A Liberal Argument for School Choice
By Bruce Goldberg
Most critics of America’s public schools attack from the right, in the name of Tradition and Authority. They complain that the schools are insufficiently rigorous in their methods, do not stress math and science, fail to inculcate "cultural literacy," emphasize individuality at the expense of discipline, and so on.
While I agree the public schools are failing, I disagree with the reasons these critics give. Nor do I share their criteria of educational success, which amount to little more than rising sat scores. No, America’s schools are failures because they systematically suppress children’s interests, values, and idiosyncratic potentials. The denial of individuality—the idea that everyone must follow the same general plan—lies at the core of the schools’ failure.
Still, whatever sort of changes one thinks would improve the schools, every would-be reformer must consider why the present system resists change when, even by its own standards, it is failing. On this issue, all varieties of reformers can agree: The school system resists change because it is a bureaucratic monopoly that displays the rigid, lethargic ineptitude of all such beasts. As David Boaz of the Cato Institute puts it, "The government schools have failed because they are socialist institutions. Like Soviet factories, they are technologically backward, overstaffed, inflexible, unresponsive to consumer demand, and operated for the convenience of top-level bureaucrats."
The same insight comes from an unlikely source, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "It’s time to admit," he writes, "that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
Even within the educational establishment itself, calls for change have been heard, but they have usually consisted of little more than educators exhorting each other to do better. "The public schools have to become committed to excellence," says Bill Honig, former California state superintendent of public instruction. "The quality of our schools must go up," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Still, things remain essentially as they have always been. With so little incentive to improve, innovation is resisted at every level of the system. Even such a relatively simple change as the introduction of a new textbook is almost certain to encounter determined resistance. And the teachers’ opposition is understandable: They have become accustomed to the old text, and they are not given any inducement to make the extra effort to learn the new one.
Indeed, there is little motivation for teachers to make any extra effort, to improve their teaching skills, to learn new methods of instruction, to spend more time with a child who needs help. There is no reward for superior performance, period. Nor is there any penalty for incompetence. "The problem in the present regime," writes one observer, "is that performance remains virtually irrelevant to teacher security and advancement. Salary schedules," Milton Friedman points out, "tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority, degrees received, and teaching certificates acquired than by merit." Some teachers, of course, are motivated by idealism, and they try harder for that reason. But they are a minority.
There are many other sources of inefficiency. To mention just one, school districts are under constant pressure to spend all the money allocated to them. If they don’t, it will go into the general fund or to another, less efficient district. And if a school district showed a surplus, "the excess funds might be subtracted from its allocation for the following year.… This common policy constitutes a strong deterrent against efficiency."
If history shows anything, it is that bureaucratic, monopolistic systems don’t work. That is why the school system displays "all the energy and creativity of Soviet agriculture." The first step toward improvement is to end the government monopoly in education and introduce competition into the field. Ted Kolderie, director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, points out that the basic question is not how to improve the present educational system; it is how to create a system that seeks improvement. For that, we must adopt a proposal made by John Stuart Mill almost 150 years ago:
If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments.
Changing to a competitive system would not be difficult. Numerous proposals already exist for funding a system of parental choice. Perhaps the best known is economist Milton Friedman’s voucher plan. Under that plan, parents of schoolchildren would receive an educational voucher from the government for an amount equal to the per-student expenditure on public schooling. The parents would then be free to use the voucher to pay for their child’s education at a school of their choice, public or private. Many other funding possibilities are discussed in detail in Myron Lieberman’s Privatization and Educational Choice.
A system of educational choice has many advantages. The most obvious is that instead of a stagnant, monopolistic regime that prevents others from trying to do better, a competitive environment exists that invites and encourages innovation. Another advantage is that it gives all parents an opportunity now open only to a few, namely the opportunity to select a school appropriate for their child. As Pete du Pont, former governor of Delaware and chairman of the Education Commission of the States, explains,
My wife, Elise, and I have four children. They’re all different, and they all had different educational needs. One is very bright and needed a rigorous academic environment. Another is dyslexic and needed a very special school. Another is scientifically inclined, the other more artistic; they needed schools that would suit them. Fortunately, Elise and I could afford to choose the school best suited to each of our children. All parents should have that opportunity. One cannot treat all children the same way because every child is different.
The most important advantage of a competitive system is the way it responds to the consumer: the family. As things stand now, parents who are dissatisfied with a school policy are virtually powerless. When they try to act on behalf of their children against a school policy, they are regarded as a nuisance. Suppose that a child, like one of Pete du Pont’s children, is scientifically inclined. Because he is not artistically inclined, he doesn’t like his art class. He’s carving a head of Geronimo, but it doesn’t look like anything. He can’t get it to look like anything and he doesn’t want to. He would just like to stop doing it and continue his investigation of paramecia, blood worms, frogs, fruit flies, rock formations, and constellations. Imagine that the parents come to school to request that the child be transferred to a different class where he would be more involved. Their chance of success is slim. The principal, or more likely some deputy, will say, "That’s not a valid reason." And that will be the end of it. Maybe, if they are especially courageous, the parents will persist a bit longer: "But Edward doesn’t like to whittle. Neither of us likes to whittle, for that matter. No one in our whole family is much of a whittler. Why should Edward have to do it? Forcing him to do something he finds so dull, day after day, does not seem to us to be a thoughtful way of dealing with a child." That too will have little effect. The school will say, "We don’t give special treatment" or, "This is not a department store."
If a school in a competitive atmosphere were to respond that way, the parents could take the child elsewhere. They would not have to accept such insensitive, peremptory treatment. Because they would have options, the parents would be in a position to insist that Edward’s character, interests, and needs be taken into account. They could decide that his being bored counted against the school. In the present system, the school counts it against Edward.
