Tag: school choice

The (A)morality of Trump’s School Choice Plan

Posted on | by Sam

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Trump will renew a call for tax breaks in order to provide more scholarships for students to attend private schools.

The Education Freedom Scholarships would provide up to $5 billion in federal tax credits to individuals and businesses who donate to scholarships for families to use at private, faith-based schools or to fund homeschooling. “For decades,” Trump explained, “countless children have been trapped in failing government schools. We believe that every parent should have educational freedom for their children.”

To which I say, buyer: beware. 

And: it’s complicated.

As a resident of Washington, D.C., site of one of the country’s most ambitious school voucher plans to date, and a city in which half of the city’s students attend public charter schools, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. And, for what it’s worth, I even support school choice. I helped launch a charter school here. My sons attend another one, and the city is beginning to see some real collaboration between its charter schools and the district. Good things are happening.

At the same time, I worry about what could happen if too many of us simply assume that the invisible hand of the modern school marketplace – or, worse still, the incentivizing hand of the federal official – is a sufficient strategy for ensuring that all children receive equal access to a high-quality public education.

One sees, for example, the horror stories from Michigan — aka Ms. DeVos’s former laboratory — where four out of five charter schools are run by for-profit entities (read that again). One sees the sizable discrepancy between the expulsion rates of charter and district schools in D.C. and elsewhere. And so one should take seriously the warnings of scholars like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, who urges us to think much more carefully about the role market-based thinking should have – scratch that, does have – in our lives.

“Markets don’t just allocate goods,” Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged.” And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. “The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

Anyone who has closely followed the sturm und drang of American school reform over the past decade has seen evidence of what Sandel is describing. Our  growing reliance on — and resistance to — data-driven decision-making is a direct result of an ascendant technocratic faith in applying scientific rigor to the previously opaque art of teaching and learning. Economist Gary Becker sums up this thinking well when he asserts: “The economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior, be it behavior involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons, patients or therapists, businessmen or politicians, teachers or students.”

That’s a mouthful, and it captures the sea change Sandel wants us to see. Whereas in the not-too-distant past, economic thinking was restricted to economic topics — inflation, investment, trade — today it is being used to outline a new science of human behavior: one that assumes modern society will work best when human beings are allowed to weigh the costs and benefits of all things (including where to send their children to school), and then choose whatever they believe will yield the greatest personal benefit.

The part of me that agrees with that logic is the part that supports the basic idea of school choice. After all, we have tolerated a system of unequal opportunity in this country for too long, and there’s real merit in the argument that one’s zip code should not become one’s destiny. School choice in cities like mine gives everyone the same chance at a high-quality education, and empowers each family to set its own “shadow prices” – the imaginary values that are implicit in the alternatives we face and the choices we make – and then make their own decisions about where to send their children to school. As the rally cry goes, MY CHILD, MY CHOICE.

Who could argue with that?

Certainly not Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of the legislative sponsors for the new plan. “Competition improves,” he asserted. “And in this case, injecting new money to give that freedom, to give that competition, to give that power of choice, will enhance the quality of education to kids all across the country.”

But here’s where it gets complicated.

In the end, should we define public education as a public good, or a private commodity? Will our efforts to unleash self-interest (which is, after all, what the economist seeks to economize) strengthen or weaken the connective tissue of our civic life? And will the current trajectory of the school choice movement unleash a virtuous cycle of reforms that improves all schools, or merely add another layer in our historic apartheid system of schooling?

On these questions and others, I agree with former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who, when asked by reporters in 1971 to offer his assessment of the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, said: “It is still too soon to say.” But I also agree with British sociologist Richard Titmuss, who argued that “the ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man, foster integration or alienation,” and strengthen or “erode the sense of community.”

President Trump’s myriad other amoral tendencies notwithstanding, our changing notion of community should be the central concern of anyone who cares about school choice. How can greater choice bring us closer to each other, and to a revitalized notion of civic virtue and egalitarianism? How can we ensure that school choice does not contribute to an even wider divide between the haves and the have-nots, and an even wider discrepancy between those who know how to negotiate the increasingly commodified assets of modern life, and those who are merely left to take whatever comes their way? And how can school choice reflect this basic truth about democracy – that while it does not require perfect equality, it does require that citizens share in a common life, one that is grounded as much in the “we” as the “me”?

