Why Oppose Choice?

Though this reason seems to be seldom voiced, it is still on many people’s minds. The idea that we cannot trust parents to make good choices seems—well, it is—paternalistic. We are then confessing that (often lower income) parents, particularly those living in districts or neighborhoods with problematic schools, are unable to recognize a high-quality school. Meanwhile, they are making all sorts of decisions each day about food, shelter, auto purchases, and jobs, and presumably we “let them” (doesn’t this sound paternalistic?) make those decisions. But not school. Such a view is condescending.

 

Will parents make mistakes? Of course. We have to compare the outcome of market schooling with the reality of government schooling, not the shortcomings of peoples’ choices with an imaginary perfectly-run state system.

 

Here it is: THE principal reason why intellectuals skewer school choice. Defenders of state schooling fear a lack of cohesion in society; and, like everyone else, they have their own vision of an ideal society. But their vision tends to be profoundly secular. They suspect that parental choices, particularly those made by parents with religious convictions, will foster opposition to today’s increasingly relativistic culture that idolizes tolerance. Think of the narrow visions of parents who choose private schools! Harvard’s Education Professor Meira Levinson suggests that “the state is justified . . . in helping children to develop the capacity for autonomy, even against parents’ and children’s expressed wishes.”

 

Boston University’s Charles Glenn casts this view as religious injustice, akin to racial intolerance of the past.

 

To a degree, school choice opponents may have a valid point: it’s quite possible that a cohesive, unifying social fabric (buttressed by a modern postmodern relativism) is fostered by today’s common school system. But this raises some questions:

 

—Isn’t this vision religiously intolerant? Wasn’t our country founded by people escaping religious intolerance?

 

—If our system is educating the masses for our “democratic system,” how well is it doing? Why have test scores stagnated while spending and bureaucracy compounded?

 

—Haven’t we experienced increasing social divisions in the last 20 years? This implies that state-run systems have not really ameliorated those divisions. In fact, might resentments over inferior schools fuel social divisions?

 

—And what sort of unity are we hoping to create? What sorts of shared values should all American students have? There are so many questions.

 And—here’s the rub—who gets to answer these questions?

 

Of course, there are dozens of other questions, and I think we need to admit that a one-size-fits-all educational system cannot align with everyone’s values, because we have divergent values. America is a diverse country, and always has been.

 

In Federalist #10, James Madison addressed the issue of factions—groups, either a minority or a majority of the populace, that coalesce, either from self-interest or passions, and harm the rights of others. They are bad.

 

He thought congressional majorities would outvote minority factions; he was wrong on this point, because of the expansion of democracy and the rise of special interest groups in the past couple of centuries.

 

Madison was correct, however, about majority factions: these are equally dangerous, impossible to prevent in a nation that values individual rights, but it is possible to limit their influence. He suggested that an “extensive republic”—a country that, frankly, is large, encompassing a variety of people, religions, beliefs, and lifestyles—would be the best defense against these truly scary factions. Diversity limits factions. In an extensive republic, “A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, [okay, we do have all three of these…] will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.”

 

Remember: some of us are bearded Harley-riding Hell’s Angels, some frequent quilting bees, some are Bible-quoting evangelicals, others hell-denying atheists, others Zen Buddhists, some classical music fans, others rappers, some Packers fans, some Bears fans, and…the list goes on. We have some serious, and wonderful, diversity in the United States.

 

So if a robust educational choice system does bring about a greater flowering of different opinions (which is a large if) perhaps that is good? And if one worries about this diversity expanding, and the only “glue” that holds Americans together is a state school, what sort of “Ideal American Citizen” must we shape?

 

Who gets to decide this “ideal mindset”? The majority? (who happen to have matriculated in public schools.) And will this not involve a good number of disputes, or—perhaps more likely—various islands of state-run schools with wildly conflicting ideas about what sort of citizen to shape, each shaping their own ideal? I imagine that a rural public school in Mississippi is a bit different than a public school in San Francisco.

In the end, then, no matter what we do, we don’t have that alignment of cultures. This is not to say that we don’t need to have basic agreement on fundamental values that have been an intrinsic and enduring part of our society—perhaps summarized by the Pledge of Allegiance, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights.

 

Regardless, the real value of school choice is that it aligns with human dignity: the ability to use your own resources to educate your own children in the way that you prefer, which is the beauty of your own choice to send your children to a school such as Brookfield Academy.