Certainly it's fair to argue that we have not always done a good job of fulfilling that promise, but deciding to just stop making the promise, to tell parents "You're on your own now, good luck"- that's a huge shift in how we do education as a nation, a shift that guarantees a tiered education system that reinforces socio-economic class even more than the public system we've got. 

It's the Friedman dream, the dream of a country in which education is a private commodity and not a public good, a personal issue and not a shared responsibility. It has been a persistent dream for some folks for years. I don't think very much of this dream, but the very least we can do as a society is have an honest discussion about it.

The Free Market Won't Save Public Education

It's been an article of faith since Milton Friedman first started fantasizing about getting government out of education and replacing it with a voucher system.

Competition will spur excellence. Free market schools will save students from failing schools in poor districts. Free markets will stave off inequity. 

Folks keep saying it. And yet there isn't a shred of evidence that it's true.

Name a single free-market sector of the economy that serves all citizens with excellence. Automobiles? Restaurants? Technological tools? 

None of them, because what the free market excels at is picking winners and losers. The free market says these folks over here can have a Lexus and these folks over here can have a used Kia and these folks over here can take the bus (if there is one) and these folks over here can just walk. 

What the free market excels at is sorting people into their particular tier, their particular socio-economic class. If you want to move up a level, then show some hustle and grab those bootstraps to prove that you deserve to move up the ladder. Otherwise, we'll just assume you're right where you belong.

There's no version of our free-ish market that is about lifting every single citizen up to a decent level, no function of the free market that says, "Let's get every single person in this country behind the wheel of a Ford." The free market doesn't like the poor. 

Economist Douglas Harris laid out a solid explanation of why education is a lousy fit for the free market, and there's one more problem-- the free market and the public education system don't want the same thing. The free market wants to sort people out, put them at the top, bottom, middle-- and then provide them with what they deserve. The US public school system, however imperfectly, promises to provide every student with a quality education, without ever asking if one child deserves something different from another. 

For some free market fans, inequity is not a bug but a feature; it's a way to sort people into their proper place. Equity for them means "equal chance to prove that they belong in a particular tier." The social safety net is disruptive and wrong because it "rewards" people with stuff they haven't proven they deserve. 

Some free market fans believe that the free market will provide equity and even things out. Hell, Friedman appears to have believed that the free market would fix segregation and not, say, give rise to segregation academies. But the notion that free market mechanisms will bring greater equity than we now have in education is silly. Your ability to vote with your feet will always be directly related to your wealth.

But more to the point, we know that the free market will not correct the inequities of the education system because it is the free market that cemented them there in the first place. The primary mechanism for creating public school inequity is the policy of linking school funding to the housing--one more free market where winners and losers are sorted out. The free market was instrumental in giving us educational inequity; how can we possibly imagine that the free market would help get rid of it?

Well, that's not really a free market, free market fans will complain; it's a market that has been hampered and hamstrung by various government policies. But that's all markets. To start with, money is just made up stuff, and it takes government policies to maintain the illusion. Nor is there some pristine natural economic playing field that exists naturally; all economic playing fields are created, maintained, and regulated by governments. "That's not a true free market" just means "that playing field is not tilted the way I want it to be." 

There are playing fields more severely tilted than others, markets more free-ish than others. I'm actually a fan of our free-ish market system. And some free-ish markets are excellent at handling some sorts of commodities, companies and customers. But education is not a commodity, and no free-ish market is going to help us create a more equitable system fir universal education of young humans in this country. 

OK: Ryan Walters and Project 2025

Ryan Walters, the education dudebro-in-chief of Oklahoma, has made a national name for himself with a flurry of christianist nationalist policies (most recently requiring every classroom to include the Bible), which has helped distract from, the trouble he has getting along with legislators and doing his actual job. His rise has been swift and well-funded and bad news for Oklahoma education; as a modestly-paid state employee he was actually making the big bucks thanks to Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, yet another of those Koch & Walton privatization groups.