These are the questions we must explicitly ask – and answer – if we want school choice to become a force for good. And we can’t do that without explicitly debating the extent to which market-based thinking can get us there. As Michael Sandel reminds us, “when market reasoning is applied to [an issue like] education, it’s less plausible to assume that everyone’s preferences are equally worthwhile. 

“In morally charged arenas such as these, some ways of valuing goods may be higher, more appropriate than others.”

The (book) reviews are in!

Posted on | by Sam

Well, three of them at least — from the Washington Post‘s Moira McLaughlin, the Century Foundation’s Rick Kahlenberg (via Washington Monthly), and Eduflack’s orange-jacket wearing Patrick Riccards. And they’re good!

On a related note, C-SPAN posted a video of my public reading from Our School at the Francis Parker school in Chicago. Check it out — and let me know what you think.

New Orleans is an all-charter city. Is that a good thing?

Posted on | by Sam

This week, the last five traditional neighborhood schools in New Orleans’ Recovery School district were closed – making it the country’s first district made up entirely of charter schools.

That’s a good thing, right?

If you look at some of the baseline data, it’s hard not to say yes. According to the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton, prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’ high school graduation rate was just over 50 percent. In 2013, it was just shy of 80 percent. Similarly, student math and reading scores have risen over thirty points higher than they were before the storm. Indeed, as longtime PBS education reporter John Merrow shows in his documentary film, Rebirth, there’s a lot to like about what’s happening in the Crescent City.

Of course, Merrow’s balanced coverage also exposes some of the problems with the reform strategy in New Orleans – from reduced financial oversight to increased social stratification. And community activists like Karran Harper Royal have gone further, arguing that school closures in cities like hers disproportionately affect African American students and families. “This push to close schools  . . . is the new Jim Crow,” she explained, pointing out that New Orleans’ “new normal” means something very different to residents like her. In an all-charter city, she says, “You have a chance, not a choice.”

Which is it? Are charter schools the answer? Or are they the beginning of the end of public education in America?

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot these days, after spending the month of May traveling around the country to talk about my new book, which is (surprise surprise) all about school choice. What I learned can be boiled down to these two observations: first, school choice feels (and is) very different depending on where you live; and second, the question we ask when we talk about school choice – are charter schools the solution or the problem? – is not the question we should be asking.

With regard to the first point, let’s begin with a city like Washington, D.C., where enrollment in both charters and district schools is rising, and where the district and charter community are collaborative enough to have held their first unified lottery this year. Contrast that with a state like Michigan, where four out of five charter schools are for-profit entities. Then look at a city like Chicago, where more than fifty neighborhood schools have already been closed, where more will undoubtedly be shuttered this fall, and where shiny new ones are opening all the time – and this amid a larger climate of declining enrollment overall (you do the math), and you begin to see that speaking broadly about “school choice” or “charter schools” is appealingly simple, and completely inappropriate.

How choice feels depends on where you live, and how high (or low) the levels of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration are in those communities. Period.

To be clear, school choice should feel different in different places, because different driving forces are at the root of different parts of the movement. Is the goal to build space for more innovation as a way to not just increase the number of charter schools but also create a rising tide that lifts all boats and improves all schools (of all stripes) in a city? I would argue that’s what’s happening, mostly, in D.C. Or is the goal to create a zero-sum game that results in the disappearance of everything old in order to make way for anything new? That’s what it feels like, partly, in Chicago.

Too often, our infatuation with charter schools has led too many of us – from soccer moms to President Obama – to equate them with reform. More charter schools, the logic goes, equals more quality and a reimagined public school system. And, to be sure, I’ve seen a lot more good charter schools in my travels than bad ones. But you can’t improve American public education, systemically, one school at a time (and, to be clear, although cities like New Orleans and D.C. are inundated, less than 5% of children nationwide attend charters).

This is not surprising to anyone who knows anything about systems change. “From a very early age,” Peter Senge writes in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline, “we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world.” This reflex makes complex tasks seem more approachable. But the truth is we all pay a price for deluding ourselves into thinking that complex problems can be addressed with piecemeal, or, in this case, school-by-school, solutions.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane postulates that one reason we do this is because we fail to recognize the interplay of three different types of complexity: dynamic, generative, and social. “A problem has low dynamic complexity,” Kahane writes, “if cause and effect are close together in space and time. In a car engine, for example, causes produce effects that are nearby, immediate, and obvious; and so, why an engine doesn’t run can be understood and solved be testing and fixing one piece at a time.” By contrast, a problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time. This characterizes just about any major challenge faced by American public education today. Kahane says such problems “can only be understood systemically, taking account of the interrelationship among the pieces and the functioning of the system as a whole.

