A colleague points out that new state laws that allow parents to use public money to purchase education may represent the biggest US policy trend of 2023–basically, since the Republicans won the US House and stopped further federal progressive legislation. As Libby Stanford wrote in EdWeek last June,

So far this year, lawmakers in 14 states have passed bills establishing school choice programs or expanding existing ones, and lawmakers in 42 states have introduced such bills … Six of the 14 states—Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Utah—have passed school choice policies making programs universal or near-universal over the next three years. They join Arizona and West Virginia, which in recent years either established or expanded education savings accounts and made them available to virtually all students. That brings the total number of states where virtually all students will be able to use public funds for private schools to eight.

I hold some principled skepticism about school choice, yet I believe it is a valid policy debate–in fact, I have sometimes chosen it as the leading topic in my undergraduate course on public policy, because there are arguments on both (or many) sides.

It’s mainly in the USA that school choice is seen as a conservative cause; many social democracies allow parents to choose among publicly funded and licensed schools. And there have been progressive proponents of school choice in America.

On a political level, the passage of these new state laws is interesting for several reasons.

First, it is happening without a great deal of national attention, which I suspect reflects the national media’s basic lack of interest in state policies, especially in the South.

Second, it challenges the premise (which, I admit, I sometimes share) that the modern conservative movement has run out of policy ideas and is obsessed with performative politics–denouncing “woke” companies and universities without actually passing laws. A wave of school-choice bills reflects a policy agenda.

Third, it challenges the premise that today’s GOP is shifting from quasi-libertarian to quasi-authoritarian. A law that enforces particular ways of addressing contested social issues in public schools verges on authoritarian. But a law that allows parents to opt out of public schools is libertarian–for better or worse.

(However, many parents may seek schools that have authoritarian climates for their own students, somewhat like private homeowners’ associations that enact meticulous rules to control their own residents’ behavior.)

Before you look at the graph …

What subjects do you think have become more or less prevalent in US high schools since the late 1980s?

If we measure the percentage of all high school teachers who are assigned to each major subject, this is the pattern:

Almost all the subjects were similar in 1988 and 2012, except that vocational education dropped a lot and health/physical education shrank by a bit. The other subjects all gained about the same amounts at the expense of those two.

It isn’t worth showing the trends for most of those subjects by year, because the lines would be pretty flat. But here is the proportion of vo-tech teachers for all the years in the survey.

Posted without a comment, except to say that this may surprise people who think that some of the arts and sciences have expanded at the expense of others.

My analysis of U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), “Public School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; “Private School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; and “Charter School Teacher Data File,” 1999-2000.

In lieu of a post here today, I have an article up on the American Federation of Teachers’ Shanker Institute blog, entitled “Educational Equity During A Pandemic.” It begins:

My wife and I have each spent many hours teaching by video this spring. While sitting in the same house, I meet online with college students who attend a selective private university; she meets with 5-to-9-year olds in an urban public school system, helping them learn to read. 

Both of us think and worry about equity: how to treat all students fairly within our respective institutions and across the whole country (even the world). And both of us discuss these issues with our respective colleagues. I suspect that many other educators are similarly wrestling with the challenges of teaching equitably while schools are closed. 

I hope it may have some value for people currently teaching remotely (at any level) or for parents and other adults concerned about education while schools are shut.

In my public policy course, we are discussing school choice as an opportunity for exploring theoretical issues (What is a market versus a state? What is a public good versus a private good?); empirical questions (What happens when you implement various systems of choice? How should we measure the outcomes?), and normative principles (What counts as an acceptable outcome, or an ideal outcome?) Most policy questions involve a combination of mandates and choice, or choices structured and constrained by laws. School choice is therefore exemplary of broader issues.

Some quick notes from the readings so far:

1. Chubb, John E., and Terry M. Moe. America’s public schools: Choice is a panacea. The Brookings Review 8.3 (1990): 4-12.

This is a classic (1990) manifesto for the modern school choice movement. It presents a radical proposal, and is therefore not based on data or experience from the past. The main argument is theoretical, applying a certain strand of public choice theory. The authors argue that if you favor any particular approach to education, there is little point in advocating it to government-run schools, which work in the interests of government officials. The only reform that can succeed is to make schools accountable to parents, who will then demand the education they want–squeezing out bad practices and supporting a diverse array of schools that meet their diverse preferences. Note, however, that in their proposal, the government remains the funder of education, which is therefore as much a public good as Medicare is, or schooling in a country like the Netherlands that uses vouchers. Bernie Sanders’ college proposal is like theirs for k-12 schooling.

2. Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Michael C. Johanek, Making Up Our Mind: What School Choice is Really About

Johanek contributes a chapter on the history of how American kids have chosen, or been placed in, particular schools since colonial days. Ben-Porath presents and analyzes the main conflicting principles of justice that arise when we consider who should attend which schools, and who should decide. It’s a complex and wide-ranging book, but if I had to derive one summary statement, this would be it: We do not face a decision about whether or not to implement “school choice.” Which school you attend is inevitably a function of choice under constraints. The appropriate question is: Who should choose among which options for whom, and how?

3. Robert Pondiscio, How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (2019)

Pondiscio embeds himself in a school within the controversial charter network called Success Academy. He has written a nuanced and beautifully reported account that eludes easy categorization. But again, if I had to summarize it, I’d say something like this: Success Academy actually works extraordinarily well for the goals that its parents and teachers sincerely value–best defined not as high test scores but as winning a competition that they consider worthy. The school works because the parents and teachers share these goals, and both sacrifice to make it succeed. Although the parents are diverse individuals, a common profile is a culturally conservative working-class family of color that values discipline and is especially concerned about the variety of racism that manifests as low expectations. These families often thrive at Success Academy and have a right to the choice that it offers. But the model wouldn’t scale very far, because it depends on the specific value commitments and capacities of its parents and teachers.