While Walter talks a big game of cultural warfare, he's not actually very good at his job, to the point that even like-minded conservatives have walked away from him. But Walters has the super-power of being super well connected. From his adoption by Governor Kevin Stitt. through his patrons at EKCO to his national profile courtesy folks like Fox News.

It's those connections we want to note. Now that everyone is finally catching on to the anti-liberty mess that is Project 2025, we should note that Walters is very tight with the Project 2025 crowd.

We can start with the PR firm that Walters has hired to boost his national profile. 

The firm is Virginia-based Vought Strategies, They seem like a great fit. Their website includes a testimonial from Jim DeMint calling the firm's founder, Mary Vought, "one of the best conservative communicators and public relations specialists in the nation." Mary Vought has been at it for a decade; previously she did coms work in the US Senate and House of Representatives, working for folks like Ron Johnson and Mike Pence; she's also a senior fellow for the far right Independent Women's Forum, and the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outfit that endorses the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott. And she cranks out pieces like this one for the Daily Caller in which she writes "as a parent" (not a conservative PR operative) that she doesn't want her daughter reading naughty books. Or slamming NIH for Fox News. Or noting a Wall Street Journal profile of Walters, saying "we proudly stand beside our clients as they fight to protect our children and parental rights."

Mary Vought is also the vice president for strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 to push conservative business-friendly policies, and has developed into one of the most influential activist right-wing think tanks in DC. They are politically agile; they developed and promoted a health care proposal, then opposed it when it was adapted by the Obama administration as the Affordable Care Act. Their reaction to a Trump candidacy was to call him a “clown”, then once he was in office, they became a major voice in staffing; CNN said that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition.”

They have worked to push critical race theory bans, praised Florida’s dismantling of public education, and repeatedly argued for education funding to be voucherized. They even once tried to argue that school vouchers would increase the birth rate.

And, of course, they took point on the development of Project 2025.

A partner group for Project 2025 is the Center for Renewing America ("For God. For Country. For Community.") This group was created by Russ Vought, a Project 2025 project leader and Mary's husband. He previously served as Donald Trump's OMB director. He's one of the people accused of interfering with the Biden administration's transition; he is also among those who defied a Congressional subpoena during the Trump-Ukraine scandal. He's considered a likely candidate for Trump's next chief of staff. He has said we are in "post-Constitutional" times and wants to staff federal agencies with true believers who will bring the culture war to DC. He is a self-described Christian Nationalist, and argued way back in 2021 that Christian nationalism was "benign and useful."

Walters is also linked to Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage. He appeared on Kevin Roberts podcast in an episode teased with "The entrenched woke elites within our education system aim to dismantle the innocence of our children, erode parental rights, and undermine community authority over schools. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters has boldly confronted them—and he's winning." Walters opened up by listing his struggles against the terrible media and the awful teachers' unions (he does not mention that much of his opposition has come from other GOP politicians) and he offers this:

The Heritage Foundation has been an incredible partner to help us develop what the plans are for the state, for our schools, for our education system

And praises them for sitting down with him and walking through the plan.  

Project 2025 is soaked with christianism and high level of culture panic. If you wonder what it looks like in action, looking at Ryan Walters in Oklahoma gives you just a small peak, because Walters tied toi the project and the ideology behind it. 

And this news just dropped-- Walters has tapped Kevin Roberts to lead the committee rewrite Oklahoma's social studies curriculum. The committee will also include fake historian Dennis Prager.

In a document obtained by the Washington Examiner, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters announced a “complete overhaul” to the curriculum with the goal to “inspire in students a love of country and a proper understanding of the American founding,” as well as completely eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology from schools.

“Teacher’s unions have been rewriting history, teaching students to hate America. But not under my watch,” Walters told the Washington Examiner. “Our goal is to give Oklahoma students an education that focuses on history, not indoctrination. The executive committee that we’ve assembled are experts in American exceptionalism, our Founding Fathers, and historical documents like the Bible. These things are essential to understanding our history.”