“A problem has low generative complexity,” he continues, “if its future is familiar and predictable. In a traditional village, for example, the future simply replays the past, and so solutions and rules from the past will work in the future.” By contrast, a problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable. Think again of the challenges faced by schools, which must depart from the traditional Industrial-era model of schooling to match the needs of students who are entering a radically different world than the one their parents grew up in. “Solutions to problems with high generative complexity cannot be calculated in advance, on paper, based on what has worked in the past, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds.

“A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.” This may have been true in the past, when one’s neighborhood school was more likely to attract families of similar faiths, economic levels, and ethnicities. But a problem has high social complexity if the people who must solve it together see the world in very different ways. “Problems of high social complexity,” Kahane says, “cannot be peacefully solved by authorities from on high; the people involved must participate in creating and implementing solutions.”

So how do we identify solutions for a field that is marked by high degrees of dynamic, generative, and social complexity? One step is merely by asking the question, as opposed to debating whether we need more or less charter schools. And another step, impossible to avoid when the opening question is a different one, is to start seeing public schools and the communities they serve as systems, not parallel tracks.

Too often, this interdependence between charters and traditional public schools (not to mention between charters themselves) is given short shrift. Yet our still-nascent experiment in school choice – national and/or local – won’t work until we do. And although New Orleans’ highly localized experiment as an all-charter city may ultimately succeed, its strategy, applied nationwide, is a fool’s errand. “The most profound strategy for changing a living network comes from biology,” Meg Wheatley explains in Leadership & The New Science. “If a system is in trouble, it can only be restored by connecting itself to more of itself.”

So what does this all mean?

To unleash the sort of generative feedback loop that can improve all schools, we must see reform as a both/and proposition. We need to raze and rebuild, and we need to preserve and improve. We need the ingenuity of single-school autonomy, and we need the scalability of whole-community structures. We need to incentivize schools to instill in young people the skills, habits and dispositions they’ll need to navigate this brave new world, and we need to stop rewarding schools that are merely perfecting our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests. And, finally, we need to realize that as appealing as it may be to assume otherwise, concepts like “choice” and “charter” are not monolithic terms; they are fluid, fulsome, and unfolding before our eyes.

In New Orleans, and everywhere else, we remain in the eye of the storm.

(This column originally appeared in Education Week.)

OK, Brown v. Board is 60; Now What?

Posted on | by Sam

As I travel around the country this month, participating in public conversations about the promise and peril of school choice, it seems fitting that right as we marked the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I would end up having lunch with Michael Alves.

For those of you that don’t know, Alves has made a career out of helping communities and districts craft new student assignment policies that promote greater equity throughout their schools.

The 1980 effort to create more diverse schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts? That was Alves. The celebrated effort to merge city and county schools in Raleigh, North Carolina? Alves. Indeed, although as recently as 2000 the number of U.S. school districts pursuing socioeconomic integration policies could be added up on one hand, today there are more than 80 that are using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment – and Alves has had a hand in almost all of them.

A bald, jovial Bostonian who raised his six boys in a stately house that was built in 1882, Alves provides a clarity to core questions of equity that I rarely encounter in school reform circles. “The problem with most of the current efforts around school choice,” he explained, “is that we aren’t clear on what the goals are. The goal can’t be a zero-sum game between charters and districts. So how do kids get distributed? In my mind, the purpose of any student assignment policy should be to facilitate the mission and vision of the district. Is our goal to promote greater socioeconomic diversity? Are we motivated by a need to ease overcrowding? Whatever the answer, you can’t craft a good plan unless you really understand the makeup of your community. And the reality is that charters are operating as their own islands, and most school districts don’t know much more than the percentage of their kids that receive free and reduced lunch. That’s not good enough.”

To help districts solve this information problem, Alves has a simple solution: treat student registration the way an obstetrician treats a pregnant mother’s first visit to the doctor’s office. “When a couple makes that first visit to the OB/GYN,” he says, “the doctor gets all kinds of information – not to hurt the child, but to help him. We tell districts to do the same. When that parent registers their child, schools should be asking all kinds of questions (all of which are voluntary): what is the monthly income of the household; how many adults are in the house; how many other children are there in the house; what is the highest educational attainment level of the parents; what sort of preschool program was the child enrolled in; and so on.

