School choice is self-interest and self-interest is what it is, self before all else. One can parse out all the other motives and characteristics that underlie school choice and the one common denominator is “I want to choose who my child will associate with in their school attendance.” Is self-interest a good or a bad thing? Not necessarily either. In a world that places the highest values upon “the Dream,” American or otherwise, giving people the opportunity to express their self-interest by choosing the school their children will attend seems an American thing to do.
Lest we forget, school choice is not a new phenomenon. Parents in our nation have made choices relative to the school their children will attend for hundreds of years and almost always on the basis of social association. Parochial schools, preparatory schools, military schools, and finishing schools have been part of the K-12 landscape since colonial times. In my hometown in the 1950s, my childhood friends spun off in many school directions. Whereas, most attended their local neighborhood public school, kids in my neighborhood also attended Catholic and Lutheran parochial schools. We played street ball and kick-the-can without any consideration of where our school desks were housed. When we left our elementary schools for junior high, several kids left the neighborhood for military school, most notably Shattuck Academy or St. John’s Military Academy. I remember overhearing our parents talk about “a need for discipline” and the next time I saw my friends they were home “on leave” with very short haircuts. And, when it was time for high school, the last culling sent several friends to selective college preparatory or finishing schools. They sent letters from Exeter and Phillips Academy and Patricia Stephen’s Finishing School.
Did these choices truly make a difference in the lives of the children they affected? That is a difficult answer to make. For my parochial school friends, their parent’s choice of a Catholic or Lutheran education was a commitment to sustaining their chosen family values. “Everyone in our family goes to St. Patrick’s” was a way of saying “we are and will be a Catholic family.” And, many still are these many years later. Attending a prep school in New England was a variation on the same theme as a parochial education. Going to Exeter said, “these are my peers and being in their social cum economic circle is an investment in a powerful professional future.” Most of my friends who went East to school stayed East in their professional and cultural adult lives. They truly became doctors, lawyers and business leaders. And, the girls who attended Stephens made the social register when they married; they were debutantes.
School choice has been with us a long time, but the choosing of a school in yesteryear was different than the burgeoning school choice issues of today. When we look at the child in the school choice discussion, school choice still is about associations. It is the parental determination of “who will my child attend school with and what advantages will accrue from those associations” that drives the specific selection of a school. Parents give lip service to matching their child’s learning needs to a particular pedagogy or curriculum. School choice is an aggressive election to move away from undesirable school associations and to move toward more desirable associations.
When we look at the adult in the school choice discussion, school choice is about power. It is the power of a parent to make the decision of school attendance and the political and economic mechanisms that support the parental power to decide. Whereas, parents always had the power to send their children to parochial, military, prep and finishing schools, they personally funded their choices. Today’s school choice discussion is all about the reallocation of public funds to support parental school choice decisions and getting at these large public funds is all about state and local politics.
One does not redirect tax-based dollars without writing new laws. Moving another step, one needs elected lawmakers to write new laws. And lastly, elected lawmakers need financial backing to assure that they remain elected. Hence, school choice today is not about a parent in the neighborhood who wants his or her child to attend a different school in order receive a more advantageous education. School choice is about getting candidates, and enough candidates, elected to office so that new laws will direct state money that otherwise would be allocated to public schools redirected to “schools of choice” and to vouchers for the public payment for a child to attend a school of choice.
Or, from a different perspective, school choice today is about reinstitutionalizing a child’s education. The old institution of public education is being taken down and the new institution of consumer- and commercialized-education is being raised up. The power brokerage necessary to create new institutions needs organization and funding and there is plethora of political action groups ready to funnel the dollars of large and small donors to purchase and sustain the legislative votes necessary to create charter and for-profit schools of choice.
Self-interest is a powerful human motivation. One should understand a person’s self-interest in order to predict their future human behavior. When the nominated Secretary for the US Department of Education, Betsy DeVos, states that she is “…in favor of charter schools, online schools, virtual school, blended learning, and any combination thereof, and frankly, any combination or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of…”, then one can predict that we have not yet conceptualized the extent to which school choice will be institutionalized. The fact that a wealthy political activist like DeVos is even nominated to head the USDE moves the actualization of self-interest in school choice from choice as an alternative to choice as the new mainstream.
One thing we can know is this, the school choice available to our grandfathers will be nothing like the school choice available to our grandchildren. In fact, public school may become so deinstitutionalized that PS #1 in your community will be the school of choice for only those who cannot or will not choose to send their children elsewhere.