Premiumization and Education

Six Flags and Cedar Fairs (the parent company of my beloved Cedar Point Amusement Park) have merged, with the more successful Cedar Fair owning 51% of the resulting amusement park behemoth. Like many park fans, I have followed this news with some trepidation-- Cedar Point is a tight, well-run operation with a park carefully laid out to deal with their geographic limitations (unless they dump a mountain of fill into Lake Erie, they aren't expanding any time soon), and Six Flags parks are like someone dumped some attractions in a sack, shook it up, and dumped it out.

Six Flags is the gazillionth business to suffer from a lack of focus on the main thing. One regular has noticed their strategic misstep:

Six Flags, he noticed, focused on adding thrill rides and overlooked smaller rides for kids and families and other park activities, such as evening entertainment and shows. Staffing at the park and customer service also became inconsistent.

“Six Flags can feel a bit disjointed,” he said. “Finances were more important than the guest experience.”

The coverage notes a technique that Six Flags used to boost its sagging fortunes.

Six Flags hiked ticket prices in 2022, raising the average price of admission to $35.99 from $28.73. The move caused a 26% drop in annual attendance

It was part of Six Flags’ “premiumization” plan to bring in fewer people to parks but get them to spend more. CEO Selim Bassoul complained in 2022 that Six Flags had turned into “cheap day care centers” for teenagers and said the company wanted to “migrate…a little bit from what I call the Kmart, Walmart to maybe the Target customer.”

In other words, here is Example #28,911,237 of how the Free Market is not geared toward making sure every customer is served. The Free Market picks winners and losers, not just among businesses, but among customers. Some customers are just too poor and annoying, say some businesses, and we choose not to serve them.

Premiumization is already a feature of the private school world, where pricing structures help signal that some schools are for the elite. A study now confirms that in one state, vouchers led to private school tuition hikes as schools took the opportunity to "migrate" to a higher tier in the education biz. 

Voucher fans picture a country in which privates schools throw their doors open wide, ready to accept poor young refugees of failing school systems. But the history of free(-ish) markets shows no such behavior. What the free market does is set tiers of service and quality, including the bottommost tier which may get nothing at all, with many businesses working to climb the profitable ladder of premiumization. 

It's no way to run an education system for an entire country. 

Let Teachers Take Back The Classroom

During my 39 years in the classroom, my classroom management methods were pretty simple. 

Only a handful of explicit rules. We're here so I can help each of you become better at reading, writing, listening and speaking; anything that gets in the way of that is not okay. This classroom is meant to be a place where nobody needs to fear disrespect or mistreatment. Treat all students with respect all the time. That pretty well covered it.

I also subscribed to the theory that keeping focus on what we were doing, not what we were supposed to not be doing, is useful, and that keeping the class moving right along (Joe McCormick, my student teaching co-op liked the term "punchy quick") and knowing what the heck you're doing go a long way toward keeping the classroom managed. 

For 39 years, that worked well for about 97.6% of the time, even as the tides of various cohorts shifted over the years. 

But based on surveys and countless pieces of anecdotal data (aka stories teachers tell me), I have to admit that something seems to have fundamentally changed. There is more disorder, disruption, and outright violence in classrooms. There are new frontiers in attacks on teachers being found every day, like the mass defamatory social media accounts set up by Malvern PA middle schoolers. There are a variety of theories about why this is happening.

Pandemic hangover. Thanks to the pandemic disruptions of in-the-building schooling, a whole lot of students just kind of lost the knack, the skill, even the inclination, for Doing School.

Squishy liberal ideas. In the face of charges that discipline was being inequitably doled out against students of color, schools stopped doing any doling at all. Others tried implementing ideas like restorative justice, which just led to all sorts of chaos.

