Americans have generally embraced the premise that choice is good in education, but we are engaged in a long-lasting war over how to deliver it. This war has many fronts: We fight over the expansion of charter schools and talk past each other on questions of their freedom and funding; we enhance the growth of online education while doing little to change a model of public school governance that remains rooted in the 19th century; we linger over the political divide that insists on drawing lines separating “public” and “private,” even as those words have become less relevant in evolving education systems that defy traditional labels.
How do we categorize, or properly finance, the smorgasbord of options available to today’s student?
How do we categorize, or properly finance, the smorgasbord of options available to today’s student? And how do we enhance the debate to rethink how we administer a public education? The resistance to customized forms of schooling is not new. Many a well-meaning principal and superintendent fought back-to-basics schools and International Baccalaureate programs and gifted education for fear they would dilute other public schools. But too many of today’s well-meaning school leaders and policymakers remain stuck in those old conversations.
Furthermore, our dialogue remains muddy with assumptions that keep us entangled in old fears about vouchers, charter schools, virtual education or, more particularly, homeschooling. And that does little to enrich the support systems that allow, for instance, a child to take Advanced Placement and honors courses at a magnet school in the morning before taking courses through an online learning provider in the afternoon. What of the talented low-income child in the inner city who receives the value of a rigorous Catholic education with the help of a publicly funded voucher in grades K-8 but who, for high school, chooses the IB program in her district? Has the state failed to deliver her a “uniform” public education?
By now, traditional schools should have learned to co-exist with the menu of public and publicly funded private options that have proliferated during the past two decades. And states and school districts should have learned better from the promise that comes with the autonomy of charter academies without spending so much effort to slow their expansion and dampen their unique characteristics.
At the same time, school choice supporters too often dismiss concerns of accountability and quality with an arrogance that is tone deaf to the educational demands and expectations of the 21st century. In their fervor to free the education market from more Byzantine regulatory conditions, the more passionate advocates for choice sometimes forget that public education is in the public interest. The success of their cause depends more on the visible development of the student and the visible empowerment of the parent than on the invisible hand of the free market.
This blog celebrates the many potentials that come with school choice – through whatever platform those options may take shape – but its mission is also to improve the national conversation about what my Fordham colleagues have long termed “accountability, done right.” I’ve come to edit Choice Words after having spent a professional lifetime in education journalism and communications, developing principles of equity and transparency in public affairs, but also challenging my own assumptions on what makes an education truly “public.” I’m married to a mission-driven and talented public school teacher who plies her trade at a coveted district school, but I believe a quality education can become manifest through many providers if we continue to move beyond our notion of the neighborhood school.
Please join our dialogue. Our posts here will be provocative but respectful, and I hope the responses will be the same.
Adam Emerson is the editor of the Choice Words blog and the new director of Fordham's policy program on parental choice. Keep up on all of Adam's commentary by subscribing to the Choice Words RSS feed.