School choice and common ground

Back in 1894, the modern urban world was mired in the Great Horse Manure Crisis. One authority predicted that if trends continued unabated, in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Fortunately, many unforeseen developments intervened between Grover Cleveland’s second term and D-Day.

I mention this because I heard again today the new eternal education question, “Has COVID-19 changed schools forever?”

Given what we know about life after the 1918 flu, and that universities have changed surprisingly little since the Renaissance, and that the human brain is a fairly traditional organ, I suspect the answer will be “no.” Human life mostly changes gradually over time, and sometimes in fits and starts, but rarely in the ways we anticipate.

That said, education activists, including school choice advocates, are seizing this unsettled moment to advance their causes.

I believe parents are sovereign in their children’s lives. This includes the right to determine how, where, and what their children learn. Does that mean, though, that everyone else should be required to foot the bill for each parent’s preferences?

We established tax-supported public schools so children could learn to be literate, informed citizens, and capable of a constructive role in governing our republic. Public schools were founded to serve this societal purpose, not to suit my parental agenda.

There is no unalienable right to a free public education tailored to anyone’s personal specifications. At the same time, no law forces parents to send their children to their local public school. Parochial, private, and home schools offer longstanding examples of “school choice.” The relevant question is whether communities should be required to pay the bills when parents opt for alternatives.

The debate can get heated. On the prochoice extreme, it’s silly to depict American public schools as a “relic of state socialism,” unless the Puritans who invented them were 17th century Marxists in disguise. Likewise, while some choice proponents do seem bent on deconstructing America’s public school system, endorsing vouchers and choice doesn’t automatically make you “anti-public education.”

Choice enthusiasts argue that public schools will improve if they’re forced to compete with other providers for tax-funded voucher dollars. While that capitalist business argument often has merit, the profit-motive isn’t always the most appropriate organizing principle. The root of ailing student achievement isn’t that teachers lack effort or incentives.

Some advocates contend that publicly-funded school choice would spur innovation. They envision “dream schools,” arts conservatories, yearlong intercontinental foreign language field trips, and homespun curricula based on “practical things like knitting and cooking.” Except most parents aren’t longing for more innovation. Their dream schools are fairly traditional places where their children learn to read and write in peace and safety.

If we’re talking about improving the education we deliver to the public, our practical focus should be on improving the institutions that most of the public will use.

Besides, while parents’ views are important, parents don’t pay for schools. We all do, regardless of whether we have children in those schools, because we believe it’s in society’s longterm best interest to educate and equip capable citizens. Parents should be free to choose a knitting school, but I don’t want to pay for a voucher that funds one. Do you?

Choice promoters promise that vouchers would make schools “accountable.” I don’t mind being held accountable for how well I teach. But don’t blame me for how well a child learns. Choice can’t make me accountable for his native intelligence, the hardships he’s suffered at home, his apathy, or the bewildering array of absurd regulations and constraints under which schools currently labor.

Public schools aren’t like businesses. We don’t get to choose our raw materials. They just show up in September. Schools aren’t solely or even chiefly responsible for children’s achievement, graduation rates or college readiness. That’s because schools aren’t chiefly responsible for America’s children.

Understandably, many parents would leap at the chance to voucher their children away from derelict buildings, overcrowded classrooms, serial disruption, and illegal weapons. Except how will choice give children a place to flee to? It’s not like we’ve got all these empty, safe schools waiting in the wings.

Even if we did, those new schools would inherit all the problems that plague schools today, which is why charter schools typically perform no better than their public counterparts. Any advantage enjoyed by charter schools probably lies in the fact that their parents and students cared enough about education to seek an alternative in the first place.

Choice advocates recommend excusing alternative schools from onerous regulations and from dealing with some of the students that burden our public system. Why not repeal these counterproductive policies and redress these conditions in public schools right now?

Instead, burgeoning regulations and the accelerating concentration of power in consolidated districts and state and federal bureaucracies increasingly rob local communities and parents of the choice and control they once exercised over their children’s education. That’s the school choice we’re losing that should concern us.

Even more concerning, we’re a divided nation in desperate need of a common bond and a shared body of knowledge. For all their faults, public schools offer one of the last venues where the heirs of our republic can develop a common language, put human faces on points of view, and bind up the partisan wounds that have brought us lower than any virus could.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor at editor@middletownpress.com.