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The Other Good Reason for School Choice
A new worry about the quality of public education reinforces the case for empowering parents to send their children to any school they wish, public or private.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates detailed the problem last February in an impassioned speech before a meeting of the National Governors Association. Using words like “appalled” and “ashamed,” Gates argued that, not only do poor and minority children receive an inferior education, but the public system as a whole is “obsolete,” harming all students, even the privileged.
Comparing today’s high school education to a 50-year-old mainframe computer, Gates said that our schools were created “to meet the needs of another age.” He predicted that, until we reinvent them, “we will keep limiting -- even ruining -- the lives of millions of Americans every year.”
In the months since Gates raised the issue, opinion writers across the political spectrum have echoed the call to rethink the fundamental organization of public schooling. The future of education “requires a set of big ideas,” wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on April 29. Saying that only 12 percent of U.S. seniors are proficient in science, conservative Daniel Gelernter declared in the May 13 Los Angeles Times that “public schools have lost the right to exist.”
What strikes so many observers of public schooling is that in the 165 years since Horace Mann’s invention of our current educational system, the nature of manufacturing has evolved from reliance on physical labor to sophisticated industrial robots, the nature of military service from riding horses to mastering “smart” weapons, and the nature of accounting from paper journal keeping to the use of computerized spreadsheets.
Yet in all that time the underlying structure of public education, with its fixed grade levels, uniform class structure, and one-size-fits-all curriculum, has remained essentially unchanged. In truth, the assumption that we best educate kids by herding them by age into classrooms in public buildings for nine months of the year, thirteen years in a row, rests on remarkably little scientific evidence.
On those rare occasions when relevant studies are undertaken, the results give little support to mainstream practices. In 1999, for example, Dr. Lawrence Rudner of the University of Maryland made international headlines with research showing that the best educated pupils attend neither suburban public schools nor elite private academies, but home schools managed by say-at-home mothers with no teaching credential of any kind.
It is tempting to blame our antiquated system on the foot-dragging of teacher unions, but the resistance to reform is much deeper and more broadly based. The problem in many American communities is that the public school, as outmoded as it may be, has nevertheless become the organizing center of civic and social life -- so much so that most people are incapable of imagining anything different.
For students raised on Hollywood films and adolescent soap operas on UPN and WB, the high school has become the indispensable stage on which teenage emotions are to be expressed.
As for the parents, politicians can no more imagine life without local boards of education and PTAs than realtors can appraise homes without reference to the variety of sports teams and extra-curricular activities at district high schools. Gates himself warned that some of the strongest resistance to education reform comes from the legions of fathers more invested in coaching baseball than in improving student math scores.
But if we are psychologically incapable of designing a better educational system, at least we can do the next best thing: empower parents with enough choices so that the trial and error of individual decision-making will inevitably point us in new directions.
If we already knew how to improve education, explains Paul Peterson, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “it would be easy to fix, but because we don’t know what works, that’s why we have to have competition. That’s why we want to let 1000 flowers bloom. [To] see what happens on the ground.”
Advocates of school choice have long argued that public funding of private and even home-based education would help poor, minority, and learning-disabled students; but it is now clear that there is another justification.
Only by injecting more options into our ossified educational system can we generate needed, if unpredictable, changes for all.
Dr. Lewis M. Andrews is Executive Director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Inc. at Trinity College, a Connecticut research and educational institute.
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The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is a nonpartisan educational and research organization founded more than two decades ago. Today, the Yankee Institute's mission is to "promote economic opportunity through lower taxes and new ideas for better government in Connecticut." The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, Inc. is classified by the IRS as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Contributions are deductible to the extent allowed by law.
