Democrats Can and Should Support Public School Choice
At a recent dinner party with people who would define themselves as “very liberal,” someone asked me whether my new center-left employer was uncomfortable with my long record of advocacy for charter schools. “No,” I shrugged, “because charter schools are public schools.”
“But they aren’t real public schools,” he chided.
I’ve had this same conversation dozens of times in the last twenty years, and it goes to the heart of the debate now about private school choice. What makes a public school “public”? What does it mean to provide children with a “public education”?
Ask most Americans to define “public schools” or “public education,” and you’re likely to get a response that goes something like “public education happens at public schools; public schools are schools everyone can go to, they’re free, and they have to follow the rules set by the government.”
Charter schools, without question, meet this definition under all state laws where they exist. In fact, they often more closely meet this definition than some traditional public school types that no one questions. Charter schools, for example, cannot exclude children based on ability, whether academic, athletic, artistic, or any other category. They often cannot even exclude children based on where they live. Magnet schools, statewide specialty high schools, and other models that have long existed in the traditional system employ tests to select their students. Neighborhood schools and school districts generally use residential zones to restrict which children can attend. Yet, most would never consider these schools less “public” than charter schools. It’s true that charters may require children to enroll via a lottery if they are oversubscribed, but this is a fairer process than basing school attendance on where a child’s parents can afford a house. Charter schools also cannot charge tuition, and while they are exempt from certain state laws or district-made school policies, the government has decided what rules they must follow in great detail, with some of the most consequential laws and policies — like state testing, state standards, and state and federal accountability — always being requirements.
What my liberal friends really mean when they try to insist, against all logic, that charter schools are not real public schools is that charters are not run by local school boards, even as local school boards are some of the largest authorizers of charter schools nationally. Some of my blue state friends may also mean that charter schools are not real public schools because they are not always unionized, but charters are, in fact, unionized in several states, and traditional public schools are not in many others. Regardless of the reason, this inability to call a spade a spade when it comes to public charter schools has led my friends, and the Democratic party as a whole, to a losing position on the issue of school choice. Public education is already much more varied than no-choice Dems like to admit, and parents and the public support the idea of choice, at least in the abstract.
The current Democrat position also smacks of elitism, a poison pill in our modern politics. Parents with means have long had public school choice because they can afford to move to a school district, or to a neighborhood in a school district, where the schools are better. In an area without any public school choice, parents without means are stuck attending the school they are zoned for, regardless of quality, with empty platitudes that this is the way real public schooling is supposed to be. And it’s always the politicians or friends with access to options that can be sanguine about how other people’s children don’t have any.
Because Dems have spent so long resisting reality, they find themselves without a principled or coherent message as we now confront the rise of private school choice policies that spend public dollars for real private education. The commonsense position, though, seems obvious to me: parents and children deserve choice in education, but the government should not pay for all choices.
For proponents of the private school choice movement, what makes an education “public” is merely the act of the government paying for it. I disagree. Public schools and public education ensure that all students have equal access to great taxpayer-funded schools that abide by a common set of laws and policies about what children learn and how we measure it, and that promise not to violate the rights of children or discriminate against them for any protected reason.
What private school choice proponents won’t say out loud is that private schools and homeschools are private for a reason. They don’t want government intervention in what they teach or who they admit; they don’t want to be measured by state tests and compared to other schools on academics or anything else. They don’t see themselves as part of the enterprise of strengthening America’s democracy or workforce, or even part of an effort to give choice to parents who don’t have any. This is why the ideal for these new policies is not about holding schools accountable for results, or ensuring a diploma is meaningful, or targeting kids with no prior options. So far, “universal” programs’ greatest beneficiaries have been people who have already opted their children out of the public system and who now get government subsidies for doing so.
Perhaps this is why the private school choice movement has thus far been unsuccessful at passing any of their statewide ballot initiatives, even in deeply “red” states, when voters are asked to decide whether to invest public dollars in private education, potentially to the detriment of public schools. The public, like parents, sees the value of choice; they also see the value of public education. “Public schools” and “choice” never had to be in conflict. It’s time for Democrats to acknowledge that.