4. Abdulkadiroglu, A., Angrist, J., Dynarski, S., Kane, T., & Pathak, P. (2011). Accountability and flexibility in public schools: Evidence from Boston’s charters and pilots. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(2), 699-748. 

This is a quantitative study that claims to measure causation, whereas Pondicio’s book is a qualitative study that offers a perspective on what it’s like to be inside one school. (We need both methods.) According to this paper, being randomly selected to attend and then actually attending a Boston charter school is associated with higher test scores regardless of other factors. However, random admission to a Boston “pilot” school is not associated with higher scores. Both charters and pilots are choice schools that use lotteries to admit students. The main difference is that the pilot schools come under the standard union contract, while the charters do not. The charter schools have smaller classes and longer hours, probably because they pay their non-unionized teachers less/hour. A reader could conclude that unions are the problem–or that spending more money on unionized teachers would allow regular schools to equal charters. It is also worth considering whether the measured outcomes (test scores) are what we should value.

5. Meira Levinson, “Is Pandering Ethical? Power, Privilege, and School Assignment”

Levinson describes the relatively new Boston Public School (BPS) assignment plan. Every child is assigned a basket of schools that includes all the local ones plus an equal mix of good, medium, and bad schools (as measured by scores) from across the city. Parents rank their preferences, and competing choices are randomly settled by an algorithm.

Putting distant schools in every student’s basket improves equity, because poor neighborhoods have worse-scoring schools. If every child had an equal chance of attending any BPS school across town, that would maximize equity, but it would sacrifice convenience and neighborhood schools. It would also alienate a set of middle class parents who believe in equity and diversity, do not argue that they deserve better schools, but would leave BPS if their kids were assigned to “bad” schools. If they stay in BPS, they improve it.

What to do about these families? Levinson says it’s not a matter of compromising, because they don’t claim a right that needs to be balanced against other parents’ claims. It’s not a question of coercing them, because they can leave. She thinks “pandering” is the best description, and it may be ethically obligatory to pander given unjust social contexts.

The Atlantic’s Julie Halpert asks us to imagine two scenarios. In one, “every child would have to attend private school, and in the other, every child would have to attend public school. Which scenario would be more likely to improve or worsen kids’ educational outcomes—and, by extension, the health of American society?”

She quotes me a few times with doubts about an all-private system:

Levine’s prediction for an all-private-school world? “You’ll have this very intensely competitive market in which every child would be assessed,” he said, “and if your child has behavioral issues, they won’t get as good a deal in the market.” … An all-private-school world, then, would foster a system that thrives on selectivity. As Levine emphasized, private schools can’t just scale up like companies can because small size is often a selling point in K-12 education; the best schools are those that don’t accept large numbers of students.

I am not a doctrinaire opponent of choice or market mechanisms in education. Denmark is rightly admired as a model social welfare system, yet 15.6% of Danish kids attend private schools fully funded by vouchers. In many European cities, all the schools are what we would call “charters”: basically self-governing entities, regulated by the state, that get public money in proportion to their enrollments. (Rural areas tend to offer less choice, simply because the low population density favors local mandatory-enrollment schools).

By the way, the Danish Union of Teachers represents 97% of primary and secondary teachers. A competitive market with high union density may offer a good combination of choice plus job security.

Meanwhile, it’s not so clear that offering only public schools really gets rid of market competition. The American “common school” model–one school system for all the children in each political jurisdiction–reflects a fierce market for housing. Americans of means choose their residence in order to determine their kids’ schools. It would arguably be better to separate the market for schools from the market for houses, rather than combining them and kidding ourselves that we have ever had a “public” school system.

But I was asked whether I’d like to see a system without public schools at all–Milton Friedman’s model of vouchers for an all-private system. I offered several ways in which education differs from other markets.

One difference is that education is meant to produce public goods, such as a unified body of informed citizens, not just private goods, such as each graduate’s value in the labor market. I agree with this normative position, but the empirical evidence is complicated. There is evidence that Catholic high schools in the United States–which are private–have done a better job than public schools of generating public goods.

Another difference is that educators typically do not want to increase the size of their own enterprise. For teachers, it’s better to have 18 rather than 8o students. For principals, it may be preferable to have 20 rather than 200 teachers. Families may also prefer smaller and more selective schools. The usual incentives to “scale up” don’t apply.

A third difference is that kids, not just schools, have unequal market value. Coca-Cola doesn’t care who you are if you have enough money for a bottle of Coke. Detroit Country Day School (the institution that Halpert uses as an example) definitely does care who you are if you want to enroll. The other kids contribute profoundly to each student’s experience and trajectory.

In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether a university that had sufficient status–thanks to its history and branding–could offer no education at all, and its students would still fare well thanks to their cultural capital, the network ties they form among their peers, and the market signal conveyed by enrolling them. The admissions office and the dormitories could do the whole job of conveying social advantage. It would not be irrational to prefer (and to pay tuition for) such an institution rather than an open-access university that added more value in the classroom.

In the long run, it might be a mistake to blatantly offer no pedagogy or curriculum whatsoever. That might erode an institution’s brand. However, I’m confident that many highly selective schools and colleges do a subtly worse job of instruction than many low-status institutions that enroll less advantaged kids. The former still win in the market for students because they have already attracted other privileged students.

Charging higher tuition can even make a school more desirable by ensuring that most of its students have high social positions. (A school may then get even more value by admitting a few non-privileged kids for “diversity,” charging them less than the sticker price).

These are not reasons to reject choice and market mechanisms altogether, but they do suggest that facile analogies between ordinary consumer markets and education are likely to mislead.