Under a scheme of competition, schools’ own survival will require them to be sensitive to parental concerns, with the result that greater attention will be given to the individuality of children. The school system will begin to recognize that different children have different needs.
Defenders of the present system challenge the idea of privatizing schools on a number of grounds. The most frequent argument is that a system of competing schools, financed by the government, would violate the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state. Since some parents would use the vouchers to send their children to parochial schools, it is argued, the government would be subsidizing religion. This objection does not have much weight. In the first place, there is no more reason for saying that the government would be subsidizing religion in this case than there is for saying it is subsidizing religion when it gives a welfare check to someone who uses part of the money to make a contribution to his church. The government would be subsidizing the education of children, some of whose parents might want that education to be in a sectarian institution.
In the second place, a school voucher system has long existed without being seen as a violation of the separation of church and state. At the end of World War II, under the G.I. Bill, returning veterans were given government money to pay for their college education, and it did not matter whether the recipient chose a church-related school, as many did. Indeed, the GI Bill is the model Friedman uses to explain his voucher plan.
Some critics have also objected that a choice system might eventually result in less freedom than at present because private schools that are now relatively free of government interference would, in the new system, find themselves facing more government regulation. Since the government would be involved in funding the system, this argument runs, it would have to establish criteria for what constitutes a school, which opens the possibility that all schools would have to adopt the same practices as the public ones.
The point is well taken. Any human institution can be corrupted. And so it might happen that competition would be introduced in name only. Not only might it happen, there will be pressure for it to happen. Government regulators tend to regulate as much as possible. But people will also see the connection between the degree of governmental control and the range of their choices. So some parents will be exerting a counterpressure to governmental attempts to impose uniformity. As they come to see the value of competition, more people will demand the same variety of choices in education that they are accustomed to in other areas of their lives.
Finally, the most fundamental objection to a choice system rests on the idea of parental choice itself. The schools, it is held, should not be responsive to parents. Parents shouldn’t be able to tell a school what class a child should or shouldn’t be in. Parents are not in a position to decide whether the school’s efforts are worthwhile. They are not experts. The education of a child is a matter for educational professionals. An English educator attacks parental choice head-on: "I’m not sure that parents know what is best educationally for their children. They know what’s best for them to eat. They know the best environment they can provide at home. But we’ve been trained to ascertain the problems of children, to detect their weaknesses, to put right those things that need putting right, and we want to do this freely, with the cooperation of parents and not under undue strains."
The assertion that experts in educational science know how to "put things right," or how to prevent a child’s having "a lopsided mind," is supposed to convince us that parents should not be making educational decisions. In this view, parents are no more in a position to question the judgment of educators than they are to question the judgment of a brain surgeon.
Schooling, then, consists in the giving of psychosocial treatment, in scientifically shaping the mind and character of a child. Parents are not simply sending their children to school to be taught. They are turning their children over to school to be constructed. As Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century "father" of the public school system, put it, "We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."
But educators’ claims to scientific knowledge have no foundation. There is no such thing as educational science, as the crumbled theories of earlier "experts" like Horace Mann and countless others caution us. Those who have wanted to control the lives of others have always claimed to know exactly what others need. They have always believed that their plans represent order and public-mindedness, as opposed to the chaos that would ensue without them. When Robert Owen defended imposing his way of thinking on the members of the (failed) utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, he claimed that the issue was "whether the character of man shall continue to be formed under the guidance of the most inconsistent notions, the errors of which for centuries past have been manifest to every reflecting rational mind; or whether it shall be moulded under the direction of uniformly consistent principles, derived from the unvarying facts of the creation."
The authors of all such views are deluded in thinking that their plans are "derived from the unvarying facts of the creation." "I have discovered what everyone needs," each one says. "My superior insight" or "my divine foresight" or "my research in the field" has "enabled me to ascertain what human beings require if they are to become rational, enlightened, civilized, autonomous." Every one of those mind-designing schemes, however, when looked at closely, has turned out to have little to do with either science or order. (The famed Horace Mann based his "science" of learning on phrenology, the now-discredited pseudo-science of bumps on the head.)
Schools have been imposing on children just the opposite of what the professional educators claim. According to the rhetoric of the public-school monopoly, today’s schools follow an ordered plan, constructed by experts, based on a scientific understanding of mental development. But even the most casual look at what the school system actually offers shows there is no ordered plan at all. "The public school curriculum," as critics David and Micki Colfax put it, consists of "nothing more than a hodgepodge of materials and assumptions resulting from the historical interplay of educational theories, political expedience, education fads and fashions, pretensions to culture, demagoguery, and demography."
In truth, there is no "public school curriculum." Every state, every county, every educational committee, has its own idea of how to shape people and form their character. Every educational theorist has his or her particular notion of what constitutes indispensable human knowledge.
Even if educational theory were not riddled with ridiculous pretension, it would still be a mistake to try to impose a blueprint for mental development on everyone. To do so is to ignore the truth of Pete du Pont’s observation that children all have different needs. As John Stuart Mill wrote, "There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns." "Human beings," he added, "are not like sheep; and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike."
Horace Mann’s central premise, writes his biographer Jonathan Messerli, was that "all children everywhere were essentially the same." Therefore, "all could be taught, once the correct techniques and goals were determined." He believed that "a system of instruction which would work for some, would work for all." In this way, today’s public school system, despite its lip service to diversity, is fundamentally at war with individuality. And that is why it is failing.
Bruce Goldberg’s book Why Schools Fail will be published by the Cato Institute this fall.
