Educational Freedom

A defense of school choice

Scenario

I want to start this week’s newsletter with a scenario. Imagine you live, according to GPS, 11 minutes from a public high school with a greatschools.org summary rating of 4 (10 being the best), 15 minutes from a public high school with a greatschools.org summary rating of 9, and 16 minutes from a public high school with a greatschools.org summary rating of 9. Which school would you rather send your kids to?

I’m sure most responsible parents would probably choose to send their kids to one of the schools with a summary rating of 9 because they are better schools that will provide a better education. Many parents (I would bet most) wouldn’t think twice about the extra 4 or 5 minutes they were driving to take their kids to the better school.

Now, imagine the government said you must send your kids to the worse high school because that is the one you are zoned for and your tax dollars are funding for you to attend. Unfortunately, this is not an imagined scenario but the exact scenario that my wife and I would face if we had kids and continued to live in our current location. This scenario is a reality because school choice has not been prioritized as it should be by most conservatives and is vehemently fought against by most progressives.

School Choice

In the future, one of these newsletters will probably be on the practical application of school choice and explaining the various school choice options such as charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, funding, etc. For the moment, I want to push that discussion off in favor of the larger philosophical debate regarding why implementing school choice should be a priority. As such, I am going to assume my ideal school choice program, giving individual families the money that is already allotted to their student(s) directly instead of to the school, throughout this newsletter.

The three strongest arguments in favor of school choice, as is the case with most politics, involve liberty, competition, and equality.

Liberty

An essential component of American identity is our foundational belief in the virtues of liberty. As I explained in a previous newsletter, liberty means freedom from external constraint while maintaining a sense of duty. The lack of school choice strips parents of both of these core components of liberty.

In the scenario described at the beginning, the external constraint placed upon families by the government is clear. The government is constraining a parent’s ability to send their child to whatever school the parent wants to send them to. However, the infringement upon liberty also extends to a parent’s sense of duty by stripping them of the opportunity to perform their duty.

A central duty of a parent is instructing children in what is right and wrong. This is obvious in terms of what is right and wrong behavior but extends to right and wrong beliefs as well. Schooling is influential in behavior and absolutely critical to beliefs. Consequently, a lack of school choice strips parents of their duty to instruct their children in what is right and wrong and replaces them with the government. School choice would give that duty back to parents as they assess for themselves what school best teaches the values that they want to be instilled into their child.

School choice would not only allow parents to choose what school best teaches the values they want to be taught, but would incentivize parents to consider what those values are and whether schools are actually teaching them. Many parents currently send their children to whatever public school they are zoned for without much of a thought. This may be because they specifically moved to a certain school district and have already thought about it, do not have money to move or send their child to another school so there isn’t a point in thinking about it, or a problem with grades, behavior, or curriculum hasn’t come to the attention of a parent to warrant them thinking about it.

Being given the decision to choose a child’s school would bring the quality of education to the forefront of many parents’ minds. This would encourage parents to consider what values are important to pass on to their children and what school would do that best. While many parents already do this, school choice could create a real opportunity for parents who don’t, to reengage with their child’s education and the values they want to pass on.

Competition

How often do you interact with the government, whether it’s going through security at the airport, waiting at the DMV, applying for a passport, going through customs, etc., and say “man, that was fast?” I’m going to guess rarely ever. Now, how often do you order something from Amazon and, upon its arrival, say, “oh wow, that was already delivered?” I’m going to guess more often than you do with the government. Why is that? The answer is competition.

Remember back in the day when people still used Blackberry phones? Today, I don’t know a single person that still has one. In fact, I haven’t known someone in the last 15 years that had a Blackberry. That’s because in 2007 Apple came out with the first iPhone and the smartphone market was never the same. People loved the iPhone so much that Apple is now the most valuable company in the world. Meanwhile, Blackberry is worth roughly .002% of Apple.

In order to avoid Blackberry’s fate, Apple has redesigned and drastically improved iPhone capabilities while keeping it affordable. Apple knows that if it does not continue to improve its product, then another company will come along and put it out of business just like it did to Blackberry. This competing for economic supremacy and survival is the mother of innovation.

Now, how much has airport security improved since 2007? I wasn’t flying much in 2007, but I know enough to know the answer is not very much. The reason is that the TSA is not threatened by a competitor. The TSA does not have the same urgency to improve its product as Apple because the TSA knows it will still be around in ten years. The same cannot be said of Apple if it fails to improve its products.

If competition incentivizes innovation and improves products, then why not increase competition amongst schools? This is exactly what school choice would do. Instead of schools automatically being allotted funds, school choice would give those funds to families and force schools to compete for them. The more families that sent their children to a school, the more money that school would receive. As a result, schools would be forced to constantly improve their product in order to incentivize parents to send their kids there. This would increase the quality of education across the board just like the quality of the iPhone has increased drastically.

Because this competition does not exist in education, schools do not have the same urgency to innovate and improve the quality of the education they are providing. This isn’t because the education field is full of lazy employees that don’t care about their craft. It’s merely a recognition of human nature. Without competition, people are more prone to merely default back to the way things have always been rather than continue to push the envelope and think outside the box.

We don’t even know what competition-forced innovation would do to schools across the country. In 2006, no one could have imagined a world without Blackberries and could not have imagined a significantly better product being developed. Similarly, in 2021 we can’t even conceive what an education system shaped by competition-forced innovation would look like. The one thing we can be pretty sure of though is that, like the iPhone, it will be a significantly better product.

Equality

I would argue that most importantly school choice will create more equal opportunities for students in poverty. Right now, the reality in the United States is that families who have enough resources already have school choice. If these parents do not like the public school that their children are zoned for, then they can either pay for their child to go to a private school of their choosing or move to another district.

However, a family that does not have those same resources either can’t afford tuition at private schools or can’t afford to move to a better school district. That family will be forced to send their child to the public school that they are zoned for regardless of the quality of the education. Because schools in areas of poverty are notoriously bad, children in poverty are often subjected to worse education which puts them further behind children from wealthier families.

School choice would give more families in poverty the opportunity to send their children to a better school and potentially break the cycle of poverty. Whether it is attending another public school, charter school, or private school, a better quality education could be a literal life-changer for multitudes of kids across the country.

While perfect equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve, especially in education, even incremental steps in the right direction could mean thousands of students across the country being equipped with skills and knowledge that they never would have imagined without school choice. Among the thousands of students that are being left behind by our anti-choice school system are future productive workers and responsible citizens that improve the lives of everybody around them. They are future moms and dads that provide and take care of families which serve as the basic unit of our society. There may even be the next Jeff Bezos or Oprey Winfrey amongst them.

Without school choice, however, these kids will be left behind as they are forced to attend a failing school and our country is worse off for it.

God Bless,
Hunter Burnett