Beyond Choice: An Education Reform Advocate's Argument Against National School Choice Week

Last week marked the end of National School Choice Week, a set of more than 3,600 national events both endorsed and reviled by elected officials and advocacy groups of both parties. The week garnered significant media attention and successfully organized a range of events around the country. Unfortunately, its organizers fundamentally misunderstand the problem in American education reform and their primary contribution to the debate is to distract from the most pressing policy problem in America.
To be clear, I don’t think choice is bad. In some cases it might even be good. But pretending that it offers anything approaching a solution to America’s education crisis does a disservice to those actually trying to help kids.
Simply put, school choice doesn’t really matter. The act of being able to choose means very little if families are faced with a series of mediocre or poor performing schools. Similarly, no family ever complains of being trapped in a high performing school. The challenge that our education system so consistently fails to meet is offering every child a great education, not making sure that every family is tasked. Putting choice, rather than quality, at the center of the debate is an absurd distraction that oversimplifies the debate and wastes the reform movement’s political capital so desperately needed to actually improve schools.
If we set our goal as making sure that every child in America gets a great education, then focusing so much time and energy on choice only distracts from actual progress. Fundamentally, the problem is this: offering choices to families does nothing to ensure that any children will be given a better education. The problem with American education isn’t that there exist a bevy of unoccupied spots in great schools. The problem is that we don’t have enough great schools. The central problem of education reform, then, isn’t to put children into different schools but to make schools better.
If misallocation of students could explain our terrible academic results, choice might just allow parents and families to put their children into better schools. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Sure, moving a child from a poor performing school to a high performing one would be great. Unfortunately, offering vouchers to children from low income families works only until private schools run out of spots for new children. Similarly, high-performing charter schools are great. But even doubling the number of charters leaves them at a relatively insignificant portion of America’s children. Unless school choice advocates have devised a plan to induce a thus-far absent flood of high-quality charters or private schools to open their doors, we get no where.
Proponents of school choice aren’t entirely wrong in their policy prescription. High performing charter schools offer some students a much better education than do districted schools, and we should do everything we can to scale them up as quickly as possible. The most rigorous analysis yet, however, finds that only 17% of charter schools in New York outperform their districted counterpart. For the child sitting in a classroom of an ineffective charter school, her families choice to enroll her there matters very little.
The fact that 83% of parents who have enrolled their children in charter schools in New York have chosen schools of either the same or worth performance than their districted schools underscores what may be the most serious flaw in the argument of school choice advocates. Parents, we are told, are the best advocates for their children and can be trusted to make good choices about where to send their children to school. Unfortunately, existing evidence suggests parents are actually pretty bad at spotting what a highly effective school likes like. The fact that this trend is even more acute among the very same low-resource communities our system has failed for generations only strengthens the moral argument for providing a high quality school to every child – whether or not parents are willing to put int he work to ‘choose’ it.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of events like School Choice Week is what they allow opponents of real reform to do: disengage. American education desperately needs a fundamental overhaul and interest groups and politicians who obfuscate reform efforts should pay an enormous price. When faced with opposition from the simplistic and divisive case made by School Choice Week, advocates of any reform can stop listening. They just say charters take away resources from public schools (they don’t) and that we need to fix the system we have. When it comes to actually fixing the system, they are mysteriously no where to be found.
Maybe even worse still, those who don’t want to do the difficult work of actually improving America’s education system can announce that they support ‘school choice’ and go back to taking nice brochure pictures with kids in classrooms. In the meantime, we keep one of the worst performing education systems in the developed world.
The organizers of School Choice Week seem to want what’s best for America’s children. They make quite clear in every piece of marketing that their goal is to find high-quality schools for every child. Their policy proposals aren’t bad necessarily. But using them as a political distraction from our real education crisis is, necessarily, a bad idea.