Are You Angry at the ‘Other Side’ in the School Choice Debate?
With private school choice programs spreading like wildfire across the US in the last few years, hardly a day goes by without school choice programs or legislation making the headlines. Yet few education policy topics are shrouded in such controversy.
Many good-hearted people support school choice, not because they hate public schools, but for various reasons that boil down to the idea that having more options is better for students. They may believe that no one school can educate all the students in its community well, and a more market-oriented system introduces pluralism and healthy competition that improves education for all.
Others believe that since children from affluent families have access to a variety of educational options, equity demands we extend those same choices to children from low-income families. On the other hand, other well-intentioned people I know oppose school choice because they believe simply providing a student with a voucher does not truly give them access to the same options as children from affluent families. They do not deny that the public school system is broken in many places; they argue that rather than splintering each public school into a cluster of choice schools, we should all make concerted efforts to fix the public school system so it works for all students.
Of course, there is much more variety, depth, and complexity to people’s policy stances on school choice than the two-dimensional views articulated here, and my point here is not to evaluate the merits of any of them. Rather, I want to demonstrate that advocates for and against school choice share common goals: the well-being of children and the improvement of the US education system. Where they disagree is the means to achieve those goals.
Yet the school choice conversations I’ve observed in the media and on social media increasingly assign the labels “good and evil” to the supporters and the opposition, or vice versa, signaling that the school choice debate has been hijacked by a few loud voices who only care about winning, leading to increasing polarity and hostility.
How do you ensure school choice legislation advances? Sound the alarm to parents that public schools want to usurp their authority to raise their children according to their beliefs and values. Paint public educators as political propagandists. Provoke taxpayers to anger about how bureaucrats “waste” their tax dollars on “failing” public schools. Call for ire in the name of social justice because blocking school choice legislation “crushes” the dreams of disadvantaged children. Call out the “hypocrisy” of public figures who attended private schools denying the same opportunity to kids in poverty. Start an uprising about the teachers’ unions’ “chokehold” on American education (despite 28 states having “Right-to-Work” laws).
Conversely, how do you shut down school choice legislation? Convince public educators that school choice will “defund” their schools, increase their responsibilities, and decrease their compensation–maybe even eliminate their jobs entirely. Stoke moral outrage in the general public about the “agenda” behind the school choice movement: to give parents unlimited authority over their children and power over the school system, to further divide our country by putting an end to the era where most American children go to a “common school” to learn democratic norms alongside children of different backgrounds, and to further empower the wealthy to choose extravagant private schools for their privileged children while draining public schools of resources available to educate kids in poverty. Paint school choice, as Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute says, as “the nefarious handiwork of a shadowy cabal.”
Such behavior might successfully pass or block legislation. But it divides communities by convincing people who disagree that the “other side” hates them, and it slanders good people who have given their careers in the service of students’ futures, as well as parents who just want what’s best for their children. They are our family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. And they might be more open to considering a different perspective on school choice if they do not associate it with being charged with malicious intent.
Are there self-interested, greedy, and discriminatory people among those who support and those who oppose school choice? Probably so. But when we paint people with whom we disagree with a broad brush, we widen the divide between “us and them.” When we distance ourselves from those with whom we disagree, the only way to get a message through to them is to yell. And we position those in the middle ground–who hold a deeply nuanced position and refuse to view the issue as “good versus evil”–down at the bottom of a ravine, wondering if anyone above can (or wants to) hear them.
Do we want to help raise up a generation of American children who think critically and act civilly? We must not be so concerned with winning–on school choice and other issues–that we fail to see the nuance in policy positions and debates, the common ground in relationships, and the good intentions in others. We must stand for the policy positions we can support in good conscience but recognize that, in many cases, people who disagree with us share the same core goals; and we must treat them with civility. Our nation’s children are watching.