“Everything we ask is designed to create an assignment algorithm that correlates to educational readiness while still prioritizing proximity,” Alves continued. “Once districts start to understand, on a more granular level, where their kids are coming from and what their school readiness is likely to be, they have the chance to craft assignment policies that ensure a more equitable distribution of children and families across their network of schools.”

“We have diversity everywhere, except in schools. “Where you live, you live. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to school strictly based on where you live.”

For me, that last point is one we need to take more seriously as we mark the 60th anniversary of The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown – and our inability to fulfill its promise. Too often, we assume that schools and school policies can somehow solve by themselves the intractable, entrenched legacies of race-and class-based inequity in American society. But schools can’t impact economic and housing policies, or deepen our commitment to public health. And even though the Court came within one vote, in 1973, of ruling that the way we fund schools – via property taxes – was unconstitutional, the reality is that many of our most celebrated school reform efforts are actually deepening, not diminishing, our commitment to “separate but equal” schools.

This is why I support school choice – albeit not the limited concept of choice that so many want to promote. Simply put, you can’t solve the equity problem in American society merely by razing the old system and rebuilding everything from scratch. But neither can you solve it solely by preserving and improving what we already have; a both/and strategy is needed, one that creates space for new schools and ideas, and that puts as much energy into renovating the old as it does to revering the new.

What would such a strategy look like? I’d start by having more urban districts mirror the efforts of Boston Public Schools, which has built into its traditional district model the space to seed 21 schools that have charter-like autonomy, and keep them within the larger network of the district. Does the system work perfectly in its efforts to have the best ideas of those pilot schools funnel through the rest of the schools in the district? No. But as Mission Hill principal Ayla Gavins puts it, “what the pilot program does is create the conditions for greater innovation and collaboration to take place; the rest is up to us.”

Next, I’d encourage more schools to adopt intentional, district-wide socioeconomic diversity assignment policies – the sorts of policies Michael Alves has been tinkering with for over thirty years. “I believe a central goal for any district should be to help any kid at any school feel like, “No matter who I am, I fit in somewhere at that school. No one wants to be the ‘only’ anything – that’s the goal; that’s inclusion. And that’s the only way, until these other aspects of our society change, we can get closer to the promise of Brown.”

Raze and renovate. Freedom within structure. And policies that balance individual choice alongside communal commitments to equity.

Would that sort of recipe get us closer to honoring the Court’s declaration, on May 17, 1954, that education is “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms?”

I think it would.

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

This is what a community conversation about school reform looks like

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Now that my new book is out, I’m doing a series of public talks around the country to explore core issues of choice, reform, and community.

My first event was at the legendary DC bookstore, Politics & Prose, and they videotaped the conversation, which featured everything from high-stakes testing to E.D. Hirsch to a quick crowdsourcing of the core characteristics of the ideal graduate.

See for yourself, and let me know if it was helpful.

In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

Posted on | by Sam | 9 Comments on In New York, A Tale of Two Cities (and Two Selves)

At the New Teacher Center conference a few years ago, I watched a master teacher model a great way to introduce students to new material. She projected a single image onto the screen in our conference room — it was Liberty Leading the People — and asked us a single question, over and over again: “What do you see?” Any observation (“I see a strong woman”) would prompt a second question from the instructor (“What’s your evidence?”). It was fun, and illuminating, and after ten minutes, based on nothing more than our own close observations, we were ready to study the French Revolution.

I was reminded of that workshop recently, when I saw someone on Twitter share the following picture:

Absent any context, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

Now let’s try another one, this time a 30-second video:

Or this one:

Again, what do you see? And what is your evidence?

If you’re someone who closely follows the news about school reform, you already know that the standing woman in the photograph is Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy network of charter schools in New York City. You know that her salary — $475,000 a year — is twice that of the NYC Schools Chancellor. And you know that the video, and others like it, appeared shortly after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City — and allowing virtually every other charter proposal to proceed.

It’s been disconcerting to watch this fight escalate — particularly because, as I’ve said repeatedly, issues of school choice are complicated. Nuance is required, and once again, nuance is nowhere to be found. But there’s another issue I see playing out in this fight, and that picture, and those videos, and it’s the one we really don’t want to talk about: the extent to which our current reform efforts are either redefining, or merely reinforcing, traditional notions of race, privilege, and power.

