School Choice and the Common Good of All Children

The United States justifiably celebrates its pluralism. The mandate to find unity in diversity—e pluribus unum—is predicated not on the premise that all peculiarities of creed or color must be washed away; instead, it insists that all such cultural and social differences must be respected. Part and parcel of this freedom is the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. Like all rights, this one carries with it a duty: to prepare the child adequately for participation in society by being attentive to technical and life skills as well as moral formation.

Yet, this right has been imperfectly recognized for some time. Pursuing the goal of universal education, a worthy end in itself, nineteenth-century reformers gradually concentrated in city, state, and national governments the funding and control of what had been a predominantly non-governmental, disparate, and radically local regime of education. Immediately, the move toward unitary systems fueled conflict over a neuralgic point of America’s pluralist experiment: Protestant-Catholic relations. Controversy over schooling was one of the combustible ingredients leading to explosions of violence in cities such as Philadelphia and New York during the 1830s and 1840s.

A modus vivendi was reached when Catholics determined to build their own parochial system. The Supreme Court guaranteed the legality of the Catholic parochial system in its 1925 Pierce decision, and soon Catholics in the United States would build the largest private school system in the world. At its height in 1965, the system was comprised of 13,500 schools serving 5.6 million students across primary (4.5 million) and secondary levels.

Meanwhile, battles over public school curricula continued, as constituencies of many varieties perceived that what they viewed as an appropriate education for their children was not served by a public system that inexorably drifted toward a lowest-common-denominator form of education. Some religious groups such as Lutherans and Dutch Reformed began or maintained their own schools, and parents seeking social status or demanding rigorous standards enrolled their children in private academies.

Thus, the pluralist ideal survived but in a deformed shape. The right of parents to direct their children’s education was recognized in theory, but in practice every citizen was compelled to pay for the government school system. The result was an arrangement unjust at its core. Parents devoted to a particular form of education for religious or other reasons might choose to sacrifice other goods to fund their children’s education outside of the government system. For wealthy families, the choice might come easily; for most, the decision was difficult. The incentive to participate in the government system was strong, and genuine freedom in education remained an elusive ideal.

We have thus come to the present, a hybrid system of private schools increasingly off-limits to the working and even middle classes and state schools plagued by inefficiencies, inequities, and in some cases, abject failure. By no means does this generalization denigrate the good work that thousands of educators in both private and public systems do every day. Some religious schools strive ardently to keep open the prospect of a first-rate education for students of poor parents and challenging backgrounds. Some public schools provide outstanding academic and extracurricular opportunities for their students. Yet, too many students are, despite political rhetoric and flawed legislation, “left behind.”

Conscientious parents naturally assert their freedom whenever given the opportunity. School district choice among public systems is extremely popular. Private school spots available through vouchers in locales such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., have been grasped as quickly as they appear. Charter schools have exhibited some widely publicized hazards, but on the whole they have been successful, an affordable alternative to traditional public schools. Finally, an increasing number of parents have opted out of conventional educational models altogether: Some two million students were homeschooled in 2008.

Positive developments in the political and legal culture of education have permitted these exercises of liberty, resulting in tremendous gains in parent satisfaction, cost efficiency, and most importantly, student achievement. Still, old ways of thinking, archaic prejudices, and special interests remain formidable obstacles on the path to further progress. To encourage continued improvements in education—in whichever setting that may occur—parents must be granted greater control over and responsibility for their schooling choices. At its root, this means breaking the stranglehold on education dollars that government systems currently enjoy. It means returning control of that money to parents.

Obviously Catholic and other private schools stand to gain from such reform, but proposing it is far from special pleading. The appeal and urgency of school choice lies precisely in its implications for the common good of all children—regardless of religious persuasion or socio-economic status. Indeed, the exact outcome of extending educational freedom is hard to predict: that is the nature of freedom. What is certain is that the worst elements of the current state-run systems would not be tolerated, for no parent wants her child to fail.