Parents these days. Gentle parenting and other modern parenting trends are creating unmanageable children. 

Bad top-down policies. States impose rules about how certain populations may or may not be treated in school and schools suffer the consequences. 

Cultural ick. A decade or two of arguing that schools are terrible and teachers are evil grooming indoctrinators eventually trickles down to children. A culture in which our very highest officials regularly bully and belittle and break rules with neither shame nor consequence trickles down to students, too.

Young teachers are wimps. I know a lot of young teachers. I don't buy this one.

Something in the water. Cosmic rays. Who the heck knows. Not a popular explanation, but I've heard it more than once.

Further complicating the discussion is that some folks have attached particular explanations to particular politics, and it's not a political problem.

We have, on the one hand, people who sincerely want to address issues of equity and sensitivity and are doing a lousy job of it. Restorative justice and trauma-informed practices and all the versions of positive behavior reinforcement are not terrible ideas, but they take a lot of time and training (and therefor money)--and none of them mandate that students never suffer consequences for bad choices. 

See, several things can be true at the same time. Is misbehavior often the student's way of communicating underlying issues that they need help in addressing? Yes. Should students experience consequences for their misbehavior? Yes. Should students be handled with respect and care for the baggage they bring with them? Should teachers be mindfully aware of equity issues in how they treat their students? Yes, and yes. Should the classroom be an environment where the teacher is safe to teach and students, including the ones that are not causing trouble, are able to learn? Yes. Does every individual child deserve support, empathy, and consideration? Yes. Can a single child who goes off the rails regularly make life miserable for a teacher and all the other students in the room? Yes.

All those things can be true at once, and therefor proposed solutions have to treat all those things as true rather than, as some folks tend to do, declaring that only certain sides of the problem need to be addressed. That means that those who want to blame it all on liberal squishiness are only looking at part of the issue, and those who don't want to talk about any classroom management problem spike because saying it exists might feed the conservative trolls--they have to ease up as well.

Most of the solution for issues of classroom management is located exactly in the administrative offices of your district and building. 

I've seen all manner of problem principal. Send your problem student to the office. In one case, the principal would have the student pull up a seat while the principal talked about how he'd done way worse stuff when he was a teen and ten minutes later send the student to class. In another case, the principal would browbeat and bully the student, pushing them into a corner until they either broke down or blew up and earned a suspension that never should have happened. Or there's the hands off principal--the one who, if she's in the office at all, will ask you if you have made five contacts with the home and sat down with parents three times. In all cases, what teachers learn is that they shouldn't bother asking for help from the office.

Every building has its actual written behavior policy and its operational rules--the rules that the office really follows. Like the school where the dress code is only enforced for certain young women. Or the school where bullying is dealt with directly unless the victim is a LGBTQ kid. Or the school with different rules for white kids and students of color.

Teachers and students both learn what the unwritten policy really is and conduct themselves accordingly. 

Do teachers have responsibility for managing their classrooms? Absolutely. But the tools they have are directly related to the tools that the administration lets them have. The most basic thing you learn as a teacher is whether or not administration has your back, and nothing else will have a larger effect on your classroom management style and effectiveness. 

Are there teachers who use ineffective policies in their classroom? Are there teachers whose lackadaisical or biased or, yes, even racist policies cause them and their students plenty of trouble? Are there teachers who send students out of the room every ten minutes for sneezing disrespectfully?  Absolutely. Whose job is it to straighten those teachers out (or show them the door)? Administration's.

Behavioral issues require a vision of both trees and forest. Often the issue is immediate--right now I cannot help 20 students in this class better understand a simple algebraic formula because Pat won't stop throwing books at the windows. That needs to be dealt with Right Now because every minute that I'm kept from providing instruction is a minute I can't get back. But in the big picture, I need a plan for the long term, something more useful and thoughtful than simply playing daily whack-a-mole with Pat's outbursts. For success, I need to deal with both the forest and the trees, and it helps if I have someone to work with me on that,

A building administrator's job is simple--create the conditions under which each teacher can do her very best work. That includes helping her with the tools to manage her classroom. It is possible to be fair and just and sensible and equitable and still have classrooms where teachers are able to take hold of their classrooms and do the job they entered the profession to do. But that only happens when your school either A) gets really lucky or B) makes a deliberate, thoughtful attempt to create such a culture.