Indeed, the battle between the Matriarch and the Mayor isn’t really about co-locations, or charter schools, or the right of a parent to choose: it’s about the ongoing tension between our country’s delicate, dual allegiance to the core values of capitalism (consumption & competition) and the core values of democracy (conscience & consensus). It’s about a mayor’s clumsy attempt to swing the ideological pendulum back — perhaps too far — in the direction of democracy by making a political point. And it’s about whether it’s OK or a little shady that a white woman can make a personal fortune by dramatically raising the test scores of poor black and brown kids.

Personally, I think it’s a little shady. Not because schools like Success Academy are inherently wrong or misguided, but because it’s a vivid example of the ways in which our society in general, and public school reform in particular, has shifted its moral center to the capitalist side of the values continuum. In that world, competition is king, and to the victor goes the acres of diamonds.

This is an old tension, and an ongoing argument between two competing sides of ourselves. Plato first laid it out for us, in The Republic, when he said that liberty was democracy’s greatest good. What type of liberty will generate the greatest good, however, has been debated ever since, though philosophers have clarified the distinction. One vision, described as the liberty of the ancients, refers to the need for people to have a voice into the policies and politicians that govern their lives. The other, the liberty of the moderns, speaks to the right of each individual to pursue his or her own private interests free form state oversight or control.

I would suggest that the core of the current fight over school reform policies can be traced back to which side of the liberty equation speaks to you most. Consider the central rallying cry of the charter school movement: My child, My choice. Consider the rallying cry on the other side — less pithily stated, but the essence is, public schools are the foundation of a healthy democracy (gotta work on that messaging, guys). Or consider the words of Khari Shabazz, the principal of Success Academy’s fifth Harlem location, in an interview with a reporter from the New Yorker. “They are going to be competing for spaces in colleges and universities across the country,” he said of his students. “Coming from the socio-economic background that they’re coming from, it’s important to learn to be competitive. And none of us work for free.”

There’s nothing wrong with that statement; it’s simply a market-oriented approach to school change — a liberty of the moderns worldview, if you will — and it’s a view that’s very much in line with the larger sea change in American society. “Markets don’t just allocate goods,” says Harvard’s Michael Sandel. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged. And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

For a society in which social relations are deeply rooted in a shared history of race-based inequality and oppression, will the application of market thinking to public schools result in the erosion, or the entrenchment, of those legacies? Indeed, the center of the fight in NYC seems to be about what will happen when the considerable wealth and influence of a capitalist economy begins to remake the institution that was founded to be the ultimate safeguard of our democratic society. It’s about what happens when educators start to make private-sector salaries by improving achievement in communities that have been left behind. And it’s about what happens when two increasingly entrenched groups of people debate the future of public education from perspectives that can sometimes feel mutually exclusive.

This is what makes modern school reform so complicated. It isn’t that one side is evil and out to ruin America, and the other is righteous and out to save it — though both sides have claimed exactly that; it’s that the values people are working from to solve our most intractable problems are, in many ways, diametrically opposed.

Which takes me back to that picture, which feels like a Rorshach test for the values you bring to this debate. Does the imagery make you uncomfortable, even angry? Or does it seem like much ado about nothing, or perhaps even a positive representation of precisely what you want to be fighting for?

Knowing where we stand on the values question doesn’t immediately lend itself to any clear-cut, system-wide solutions. But perhaps it can clarify what we’re actually fighting over, and why any effort to find the happy medium between our democratic and our capitalistic selves may prove as elusive as the search for Plato’s ideal republic — now 2,500 years long, and counting.

Something’s Happening Here . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Something’s Happening Here . . .

In the span of a few weeks, all of DC seems to be abuzz with the prospect that our elected officials may actually try to ensure greater racial and socioeconomic equity in the city’s public schools — apple carts be damned.

First, there was the Op-Ed two colleagues and I published in the Washington Post, calling for the adoption of controlled-choice policies as part of the city’s current effort to reconsider neighborhood school boundary lines.

The next day, the Department of Education released new guidelines that would allow charter schools to employ weighted lotteries that gave preference to disadvantaged student populations.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of Washington City Paper features a cover story about Roosevelt High School that places the issue of integration and school boundaries squarely in context, by way of a crumbling beauty of a school building that is currently under renovation — and seriously under-enrolled. And listerves like this one are burning up with a mixture of interest, anxiety and vitriol at the idea of such a dramatic departure from the norm (does someone really think I should be tarred and feathered?).

