Choosing schools. Students and parents do it all the time when it comes to college. They also do it for pre-school for three- and four- and sometimes five-year olds. But for first grade through 12, there is no choice – unless you are rich. If you are rich, you get to choose, either by paying private/parochial school tuition or by buying an expensive house and paying high property taxes in places with good schools. For most people, however, there is no choice. Your kids go where they are told to go.
Because some of the schools where children are forced to go are not good, some people support vouchers or charter schools as a way to enable those children to go to better schools. The theory is that the charter schools will be better or that vouchers will enable parents to choose a better school for their children.
And there are many stories of charter school successes and of vouchers enabling children to get out of bad schools and go to better ones. The problem is that opponents of charter schools and vouchers can find stories that say charter schools aren’t any better or students with vouchers don’t do better. A recent review of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, for example, "found that pupils in the choice program generally had ‘achievement growth rates that are comparable’ to similar Milwaukee public-school students."*
The problem is, as these arguments continue, children keep going to bad schools. And these arguments will never end. People on each side of the debate will always be able to find success stories or problems to talk about. The student who does great. The charter school that fails. And when it comes to studies of how well charter schools or vouchers do, there will be arguments about whether the results are statistically significant or whether the situations are really comparable.
There is, however, one test that does prove the value of vouchers and charter schools. And that test has nothing to do with how well students do on standardized tests or any of those other numbers that people use to support their side when the numbers are with them and that they disregard when the numbers go against them. The test is simple: What do parents think of charter schools and vouchers. Look at public opinion polls. More importantly, look at the waiting lists to get into charter schools. The results are clear: Parents want a choice; they want to be able to choose where their children go to school.** And the beauty of this kind of choice is that parents who like the school their child is going to now, don’t have to change. They can keep sending them there.***
But the opponents of charters schools/vouchers argue that parents don’t really know what schools are best for their children. We need to leave these decisions to professionals, they say. We need to defer to people who have been trained to know what is best for the children. Parents don’t know enough to make these decisions.
I respectfully disagree with this argument. Teachers, principals and educators may know the most about education, and they may know the most about how to teach students in general, but when it comes to individual children and what is best for them, the children’s parents know best. The reason is simple. Parents know the most about their own children. They may not know about children as a whole, but they know more about their own children than anybody else in the world, and that knowledge is what enables them to make the best choice for their children.****
Obviously, there will be cases where parents will make the wrong choice. People aren’t perfect; they make mistakes. But on the whole, parents will make the best choices for their children because they know the most about their children.
Charter schools and vouchers let parents use the knowledge they have about their own children to pick the best schools for their children. And parents like that choice. The polls show it. The satisfaction that parents have when they get to make that choice shows it.***** These are the numbers that prove vouchers and charter schools are a good idea and are working – for children and parents.
----------
* While this is not the point of this post, I note that one of the secondary arguments for charter schools/vouchers is that the competition will force the public schools to do better. Therefore, the fact that charter schools are not doing better than the public schools may not mean that the charter schools are failing. It may be that they are, in effect, forcing the public schools to do a better job than they otherwise would; i.e., as charter schools raise the scores of children who go there, they are, by the competition they create, causing an increase in the scores of children in the public schools, too.
** See, for example: Bari Weiss, "Storming the School Barricades: Weekend Interview with Madeleine Sackler," The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2010; Clarence Page, "Obama’s Private School Shopping Goes Public," November 12, 2008; "Reading Aloud," The Washington Post, June 17, 2008.
*** I am sure some people will argue that the choice to stay in the public school isn’t real if other students leave. The school won’t have enough students to survive; the good students will go, leaving just the bad/problem students. The school won’t be the same. Of course, if you look at that argument closely, what it is saying is that parent A gets to force parent B to send their kids to a particular school because that will make parent A feel better about the school – and it is too bad about what parent B wants for their children.
**** There is a hint of condescension in this argument. The argument is not made as often that parents in the rich suburbs aren’t smart enough to decide what school their children should attend. They are already deciding that question by where they live. Rather, the unspoken argument is that poor people, minority parents living in poor neighborhoods, don’t know enough or don’t care enough to pick the right schools for their children. They aren’t smart enough to decide; they need to let experts decide for them.
***** The house prices and property tax bills in places with good public schools show how important that choice is to parents who have enough money to pay for it.
Recent Comments