It will not happen if either the Repressive Military Camp or the Land Of Do As You Please Camp dominates. It will not happen if I get caught up in either forests or trees. The push for discipline and for empathetic flexibility will always be in tension, and there is no tension in education that a couple of pundits can't blow up into a full-sized battle. As with most educational tensions, we have to keep adjusting year after year, and if the surveys and anecdotal evidence is accurate, something is out of whack right now. 

This is another of those posts that could rattle on forever, because the issue is not necessarily complicated (see my classroom rules above), but it is complex (see all the other factors I have skipped over). Once again in education, if someone is touting a simple silver bullet to address the issue, they're probably selling something, and it's nothing you want to buy.

The one plus is that this is an issue that offers broad agreement from a wide variety of people. Nobody wants schools that are unfair and unjust, and nobody wants classrooms where there's so much chaos that education can't occur. We may disagree on what exactly that looks like or how we get there, but at least we're looking at the same horizon.

ICYMI: Picnic Leftovers Edition (7/7)

Weather and other stuff stifled the annual Fourth picnic this year. The plus side is that now I don't have to make food for a week. Making lemonade here.

In the meantime, here's the weekly list. Remember-- you can amplify the voices that you believe should be heard. 

What these states get wrong about the Bible and the Ten Commandments

Amanda Tyler's opinion piece for CNN is one of the better takes on the continued efforts to jam the Bible into the classroom.

Red states’ religious mandates for schools ignore basic history

Historian Kevin Kruse has some lessons for the Christianity-in-our-classrooms crowd.

As Ryan Walters mandates Bible instruction in public schools, Satanic Temple plans educational offerings

The least surprising development in this ongoing saga.

What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms As a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization

Some scholarly work from Elena Aydarova. You may want to skip past the scholarly part to the findings, which are pretty hefty all by themselves.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

It's test score time in Tennessee, and TC Weber has some thoughts about the "increasingly irrelevant" results.

Child Tax Credit Reform Languishes as Children Remain Invisible in U.S. Politics

Jan Resseger reminds us that at one point we made a real dent in child poverty. Now, we're just never-minding our way past it.

Conservatives Go to War — Against Each Other — Over School Vouchers

Alec MacGillis reports for ProPublica on the phenomenon of conservative supporters of local public schools.

A.I. ‘Friend’ for Public School Students Falls Flat

From New York Times. LA schools thought they could hire someone to replace support staff with a chatbot. Not so much.

That Way Madness Lies

Thomas Ultican takes a look back at Karen Fraid's reform-to-English dictionary, and it turns out that after more than a decade, it holds up depressingly well.

The Right-Wing Network Manufacturing the War Against Higher Education

Colleen Scerpella writing for the Center for Media and Democracy looks at some of the folks behind the recent alarms over higher education.

This week at Forbes.com, I reminded you (again) that you ought to pick up a copy of The Education Wars. 

And at The Progressive, I responded to some Corey DeAngelis talking points.

Join me on substack for free and complete updates on what I'm putting out into the world. 

Will Public Funding For Religious Schools Ease Culture Wars?

Mike Petrilli, head honcho at the Fordham Institute, has a theory. Maybe, he suggests, spending public tax dollars on private religious schools might actually ease some of the continuing cultures out there. 

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that, as more parents gain access to school choice, including the option of sending their children to religious private schools, we will see today’s education culture wars recede.

I don't think so. Here's why not. 

