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Bright Horizons for School Choice

It’s a pleasure to respond to such incisive and deeply practical essays. While there are disagreements among the contributors, I think those are much smaller than they might seem—and understanding why helps to illuminate our path forward. 

The reader is struck by what would appear to be two big disagreements. One is Daniel Buck’s warning about the “perils” of school choice, which contrasts with how the other contributors (including me) come at the issue. Buck reminds us that public schools, “though imperfect, are one of the foundational institutions of American society,” and that this should not be lightly dismissed. He warns that choice programs could extend the reach of intrusive bureaucratic oversight, homogenizing private schools.

This all sounds like a pretty hard-hitting rejection of school choice. Except, it’s not. 

Buck makes clear that he’s open to an expansive regime of educational choice, so long as we also focus on traditional public schools and take the challenges posed by choice seriously. And I think it’s safe to say that Garnett, Wolf, and I wholly agree. The abstract allure of educational choice isn’t what matters; what does is how choice programs actually work for students, educators, and families.

That’s why Nicole Garnett and Patrick Wolf relentlessly, and appropriately, emphasize the importance of program design and implementation. Wolf argues that some design decisions are easier than others, Garnett that implementing education savings accounts (ESAs) could go disastrously, and both that failing to follow legislative wins with careful attention to execution is a recipe for Pyrrhic victories. 

I don’t think Buck would disagree with any of that. And neither would I. 

The second apparent disagreement is Lindsey Burke and Jason Bedrick’s contention that the choice community miscalculated by long rejecting “values-based arguments that appealed to conservatives” for fear of “alienating” allies on the political left. They trace choice’s recent success to the way in which culture clashes have fueled an appetite for choice among many more right-leaning parents. 

This could all be read as a call for choice to be ideological and performative in pursuit of culture war. Except, it’s not.

Burke and Bedrick warn readers that they’re not seeking an abstract, ideological crusade. As they put it, “Let us state clearly and emphatically that we believe that proponents of school choice should try to appeal to the broadest number of Americans and welcome advocates of all political stripes.” They see value-fueled choice as a practical way to address parental concerns and a tool for lowering the stakes of our culture wars. 

I wholeheartedly agree, and I think the various essays show deep sympathy for their thesis.

In fact, this whole exchange could be read as evidence of an extraordinarily healthy evolution in how we think and talk about school choice. The nuance of these disagreements is less about cheerleading or naysaying than practical questions of programs, politics, and parental needs.

This is a crucial time for no-nonsense reflection. After all, the stakes have been raised. Success will be more visible and failure will be more devastating.

As I noted in my earlier essay, school choice has long made a rallying cry out of the presumption that poor families should be able to escape awful schools. For so many years, as choice advocates scraped out modest legislative wins and played defense in the courts, this minimalist defense made a certain degree of sense. Indeed, Garnett (very courteously and gently) takes me to task for second-guessing this strategy. Perhaps she’s right. That’s fodder for another conversation.

Whether right or wrong, though, I think it’s pretty clear that this approach had some unfortunate consequences. An embattled choice movement was defensive, insufficiently interested in particulars, and constrained in its vision. A few anecdotes might help illustrate what I mean. 

Back in 2002, I published Revolution at the Margins, in which I examined how choice programs had impacted public school systems in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Edgewood, Texas (home to the nation’s largest privately funded voucher program). The bottom line was that it was hard to see much evidence that the systems were responding in more than symbolic ways. This was offered not as an indictment of choice but as a way of understanding that program size, funding rules, incentives, bureaucratic routine, and much else would determine how choice-induced competition played out in practice. I’d hoped the analysis would be seized upon as useful by advocates and reformers. It wasn’t. Instead, I was criticized for being too negative (including by advocates who privately said they agreed with the analysis but worried about optics) and for making things more complicated than they needed to be. That atmosphere stifled the kind of frank, practical, and essential exchange so evident in this forum.

In the years after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was adopted, there was a lot of discussion about its choice provisions. For those who don’t recall, while President Bush abandoned his voucher proposal early in the negotiations, the Bush administration enthusiastically trumpeted provisions mandating public school choice and “supplemental education services” for students in low-performing schools. In response, Chester Finn and I convened two major conferences and published a couple of volumes (Leaving No Child Behind? and No Remedy Left Behind) focused on examining how these choice-themed remedies were working. The reality was far from reassuring. There were significant issues regarding capacity, quality, coordination, execution, and transparency. Yet, a lack of interest or bandwidth meant that not much was done about any of this, while NCLB’s architects preferred not to dwell unduly on any of it. The result was a culture of overpromising, suspect design, and inattentive implementation.

Early in Scott Walker’s tenure as governor of Wisconsin, a bit more than a decade ago, I was asked to sketch out a blueprint for next-stage reform in Milwaukee. Part of that effort included a slew of statewide polling. Confirming something I’d long suspected, it turned out that most Wisconsin parents said they really liked their kid’s school but also that liking the school didn’t necessarily mean that they liked the arts program or their kid’s math class (oddly, the kinds of questions that get at this are rarely asked). To me, this implied that educational choice should be about empowering families to switch schools and also about helping them address concerns without needing to do so. Choice of courses, teachers, or providers could offer practical solutions to both parents trapped in awful schools and those desiring less of a wholesale change. Back then, this subjected me to more than a few finger-wagging lectures from advocates and funders concerned that I was “muddying the narrative.” Today, we’re openly discussing the possibilities and challenges of a more expansive vision. That’s quite a sea change.

I’m sure this shift is due, in large part, to the successes that have come so thick in the aftermath of the pandemic. It’s a lot easier to tolerate heterodoxy when educational choice is racking up one unprecedented triumph after another. Those gains also make this a crucial time for no-nonsense reflection. After all, the stakes have been raised. Success will be more visible and failure will be more devastating. So, as Buck advises, choice advocates need to take care that policy wins yield practical solutions, and aren’t experienced as a Jacobinesque attack on valued community institutions. As Burke and Bedrick suggest, their approach should be inclusive and expansive—welcoming both right and left, valorizing values as well as test scores. And, as Wolf and Garnett make clear, those fighting to empower families had better bring their A-game when it comes to writing the rules of ESAs, handling public funds, and combating fraud. Failure to do that risks turning grand political wins into grave policy fiascos.

And that’s the very practical reason why I’m so heartened by the thoughtfulness, seriousness, and precision of this exchange.