Returning financial control to parents sets in motion a series of favorable developments: Parents demand excellence of the schools; administrators demand excellence of the teachers; students and teachers alike thrive on the fertilizer of high expectations. The potential of parental responsibility and educational choice has already been demonstrated; it remains to enshrine these concepts in the nation’s culture and law.

Some skeptical observers may suspect that school choice is but a stalking horse for public funding of religious institutions. They may guess that tax breaks for tuition, for example, are intended primarily or even exclusively to enhance the bottom line of private schools. In a climate of public schooling challenges, when large numbers of students are failing to achieve basic competency, they wonder, should we not focus our resources on public schools?

Public education is, indeed, facing its own crisis, one differing in some ways from that confronting Catholic education. More than 25 percent of public school students fail to graduate high school, but this figure masks a dramatic socio-economic divergence: The dropout rate for poor students is ten times that of wealthier students. Public schooling in the United States is thus highly stratified. Good districts enjoy healthy levels of funding through property taxes, while the tax base of poor districts leads to lower levels for the most challenging student populations. Yet, funding has become the focus of accusations of inequity to the detriment of the debate over improving public education. The per capita spending per student, even in poor districts, far exceeds the per capita spending at Catholic schools, yet Catholic schools enjoy better outcomes on a range of indicators.

There are a number of factors contributing to this relative inefficiency in the public system. State and federal regulations on everything from classroom safety to teacher qualifications, while well intended, are excessive and do not adequately permit for local variation or administrative judgment. Teacher unions secure pay scales higher than a market rate (and significantly higher than most private schools). Lacking a rational system of incentives for cutting costs, waste is endemic in many public schools.

Like Catholic schools, public education has been a highly successful means of enabling Americans of every socio-economic and ethnic background to gain the knowledge and skill necessary to be productive citizens. Yet, if American education is to succeed for future generations of its students, reform and improvement are necessary. In too many cases, public schools have too little to show for the resources that they absorb.

In this context, school choice represents a promising method for spurring improvement. Most parents desire solid education for their children in a safe and supportive environment. Too many public schools do not provide such an environment. Available evidence suggests that competition among individual schools and among districts encourages academic improvement. Despite heated rhetoric to the contrary, it is not true that school choice measures drain public schools of resources. Implementation of choice, because of the positive incentives it frames, results in a more efficient allocation of available educational resources, benefiting all students.

Competition has in some circles accumulated negative connotations. It is associated with a cutthroat or winner-takes-all mentality. Yet, there is a more benign understanding of competition that recognizes it as a useful motivation in human endeavor. Countless teachers and institutions throughout the history of schooling have recognized its potential, staging various kinds of contests ranging from quiz bowls to science fairs to academic honor rolls. Conducted in the proper spirit, these contests are not harmful, elevating those who perform well at the expense of those who do not. Instead, they encourage all students to strive for excellence, recognizing that while not all will attain it, all will benefit from the exercise. Our educational systems would do well to restore this sense of competition to the educational enterprise as a whole. School choice is one reform that can contribute to this end.

A final mark in favor of school choice is that it respects the pluralism inherent in contemporary culture. Diversity raises understandable concerns about assimilation and the creation of a common culture adequate to restrain the potentially damaging centrifugal forces of ethnic and religious tensions. Yet, fear of difference goes too far when it demands uniformity, and nowhere is enforcement of such uniformity as tempting or as easily accomplished as in government-managed primary and secondary education.

In light of this, the proliferation of genuine diversity in education that would almost certainly result from a vigorous implementation of school choice would better honor the rightful autonomy of individuals and families. Devoutly religious parents would not be forced to choose between an education that integrates their theological views but at the cost of painful financial sacrifice and a free school that undermines or at least fails to buttress the principles that they hold dear. Even with respect to purely academic pursuits, diversity could be honored. While a genuine education must cover certain basic fields, students might legitimately choose schools with particular strength in various areas such as science, visual arts, or literature.

