Leverage is designed to provide advantage. Leverage when using a pry bar allows one to lift or move something that is otherwise unmovable. Understanding the mechanical advantage of a lever helped early mankind build with stone and open the doors of later industry. Not every lever is mechanical. School choice uses the lever of money to influence decisions. Choice is the fulcrum and enrollment and school money are the objects being moved by a parent looking for educational advantage.
School choices offer parents a personal tool for addressing pandemic education. It allows parents to examine available options and select the where and how their child will be educated. Parental choice of schooling is without prejudice; it is a personal decision that is freely made and without subsequent repercussion. Choice allows a parent to match their understandings and beliefs about the pandemic with an educational option and to re-choose as understandings and beliefs change. And, re-choose again.
School choice was initially designed to allow parents in schools with chronically poor educational opportunity and achievement to enroll in schools that demonstrably provided better opportunities and achievement. The idea of choice was to lever a child’s enrollment for improved educational equity and equality.
Like so many things in life, the use of the tool changed. Choice has become a socio-economic- and political lever. In some communities, choice re-established segregation from cultural and economic diversity. In some schools, choice elaborated elitism. In some schools, choice allowed those who could to leave and left a school community of those who could not leave depleted. The tool no longer was a lever for educational equity and equality but for personal advantage.
Choice in the pandemic is a political and economic lever. The power and threat are displayed in the following fashion by a parent addressing school administration or the school board. “If I do not like your school policies, rules and decisions, I will take my child from your school and enroll in a school where I agree with their policies, rules and decisions.” Most frequently, the parent is speaking about policies, rules and decisions related to in-person versus remote education and masking versus no-masking. On the face of this scenario, this is school choice. In the reality of this scenario, this is economic leverage. My child represents school funding and a parent controls where her child’s funding will be schooled. A small school with a small economy may not be able to survive many losses of enrollment. Or, may not be able to withstand the threat of “… there are a lot of families who feel the same way I do and they also will leave this school if you don’t change your policies, rules and decisions”. A school may fear a significant run of disenrollments, like a run on a bank during a financial panic, that drains the school district.
As with most things, one action begets another. The loss of enrollment can diminish school pay roll. Fewer children can diminish school jobs. Fewer children can diminish programs – not enough children for a football team or a school play. The threat of disenrollment causes leadership to consider these “next” problems and that consideration can temper how leadership responds to the lever of threatened disenrollment.
Whoa! At this point, the nature of school governance is completely distorted. No school policy, rule, or decision can be made without the implied threat of disenrollment choices by those who disagree. And, if the threat of disenrollment choices become the “decider” for future policies, rules, and decisions, governance for the good of the school community will be governance for the happiness of a few. When the threat of the disenrollment lever works to change school policies, rules, and decisions, fear of disenrollment choice becomes the modus operandi – anything and everything done in the school may elicit the disenrollment threat.
The best response to such attempted leverage is this – and, make the best educational decisions and life goes on. A school that is consistently focused on the equity and equality of educational opportunity and achievement, including the health and safety of all within the school, needs to stay the course of its policies, rules, and decisions. These high ground qualities will sustain a school through the turmoil of both the pandemic and pandemic behavior. Parents who persist in using school disenrollment as a lever for personal advantage or preference are not seeking the enduring qualities of opportunity and achievement inherent in public education. They are into the self-serving politics of “I want what I want and if I cannot have what I want I will leave”.
Wish them well, as life in the school goes on.