Education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers, charter schools, hybrid home schooling, tutoring, course choice, dual degrees, and microschools are transforming K–12 in profound ways. In “Talking Choice,” Ashley Berner and I try to make sense of the shifting landscape. Berner directs Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Education Policy and is one of the nation’s leading authorities on “educational pluralism.” Whatever you think of educational choice, we seek to provide a more concrete, constructive discussion of what it means for students, families, and educators.
—Rick
Ashley: I’m struck by how frequently the choice debate is dominated by urban myths, dubious claims, and misinformation. The big one is this: I wish Americans knew that most of the world’s school systems fund a wide variety of schools alongside “district” schools. This summer, watching the breathless fight over the federal scholarship tax credit in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” I kept thinking how most people in free nations would regard this as much ado about nothing.
Growing up in the U.S., I assumed that “public” schools and “private” schools exist in a rigid “either/or” binary. It was a huge shock to learn, during my doctoral studies, that most countries don’t operate that way. They don’t fund just one kind of school and call it a day. Parents in the U.K., Norway, Denmark, Poland, Indonesia, Chile, and many provinces of Canada, for example, can find a publicly funded school that fits their values or pedagogical preferences. In fact, according to UNESCO, more than 80% of the world’s school systems leverage public-private partnerships to educate young people. Though the funding mechanisms differ from place to place, in most countries, a broad range of schools fall under the umbrella of “public education.” If you walked up to your average Dutch or Swiss citizen and asked, “What’s public education?” they might literally not understand your question.
Perhaps this is completely naïve, but I had imagined that just knowing about the near ubiquity of “school choice” around the world would help Americans relax about private school scholarships. If it’s normal around the world for governments to work with civil society organizations—or “nonstate actors”—to educate the next generation, why shouldn’t we? Do we have to spend time pitting “public” and “private” schools against one another?
But changing the cultural framework isn’t just about persuasion. “Culture” in this sense refers to the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape the terms of debate and dictate which laws are even plausible. Culture is prior to law and politics; it moves much slower than an election cycle. As the maven of social movements Derrell Bradford said, “Culture is all the decisions that were made before you got here.”
Pointing out that most countries take educational pluralism for granted may help some Americans to support vouchers or tax credits. But the real game-changer will be the growing presence of new school institutions. Young kids growing up in states that enable charters, private schools, micro-schools, home schools, and the like will have a completely different “picture” of public education from what I did. And if such models demonstrably result in better outcomes and become stable institutions, then we’re probably looking at a paradigm shift.
What do you think, Rick? Any value in raising the comparative issue? If so, for whom and in which context?
Rick: This is a terrific topic, I’m glad you raised it. First off, you’re right about the knowledge problem. For instance, this comes up when it comes to school spending. How do I know this? Well, when you ask Americans how much their state’s schools spend, they think schools spend much less than they actually do. When given the actual figures, people were much less likely to believe that funding was “too low.” Now, I don’t know how much a given school should spend per pupil, but I’m confident these decisions are going to be smarter when informed by hard numbers and not fake news.
So, your point about the international prevalence of choice-based arrangements is a good one. At the same time, I’d note that there are a lot of European norms—for example, those regarding taxation, speech restrictions, or regulation—that I find misguided. The fact that Europeans might accept them doesn’t mean I feel obliged to do so. And a discussion of the educational pluralism we see in Belgium or France also needs to acknowledge that their private schools accept a degree of governmental intrusion that many Americans would find unacceptable. You know all this and take care to point it out, and anyone discussing such examples needs to be equally scrupulous. If we’re looking at arrangements elsewhere as a convention, we can’t caricature policies or hand-wave away inconvenient realities.
Now, I think you’re spot-on when it comes to how the increasing ubiquity of educational choice in the U.S. will change the way parents and voters think about it. On a political level, it’s a truism that once there are real beneficiaries of a choice program, families who put a face on it and speak up for it, it’s much tougher for lawmakers to vote against it. But you’re suggesting there’s also a cultural dimension, where people become more comfortable with new policy arrangements as they become familiar with them. That sounds right. Watching politicians promise to reject even modest, prudential adjustments to Social Security, Medicare, or the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget how incredibly controversial these programs once were. In politics, the facts on the ground have an uncanny ability to rewire public preferences.
I guess, for me, one of the big questions is what Americans should know about the impacts of choice on communities and community institutions. After all, one reason choice has often met resistance is that schools are community anchors, with an outsized social role (including stuff like high school hoops in Indiana or Friday night football in Texas). This is true everywhere, of course, but especially in less densely packed exurbs and rural communities. What should people know that might either alleviate or sharpen concerns about what choice means for their communities?
Ashley: We can’t pretend that an expanding choice landscape doesn’t bear some risks for some schools, whether private, charter, or district. But the goal of education isn’t to preserve a particular type of school, but rather to ensure that students are learning.
On rural schools in particular, though, enabling choice doesn’t mean inevitably gutting rural districts. Look at Florida. A 2023 report on Florida’s rural schools noted that, yes, nonpublic enrollment was growing in rural communities, but so was district school enrollment. And for those who worry that there simply aren’t enough private options in rural counties to go around, Florida’s experience shows that small, private schools can spring up to meet demand, especially for rural students who have special learning needs. Outside high-choice, high-growth states like Florida, it isn’t yet clear that we’ll see widespread rural take-up. Some research finds rural families to be much less interested in charters and vouchers than their urban and suburban peers, even after learning more about them.
Most importantly, enabling rural school choice doesn’t alleviate our responsibility to ensure that rural district schools—which enroll almost 20% of America’s students—are top-notch. Rural schools may not be able to recruit armies of new teachers or spend high dollar amounts on Chromebooks. That said, they can focus on the academic core and they can give teachers the tools to deliver outstanding instruction and prepare students for college and a career. One of the most powerful talks I ever heard came from Clint Satterfield, a rural superintendent in Trousdale County, Tenn. Clint catapulted his schools into the spotlight—and his students into great success—by doubling down on high-quality instructional materials. Indeed, many of the Southern states that have shown academic strength post-COVID—for example, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi—have championed that strategy.
The evidence that high-quality materials is the right “play” is so compelling that 14 states have sustained efforts to make the best curriculum choices the obvious ones. This creates a real opportunity for school choice advocates and district devotees alike to ask the same questions, such as: “What are we doing to ensure that all teachers, in all schools, are delivering academic excellence?” “Is our state giving parents mission-critical info about high-quality curriculum and why it matters?” And to your point about rural communities, “Are you connecting rural principals, teachers, and parents around academic rigor?”
This gets us to another myth, which is that academic oversight or even academic transparency is deleterious. But just like choice itself, it depends! Policy details matter.
Rick: Boy, are you right about that. And I think that may be the biggest thing the education debates miss. We have a habit of arguing about bumper stickers: We debate “choice,” “merit pay,” “accountability,” and all the rest as if these were simple things. But they’re actually labels thrown over a huge variety of arrangements. A merit-pay program that offers a small cash award for moving test scores is very different from one that gives raises for teachers to take on an expanded job description. A voucher program operating in a community with a lot of school options is different from one operating in a community with limited options. And, to bring us full circle, smart decisions about policy or practice require wrestling with those particulars, not just reacting to—or reciting—slogans.