The benefits of school choice are many, which should not be surprising. When parents are encouraged to take responsibility for their children’s education, both parents and students begin to view education in a different light. Shifting parents and children from a position of dependency on government to a position of empowerment promotes a vision of persons as participants in society, rather than observers or dependents.

There will, of course, be parents who neglect their responsibilities. There will always be roles for charitable institutions and governments to ensure that everything possible is done to given children of negligent parents the opportunity to excel. This is hardly a strike against school choice: Even now the parental background of students plays a major if not decisive role in the potential for successful completion of students’ educational regimen. Policy should be formulated to support good parents and encourage mediocre ones; it should not be designed under the assumption that all parents are deficient.

School choice, then, far from being a concession to special interests, is a plan for reforming troubled schools, rewarding excellent schools, and empowering parents and students to take responsibility for seeking and attaining the education they deem necessary and appropriate for participation in a contemporary world. It is good for individuals, and it is good for society.

Excerpted from Catholic Education and the Promise of School Choice (January 2010), a new volume in the Acton Institute’s Christian Social Thought Series. Kevin Schmiesing is a research fellow at the Acton Institute.

I read articles like this and I always think that the system we have regarding school funding in Australia is a pretty good one.

Private schools receive a level of funding per student based on the average income level of parents (in actual fact, it’s based on the probable income given where the parents live for privacy reasons, but overall it probably works out pretty close). The wealthier the parents, the less the funding - but it’s always at least a couple of thousands per child per year, and for private schools serving less well off families, it’s considerably more.

But it’s still significantly less than government schools get per student.

Overall, on average, each child in a government school gets about $10,000 a year. Each child in a private school gets about $5,000 a year averaged out.

And remember private schools serving poorer communities get more and those serving the well off get less.

So a private school serving a poorer community might be getting $7,000 a year in government funding. While a wealthy school (and I teach in one so I should declare an interest) might get $2,000 or so.

What does this do?

Well, the most important thing it does is make cheap private schools viable. There are a few private high schools in Australia that have fees as low as about $1,000 a year, and quite a few with fees below $3,000. That’s a lot of money, but it’s achieveable by a lot of families. And that makes genuine school choice much more possible for far more families than if the funding wasn’t there - $1,000-$3,000 in fees +$7,000 in government funding giving $8,000-$10,000 a year per kid. A school can be run for that quite effectively.

And this means state schools - government schools - do have to lift their game and compete. Because if they don’t, they will lose students. Sure, there are some people who’ll never go private, and some who never can - but enough can that schools do have to take account of it.

It also makes it easier for interested groups to start their own schools. Religious groups, schools with particular ideas on teaching philosophy (Montessori, etc). People can get together and realistically start a school to serve their needs as a group. You’re not stuck with the state schools.

33% of Australian children are in non-government schools. A third. By the time you get to the last two years of school - the most critical in terms of a students future options - it’s 40%.

Genuine choice.

And here’s the best part. We’ve managed to convince the socialists it’s a good thing. Why?

Because when private school kids take $5,000 of government money and state school kids take $10,000, every single kid at a private school is saving the government $5,000. Money that can be put into the state schools to make sure that they are good enough that private education is a choice, not a necessity.

Years ago, during a funding dispute, the Bishop of Goulburn told Catholic families to pull their kids out of the Catholic schools and enrol them in the local state schools. Governments got the message.

Everybody who pays taxes helps pay for schools. Our system means that those of us who send our kids to private schools get some direct benefit out of that money.

"Diversity" is Orwellian speak.

Liberals trumpet diversity but what they mean by it is not a diversity of individuals, indeed, they do not mean "diversity" by any commonly accepted definition of the word. What liberal means when he says "diversity" is primarily a racial categorization and sometimes a gender, ethnic, religious, age, or sexual preference categorization. These categories are invoked to achieve the opposite of "diversity" they are invoked to impose "norming" which is a homogenization of results according to a scripted standard. They are invoked to shut down dissent or debate without which there can be no diversity.

