School Choice
Once upon a time, there were people that believed that their education system was inadequate. They envisioned an institution that would appeal to facts and the results of experimentation, and not simply have students be given the belief system of a central authority.
I could be talking about today’s Woke agenda in our public schools, but I am not.
In 1680, King Charles II came up with an idea to solve this education problem with a solution that still exists today. The British King allocated public money for the first Royal Society in London. The reaction of the education system of the time was remarkable. Even though there was pressure from the nobility, educators resisted and kept doing things the way they had always done them. This is what necessitated the formation of Royal Societies in the first place. However, once the Societies had been formed, educators saw a reduction in both students and prestige, the educators started taking on the practices of the Royal Societies as a way of keeping up.
This process helped create the modern university, where it is the goal to seek truth through experimentation and observation. It’s only recently that this mission has been perverted by Woke ideology, but Charles II has a lot to do with where we are with education today. The biggest example of Charles’ influence is school choice.
What is school choice? According to National School Choice Week:
“School choice is the process of allowing every family to choose the K-12 educational options that best fit their children. Every child is unique, and all children learn differently. Some children might succeed at the neighborhood public school, while others might fit in better at a charter, magnet, online, private or home learning environment. That’s why school choice is so important!”
They go on to say that the most common options are:
traditional public schools
public charter schools
public magnet schools
private schools
online academies
homeschooling
School Choice is important for two reasons:
1) Immediate benefit: your own child gets a better education.
2) Overarching benefit: what we saw with the positive unintended consequences of the Royal Societies.
It is important to punish underperforming schools. If schools have to compete for students, which is really a competition for dollars, then schools will shape up. It’s schools collecting tax dollars no matter how they perform that contributes to the problem.
In the old days school choice really meant choosing between the local public school and a private school. The only people that could choose a private school that weren't rich were Catholics and other faiths that had created their own school system. But if you didn't belong to one of these religions or weren't wealthy, school choice wasn't a thing. Now the debate centers around whether everyone should have this choice.
Who would be against school choice?
Well, you'd be surprised how much pushback there is, especially from Teachers Unions. The Democratic party has received millions over the years from teachers unions. In the 2024 election cycle Democrats will receive close to 5 million from the top 3 teacher unions alone.*(Source: Opensecret.org) Republicans receive no money from teacher unions. But this only seems to affect the rhetoric, not the hearts of parents.
From the NY Post September 8, 2023:
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis-Gates loves to call private schools “fascist” and “racist” — but it turns out she sends her son to one.
Davis-Gates has long bragged about how her children go to the Chicago public schools. But she recently got outed as sending a son to a prestigious private Catholic school on Chicago’s south side, De La Salle Institute (average tuition: $14,750 a year).
Good for her as a mom, choosing what’s best for her boy.
But this makes her rhetoric calling school choice “actually the choice of racists” and private schools “segregation academies” utterly damning.
In New York City they have “controlled” school choice. What this means is that there is an algorithm that determines which students can choose which schools. The reason for creating the algorithm was that the Supreme Court deemed it illegal to base who could go to which Charter or Magnet school based on race, so the basis needed to be a combination of income, location and other factors. This top-down approach is not popular with everyone including the Nobel Laureate who created the algorithm!
Alvin Roth, after winning the Nobel Prize in 2012 for economics, created the algorithm for school choice in New York. Roth is also a resident of New York City and has a son in the New York City school system. Roth didn't like what his own algorithm chose for his own son and decided to pull his son out of school and into a private school after he relocated his family. But sending a child to an expensive private school or moving out of a particular area unfortunately is not an option for most parents which is what makes controlled choice so inherently unfair.
So what is fair?
Many states have recently put forward a lot of legislation concerning school choice and much of it is good. The school choice legislation that is positive and empowering to parents involves something called an ESA (Educational Spending Account). An ESA puts taxpayer money into an account which is then earmarked for each child in the school district. The parent of that child can invest the money from that account in a Charter or Magnet School that they want their child to go to. Some states that use ESA’s take money from the school district that the child was originally assigned to and some don’t. But ESA’s are gaining popularity because they empower the parent that isn’t wealthy or willing to relocate.
Like the Royal Societies in 1680’s England succeeded in reforming education by fostering competition, School Choice enables parents to evaluate schools based on their educational merits and rewards those who are doing the best job.
Having the underperforming school lose out is something that old King Charles II would understand completely.