Charles Murray's New York Times op-ed on the merits and limitations of charter schooling coincided quite well with Fordham's event yesterday on the very same topic. Both Murray and the discussants at our event were wrestling with the same question: is school choice a means to greater overall academic achievement, or an end in itself?
Murray's op-ed, expanded from a recent post on AEI's blog, argues for the latter: ?Let's use the money we are already spending on education in a way that gives [parents who can't afford private schools] the same kind of choice that wealthy people, liberal and conservative alike, exercise right now. That should be the beginning and the end of the argument for school choice.? He views school choices as a kind of freedom that everyone deserves, not necessarily as a tool for improving our country's overall academic performance. And he explicitly admits his skepticism that any reform can actually improve overall academic performance, given the paramount influences of genetics and family background.
On the other hand, Paul Hill, discussing his book yesterday, talked about school choice in the way that Murray would deem too optimistic. For Hill and many others, school choice was supposed to create a ?rising tide? effect of achievement, especially in inner cities, as a direct effect of increased competition. As Chad Aldeman comments, education is ?about the common good.? Hill's vision for school choice served that purpose ? and not the goal of freedom per se.
Enter Paul Peterson. As explained in his new book, his vision for the future of school choice is individual customization. In the near future, students and parents will select their own courses and curricula from a limitless variety of online options, each tailored to students' own abilities and interests. There's considerably more uncertainty and ambiguity in the effect of this kind of ?micro-choice:? it certainly creates more freedom and options, but it may or may not serve the ?common good? (i.e. increase overall achievement) depending on how it's implemented. There's a real chance that online options could actually backfire in struggling schools, for example, if the software is no good or the setting (a noisy computer lab, for example) is more amenable to web-surfing than to solitary work. At the end of the day, online options may only have traction at scale for students who are already independently motivated to learn the material. Instead of a rising tide effect, a new wave of K-12 online learning could create a ?tsunami effect? ? dramatically better achievement for the motivated few, and similar (or even worse) results for everyone else.
Which may not necessarily be a bad a thing. In high school and middle school, I would have jumped at the option of more customized work, and may have learned more as a result. So my only point here is the same one Alexander Hamilton made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787: ?Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself.? Freedom and equality are in perpetual tension, in education as in every other sphere of political life. It would be a mistake for any school choice supporter to believe otherwise.
-Mickey Muldoon