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 seek to help make sense of the shifting landscape. Berner directs Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Education Policy, works on high-quality curriculum and civic preparation, is the author of Educational Pluralism and Democracy, and may be the nation’s leading authority on “educational pluralism.” Whatever you think of educational choice, our aim is to provide a more concrete, constructive discussion of what it means for students, families, and educators.
—Rick
Rick: Ashley, I’m delighted to kick off “Talking Choice” with you. This is a conversation that’s becoming timelier by the day, with Texas recently adopting a massive ESA program, Congress possibly including a $5 billion tax-credit scholarship program in this summer’s reconciliation bill, and reform Democrats saying it’s time for Democrats to explore the possibilities of vouchers and ESAs. But in this first installment, I want to talk a little more broadly about how we should be thinking about choice—especially in light of two big Supreme Court cases heard this term.
My view has long been that choice is hard-wired into education, which is why it’s weird that everyone keeps getting told to pick sides between school choice and their local schools. For many years, choice advocates have talked about “blowing up Zip code education” and opponents about shadowy conspiracies to promote “privatization.” But you know who doesn’t think this way? Actual parents. I mean, more than two-thirds of parents say they’re satisfied with their child’s public district school, and two-thirds or more endorse education savings accounts, school vouchers, and charter schools.
In other words, parents tend to like both their child’s public school and school choice policies. They don’t see a tension. How can that be? It’s not complicated, really. Parents like having options. They may seek alternatives when it comes to scheduling, school safety, or instructional approach. They want to be able to protect their kids from bullies or school practices they find troubling. At the same time, parents tend to value schools as community anchors and like their kid’s teachers. The idea that you have to choose one “side” just isn’t how real parents think. And if that’s the case when it comes to vouchers or ESAs, things get even more complicated when it comes to opting out of classes or faith-based education.
With that as a prelude, I want to turn to two Supreme Court cases—one pending and one decided in late May. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, a group of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, are seeking, on First Amendment grounds, to opt their early-elementary children out of required lessons that feature explicit books and materials. In St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, the question was whether Oklahoma’s ban on religious charter schools impinged on the free exercise of religion. The Supreme Court’s 4-4 deadlock means that Oklahoma’s ban will stand, but it does not establish a nationwide precedent on the broader question. What do you make of these cases?
Ashley: I entirely agree with you that there’s no inherent tension between regular district schools—meaning regular public schools—and copious choice options. The zero-sum-game approach some folks take is a byproduct of the U.S. funding only one type of school, the district school, for a hundred years. Using state funds to support anything else—charters, ESAs—is sometimes seen as illegitimate or worse.
The amazing thing to me is that most of our peer countries don’t pit entire school sectors against each other. That’s because most democracies fund a wide range of schools equally and hold them all to the same academic standard—which is what “educational pluralism” is all about. In the Netherlands, or the U.K., or Poland, for instance, there is no need to compare outcomes by sector. Catholic schools aren’t compared against secular prep schools, nor are Montessori schools compared with district schools. Americans may assume our system is different by virtue of the Establishment Clause in the Constitution—but that is not quite accurate. (Rick and I will dig into constitutional comparisons in another post.)
Another way of putting this is: Pluralistic school systems separate the ethos and the instructional content of funded schools. The ethos of each school should be clear and distinctive—think of a parent choosing a Waldorf preschool, a Jewish elementary school, a Montessori middle school, or a classical high school. The instructional core doesn’t need to be identical, but it should include meaningful shared content. I might not have to use the Norton Anthology of American Literature in 11th grade, for instance, but I might need to write about three American poets on an 11th grade for-stakes test. Or you might attend a state-funded secular school, but you’d still have to learn, and demonstrate knowledge of, what Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe.
