Last week’s National Education Policy Center Newsletter reports on research showing that the expansion of school privatization in Washington, D.C. is changing parents’ attitudes and, by itself, causing parents in that district to prioritize their individual preferences over the well-being of the community. NEPC summarizes a peer-reviewed study published in the paywalled journal of Urban Education. The researchers found that the adoption of universal marketplace school choice across the Washington, D.C. school district has thereby changed the city’s culture:
“The authors find that families were willing to overcome logistical concerns if schools otherwise met their individualist needs. Regarding these needs, the families ask questions such as whether the school is high prestige, provides bilingual programming, or (in the lower grades) feeds into desirable middle or high schools. They also report that relatively few families in the study explicitly acknowledged that these needs are often felt in opposition to collectivist values. And it’s those latter values that might guide these White families to, for example, select and then help improve a local school, which might better support the communities where they live.”
In this blog, I have often quoted Robert Bellah and the team of sociologists and ethicists who, in a 1992 book, The Good Society, showed how primary social institutions shape each of us and what institutions mean for a society: “We form institutions and they form us every time we engage in a conversation that matters, and certainly every time we act as parent or child, student or teacher, citizen or official, in each case calling on models and metaphors for the rightness and wrongness of action. Institutions are not only constraining but also enabling. They are the substantial forms through which we understand our own identity and the identity of others as we seek cooperatively to achieve a decent society.” (The Good Society, p. 12)
Last week’s NEPC Newsletter caused me to consider the implications of Bellah’s comment, and to think about the ways institutions like neighborhood public schools are themselves normative. The majority of parents across the United States enroll their children in their neighborhood public schools and, as expressed in their widespread support for their children’s teachers, seem satisfied. When marketplace school choice replaces neighborhood schooling on the district level, however, parents naturally shift to the new norm. In the study NEPC summarizes, the parents learned to play Washington, D.C.’s system on behalf of their own children’s needs or interests. The system of universal school choice now conveys the message that choosing a school is the way parents are supposed to support their children:
“Despite the fact that D.C.’s algorithm-based choice lottery is sometimes touted as ‘un-gameable,’ the case-study families did find ways to work the system to their advantage. For example, some families participated in the lottery annually, regardless of whether their child was at a transition grade or eager to switch schools. That way, they could jump on an opportunity to, for example, switch children to elementary schools that fed into middle schools the parents considered to be desirable. The families also used strategies such as examining past data to study the probability that their children would be admitted to a particular school, and then limiting their choices to schools where they had a better chance of being selected and that, ideally, also fed into the preferred middle or high schools.”
In a city in the midst of gentrification, the researchers found that school choice also encourages racial segregation: “The lottery system encourages a tenuous relationship between White families and local schools… This arrangement allows for an ecosystem that does not prompt incoming White families to leverage their resources to support their neighborhood schools. Even the most committed parents played the lottery every year to see if they could improve their choices and did not spend time advocating to support neighborhood schools. In other words as the researchers write, ‘(C)hoice undermines voice…. Disloyalty was the norm across participants in this study…. The parents behaved as the system prompted them to behave.’…(B)y its very nature, a market-based system creates ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ Predictably, in the context of public education in America, the winners are more likely than the losers to be privileged and White.”
Contrast this view with the communitarian ethics affirmed in an opinion piece co-written last week by the governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, and the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, and published in USA Today. Beshear and Cooper lead with values embedded in public schooling and they interweave these principles throughout their argument.
“In North Carolina and Kentucky, public schools are the center of our communities. We’re proud public school graduates ourselves—and we know the critical role our schools play in teaching our students, strengthening our workforces and growing our economies. We’ve seen record-high graduation rates of almost 90% in our public schools… Both of our constitutions guarantee our children a right to public education. But both legislatures are trying to chip away at that right.”
“In North Carolina, public schools are a top-five employer in all 100 counties. In many rural counties, there are no private schools for kids to go to—meaning that those taxpayer dollars are torn out of the county and put right back into the pockets of wealthier people in more populated areas. In fact, in Kentucky, 60% of counties don’t even have a certified private school.”
Governors Beshear and Cooper add: “Private schools get taxpayer dollars with no real accountability. As governors, we’ve proposed fully funding our public schools, teacher pay raises to treat our educators like the professionals they are and expanded early childhood education. We know that strong public schools mean strong communities… Our public schools serve all children. They provide transportation and meals and educate students with disabilities… (W)e are against taxpayer money going to private schools at the expense of public schools. The future of our nation goes to class in public schools, and all Americans must be on guard for lobbyists and extremist politicians bringing similar plans to their states.”
Beshear and Cooper’s argument is effective precisely because it clearly affirms public schooling, the dominant educational norm across their states and the nation. The governors raise their voices as leaders to encourage public pride in public education, and they confront the legislators and the lobbies who have set out to undermine one of our society’s primary institutions.
janresseger 