By invoking these categories liberals can smother what they fear the most, diversity of opinion. In fact, liberals oppose school vouchers expressly because they say children should be "socialized" in a public school environment for the good of the whole of society. Liberals are always good at fashioning euphemisms to disguise their true intentions. Liberals want kids in schools where they could be indoctrinated by liberals. They want to "norm" every generation of American kids. Why we think that our teachers whose union has just highly recommended Saul Alinsky's, Rules for Radicals,as it's most important book to read, are fit to indoctrinate our children remains a mystery of the modern public relations age.

We know that teachers unions are adamantly against school vouchers which, of course, are the most effective way to introduce choice and real diversity into our public school system. We know that teachers fear they would be adversely economically affected just as the tort lawyers fear tort reform and lobby against it. But I think there is also a more visceral motivation prompting teachers to oppose school choice.

We know that climate change is not about the environment because liberals simply will not abide the building of nuclear power stations. We know the healthcare insurance reform is not about reforming the industry before Medicare bankrupts the whole country, as mooted by Obama, because the Democrats simply will not abide reform of medical tort law. We know that their obdurate support of a failing public school system is not about diversity because they will not abide school vouchers.

We can expect after a season of healthcare reform provided by these Democrats to see doctors producing patients who are in about as good shape physically as the students turned out by our teachers who cannot read, write, or cipher. The argument of healthcare is who owns our own bodies, ourselves or the government? The argument concerning vouchers ultimately is over who owns our kids, their parents or the apparatchiks who staff these indoctrination centers?

I think we have to be intellectually honest with ourselves over this issue. In doing so, we will understand the mindset of the leftists who condemn our children, generation after generation, to normalized mediocrity. First, a voucher program implies that African-American kids will be financially enabled to escape the ghetto and that means that they necessarily can intrude on what hitherto has been inviolate white suburbia. Second, we must come to grips with the reality that Islam is a growing faith within America and a voucher program implies public subsidy of what might amount to schools of jihad in our midst. This is exactly how the left views homeschoolers who are Christian or Christian schools themselves-as counterrevolutionaries at worst or as reactionaries at best-and that is the visceral and therefore more real motivation.

We have besides these men---descended by blood from our ancestors---among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe---German, Irish, French and Scandinavian---men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

I disagree with your assertion, Gonzoll.

This editorial is fine, if you chop the first paragraph off, and throw away everything from the heading “Genuine Diversity” down. Everything else about “choice” is fine with me.

“Diversity” is a despicable, divisive, destructive liberal concept in the implementation, no matter how good the intentions. Liberals are always right there with “good intentions”.

One of the main reasons this country has not been Balkanized since its inception is the fact that for most of our history, we have treated the concept of being an “American” seriously, and that meant giving your heart and your allegiance to the USA, not to your country or culture of origin. While there have always been those who gripped their former country tenaciously, more often than not people kept that part to themselves and became publicly, and in their dealings with others, Americans.

What made this country great was not that people came to this country and tried to drag their country along with them. What made this country great was not the people who came to this country and clung to their own culture, refusing to integrate into a country that neither wanted to “integrate” nor was set up to “integrate”.

What made this country great was the people who came here to escape from the things in their countries that impinged on their personal freedoms.

What made this country great was the people who came here with the understanding that our country provided an economic, capitalist society where you could make enough money to feed, clothe and shelter your family, and that all you had to do was work hard and you could make it.

What made this country great were the families who came here, and the mother told her sons “There will be no ‘wearin of the green’ in this house” and fathers who insisted to their families ‘only english will be spoken by my children-we will be Americans’.

This author did the premise of his editorial a grave injustice by including an irritating de rigueur paean to diversity. It is irrelevant to education, wrong, and just plain destructive. The fact that he felt obliged to give it a nod means one of two things: He either believes it, or knows that, in the same way any nature researcher today must pay homage to global warming in any research, any educator must do the same for “diversity”.

What crap.

This is not directed at you, by the way. This is directed at the author and the concept.

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