So parents in most democracies are used to widespread school choice—so the St. Isidore question wouldn’t even come up—but they’re also used to their kids’ learning about a range of stuff they disagree with, so the Mahmoud type of case is much less likely. I can think of exceptions, of course, but the bottom line for me is that these two cases illustrate some of the distortions that follow from equating “public education” with one thing: the district school. This approach dominated the U.S. landscape between approximately 1890—when states departed from their previous norm of funding private schools—and 1990—when the nation’s first charter school was founded.
Rick: That’s a useful framing. I especially like it because one of the odd things about the choice debate in the United States is the degree to which it has featured hypocrisy in defense of “public education.” This exchange is taking me way back to what I was writing about 20-plus years ago. We often hear that “public schooling” is distinctive because public schools must serve every student. Except there are public schools—like Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia and the Bronx School of Science—that don’t accept every student. But they’re still regarded as “public schools.”
In the same way, inconvenient inconsistencies abound when it comes to governance, finance, public purpose, and more. It turns out that the bright lines of “publicness” are often more about vibes than specific practices. This was problematic because, for many decades, it meant we were in heated, vituperative fights that usually seemed to miss the point.
After all, parents have always been free to, in effect, choose schools when buying a home. It’s not controversial when in-the-know parents choose teachers by leaning on principals to get the “good” 2nd grade teacher or hire lawyers who get districts to pay $50,000 a year for a special education placement in a pricey private school. Teachers are celebrated for creating one-off programs by navigating around the district bureaucracy. But when advocates champion charter schools, vouchers, or ESAs, so that more parents can more easily choose schools—and teachers can more readily grow those programs—these same behaviors suddenly become controversial and evidence of nefarious agendas.
Look, as I see it, what matters is behavior—not labels. If choosing schools or teachers is a bad thing, then the opponents of choice should make their case, even when those behaviors are furtive or informal. But if these behaviors are OK some of the time, I’ve spent decades asking for explanations as to why they’re suddenly problematic when they’re transparent, formal, and wear new labels (like “charter” or “voucher”). Happily, in the wake of pandemic school insanity, it seems we’ve finally crossed into an era where parental choice is increasingly an assumed part of the landscape. That may allow us to set aside the inconsistent sniping and focus on the available options, the quality of choices, and the bottlenecks that can get in the way of more good choices. That strikes me as a very healthy shift. Ashley, what say you?
Ashley: I like the way you describe “behavior over labels.” Put differently: Wealthy parents always have options that low-income parents don’t—from moving to a “good” school district, enrolling their kids in private schools, or purchasing high-end tutors during the pandemic.
But all parents want what’s best for their kids. The question isn’t what wealthy parents can do, but how easy we make it for all families to act in their children’s best interests. This means not only funding “school choice” but also supporting school transportation, helping parents navigate the system, and ensuring young people have the background knowledge they need for social mobility and civic participation.
This background knowledge is really, really important. I will never forget living in the U.K. for my doctoral work at Oxford. My girls were in elementary school and had a wide array of school options, most of which were funded by the government and, as such, were free of charge for all families. There were two Catholic schools within walking distance; Anglican schools all over the city; several Jewish schools inspired by the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ efforts; secular schools; Islamic schools. At the same time, all schools had to provide meaningful content, subject by subject, grade by grade. My daughters knew more about the Greek and Roman Empires in 1st grade than most U.S. high school students! They knew more about coniferous and deciduous trees in 2nd grade than I ever learned. Memorizing poems and reciting them by heart was a matter of great pride across the school and culminated in a competition attended by the entire community. My daughters’ school was not unique; their friends in other schools had similar content, even if their teachers used different resources and even though the schools might be Islamic, secular, or Montessori.
Can we imagine a world where we help all schools improve and all students succeed, rather than playing zero-sum games? I can because I have experienced it—as have parents in 80% of the world’s school systems. That generous space, in which we don’t weaponize research or demean entire school sectors but rather promote parental choice and academic excellence, is a goal worth having. The post-pandemic momentum is taking us in the right direction, for sure. I just hope we don’t relinquish our hopes for academic excellence along the way.