What do you think? Is integration worthy of being prioritized as a policy goal in a city like Washington, DC? If cities have a responsibility to ensure greater equity in their public schools, are there other, better ways to do so? And, in the end, is there any way to strike the right balance between honoring people’s individual choices against a community’s shared sense of values and responsibilities?

Looking forward to hearing people’s ideas and concerns.

Turning School Chance Into School Choice

Posted on | by Sam

There are a lot of smart people in Washington, D.C., and one of them is Evelyn Boyd Simmons.

A longtime D.C. resident, an effective parental advocate, and a firm believer in the unmatched promise of public education, Evelyn has a way of cutting to the quick on complicated, contentious issues. And so it was when in a recent conversation, she summarized the state of affairs in American public education with a clever turn of phrase.

“What people like to call school choice,” she said flatly, “is nothing more than clever marketing. What folks really have is school chance.”

I’d never heard it described that way, and she’s right. In cities like ours, where an increasing number of families are opting into the chaotic dance of the charter school waiting lists – or trying their hand at an out-of-boundary admission to a sought-after neighborhood school – what we like to celebrate as an enlightened era of self-determination is in fact little more than a citywide game of craps.

Which begs the question: when it comes to something as important as a city’s public schools, can’t we do better than hoping enough people come up “Boxcars?”

I believe we can, which is why my colleagues Mike Petrilli, Rick Kahlenberg and I have urged the city to adopt policies that can transform a system of chance into a city of choice.

To do that, we need to eliminate the historic notion that each family has a property right to their neighborhood school, while at the same time guaranteeing admission to a high-quality public school that is within a reasonable proximity. Let people rank the schools closest to their home, and build a system that balances parental preferences with a commitment to evenly distribute children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. What we’ve proposed is only a first step – it does not address, for example, the areas of the city that remain largely segregated – but we believe it’s a way to begin building more racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. And, significantly, it’s an idea that has been tested, and proven effective, in many cities across the country.

It’s also, needless to say, an idea that raises complicated issues of race, class and privilege, and already our proposals have sparked a number of heated responses, accusations, and dismissals. This, to me, reinforces why it’s a conversation worth having. Indeed, it’s the conversation Thurgood Marshall tried to have with us forty years ago – and no, I don’t mean Brown v Board of Education.

The case was San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the year was 1973, and the issue was whether Texas’s method of funding its schools (via property taxes) constituted a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Marshall and three of his colleagues on the Court believed that it was, meaning we came that close to overturning our country’s historic (and historically inequitable) way of funding public schools.

Think about that for a second.

What strikes me most, however, is what the five Justices in the majority said. “Though education is one of the most important services performed by the state,” they wrote – and even though the way we fund schools in America “can fairly be described as chaotic and unjust” – the promise of a more equitable system of schools “is not within the limited category of rights recognized by this Court as guaranteed by the Constitution.” If it were, the majority conceded, “virtually every State will not pass muster.”

To Marshall, that was precisely the point: something as vital as a high-quality public education for every child should not be left to chance. And while there’s nothing that can be done about the Court’s decision in 1973, there’s plenty that can be done in cities like Washington, D.C., where rapid changes in schooling and geographic diversity are making possible some new ways of thinking about how best to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to receive a high-quality public education.

History has shown that when we let the goal of school quality be determined by the invisible hand of the market, our schools do not regress to the (positive) mean: they bunch at the poles. School choice cannot, therefore, be left to chance; it will require simple sorting structures that are grounded in our founding values as a nation – liberty and equality – and that respond to the ever-present challenge that is as old as the country itself: E Pluribus unum—out of many, one.

Boxcars!

(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What is the proper role of government in public education reform?

I read an interesting Op-Ed about education in today’s Washington Post, in which the author wrote the following: “The proper role of government is to ensure the provision of essential services, not always to provide those services itself.”

Leaving aside the author’s particular perspective on K-12 education reform, I’m curious: How many people out there agree or disagree with this general statement as it pertains to education reform? Is the “provision of essential services” a proper understanding of the proper purview of government — one in which a widening circle of choice could in theory not just be the privatization of public education, but moreso a reframing of how government can help support the highest number of high-quality public educational options? Or is the proper purview of government always to provide those services itself — especially when the services in question pertain to the education of our nation’s young people?