First, silos don't solve anything. Letting people of differing values retreat to their own separate silo has not ever solved the issue or reduced the conflict. The history of segregation in the US is as good an example as any; it did nothing at all for reducing racial issues and tension in this country. 

We've even tried this out in education before with the post-Brown segregation academies, where some parents were free to pursue their value of "get my kid an education where he doesn't have to be around Black kids." That didn't serve some Americans well, nor did it ease the tension caused by different values regarding race. 

What separate silos do is make it easier to target certain folks. All the Others are over there in that group, so we can easily rail away at them. The second part of the segregation academy movement was for white folks to say, "Now that this school system over here is mostly Those Blach Kids, let's stop funding them." Which they could safely say because their own kids were safely somewhere else in a different silo.

We've already seen that much of the culture panic is animated by folks who are not merely concerned about what values and books and humans persons that their own children are exposed to, but what varieties of human experience everyone's kids are exposed to. Hence the need to make sure that nobody's child can read "And Tango Makes Three." Hense the establishment of a school that centers LGBTQ students immediately becomes a target. 

Since we're talking about religious private schools, there's another problem. You will have noticed that within the Christian church alone, there are a gabillion sects. Thise exist thanks to centuries of doctrinal differences. In short, many churches are not only bad at welcoming pluralism outside their walls, but inside as well. Once our silo is established, then it's time to make sure that everyone inside is pure and in compliance.

And for some fairly vocal culture warriors, choice is not on the table. They will consider the culture wars over when their side has won and all the other sides have been silenced and/or obliterated. These are the allies the choice movement chose, and at some point it's going to bite choice in the butt.

None of these factors will ease the culture wars. In fact, not only will they not ease them, but they will lead to a side effect that nobody wants.

Battles amongst the various silos will escalate. Those will be exacerbated because despite reformster magical thinking, you can't run 15 parallel school systems for the same money that barely ran one ("Our business is running into financial trouble, so the solution is to open a bunch more branch locations" said no corporate operation ever). The religious schools will argue about which other religious schools should be allowed to exist, and they'll all be pissed off that the Satanic Temple is also setting up schools. Politicians will argue that Certain Schools are not run by Real Religions and therefor shouldn't be allowed to operate at taxpayer expense (spoiler alert: already happened). Others will argue that taxpayers shouldn't fund LGBTQ schools (spoiler alert: already happened). And even Petrilli notes that he's rather have some safeguards against schools that are strikingly low quality, though I don't expect any such school to say cheerily, "Yeah, that's us!"

So ultimately, the state will have to either sort it out or fork over a pile of money or defund education of all sorts. One end result is the State Department of Religious Okee Dokeeness, where state bureaucrats decide which religious schools can be certified 100% fresh and which cannot. 

Benefits to society? None. People don't learn tolerance of LGBTQ persons or conservative wingnut persons or persons of different races or religions if they spend their school years in a bubble where they never actually meet any of those humans. 

It is tempting to think that the culture wars will ease when we try to give people the impression that they have won, but the loudest culture war voices have shown us who they are again and again, and who they are are people who don't just want a quiet corner of their own, but to claim dominion over the whole education mountain. 

I love our Puritan forebears. Hell, I'm related to our Puritan forebears. For all their virtues, it's inaccurate (as I told my students) to say the Puritans came to establish a country where anyone could worship the way they wished; they came here to establish a country where everyone would worship the way the Puritans wanted them to. It was the ultimate attempt to solve a culture war by silo, and while in many ways it was better than their brethren's attempt back home to win a culture by killing the king and taking over the country, it ultimately didn't end the conflict. 

In short (okay, too late), public funding won't ease culture wars. It will likely intensify them, and most probably shift the battlefield to state and federal government, where the question of which values get to have their own schools and how much they get paid to run them will be endlessly relitigated. Maybe forever, or maybe until some wise sage discovers that the best way to preserve pluralism and religious freedom is a public school system that is inclusive about students and neutral about religion.