There is more to the “public” part of public schools than merely government funding. It denotes a population with a common interest. We are not merely a collection of individuals, workers, consumers, or taxpayers. The concept of citizens and the public are closely aligned. Public education isn’t important merely because it serves the public, it is important because it creates the public. The school’s role as a public institution is something that often gets left out or ignored when the subject of “school choice” and vouchers are brought up. Disregard of the public school’s role in creating the public is a fundamental flaw in the “money-follows-the-child” model of funding education.
Consider other institutions that help form the public such as parks and libraries: Parks give all of us green space and places to come together where we can interact with others in the community. They help define and shape the look and feel of communities and neighborhoods; they provide environmental, aesthetic, and recreational benefits to citizens; they help enhance property values; and they attract people to the community. A lot of that value would be destroyed if lawmakers decided to divert park money to individual citizens so they could spend it on backyard swing set projects, bowling alleys, and green space at their churches. You can expect proponents of such an idea would market it as “recreational choice.” Who doesn’t like choice?! Even if money was going to citizens who never used the parks in the first place to fund projects they had previously funded out of their own pockets, proponents would divide up the cost-per-citizen and claim that “recreational choice” is saving us money.
Similarly libraries are more than just books, videos, and computers. They are places where patrons can come together face to face, often for the purpose of engaging in civil discourse. Libraries help build communities. Haves and have-nots have access to information and librarians who can assist in navigating that information. Local libraries maintain collections specific to the community. They promote democratic values and are often housed in architecture that is notable in its own right. The public library was an American innovation. As David Morris noted, “Europeans had subscription libraries for 100 years before the United States was born. But in April 1833, the good citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire created a radically new concept—a public library.” “Media choice vouchers” that citizens could spend on books and videos at Amazon or at their church libraries wouldn’t be the same. Maybe citizens could get access to the same books and videos. Perhaps they could get more of them at a cheaper rate. But the public would, nevertheless, be diminished.
The more we turn ourselves from members of the public into an atomized collection of individuals, the weaker our communities and democratic institutions become. Dressing up these decisions in the language of “choice” does not change this fact.
It also provides a process by which immigrants can be assimilated into the wider culture.
Some folks complain about immigrants “not becoming Americans”. It’s a lot easier for them to do that when they, or at least their kids, can interact with the wider populace.
Diminishing the public square by diverting public money into walled gardens doesn’t help in that endeavor.
Good post, Doug.
I like this.
Could not agree with you more.
An excellent post. Thank you.
To take the analogy a step further — when we pool our resources for public parks, we can actually afford to create accessible spaces for children with disabilities, while VERY few families would have the wherewithal to put accessible facilities in their own backyards, even with “their share” of the funding. IDEA, anyone?
At the same time, The Tragedy of The Commons. Can families without means living in underperforming districts be blamed if, in trying to do best by their children, seek out alternatives? Or, are they just damned to their place?
To a certain extent, yes. You’re trying to avoid a Prisoner’s dilemma. (Or maybe there’s a better game theory model, but my knowledge is limited.) If everybody sticks together and stays, it’s a small win for both. If one leaves while the other stays, the one who leaves wins big and the one who stays loses big. And, if everyone leaves, everyone loses.
Also, specific to Indiana, the policy that’s being implemented is not designed to help the student without any other options to escape an underperforming school. If that was the goal, you’d see a system that:
1) Was only available to kids in underperforming schools;
2) Limited their transfer to schools that were performing better; and
3) Was limited to kids in families who were financially unable to pay to go to another school.
From the last voucher report, I did an admittedly imperfect and very quick and dirty evaluation of who is using vouchers. I am away from the computer that has that document, but I will summarize what I found as best I can.
I took the 2015 school grades released by the DOE last fall. This has every school in the state and their grade. I then sorted them by school corporation and created an GPA for each corporation based upon their individual school buildings. I used the classic GPA point scale (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0).
I found that nearly 50% of the kids using vouchers were “fleeing” a school corporation that scored 2.75 or better. I also found that ~70% of the vouchers were used by kids in corporations scoring 2.00 or better. So, for the most part, these kids aren’t leaving “failing” schools.
I have not had a chance to break it down by any type of income ranking, but of the 32,686 kids participating 10,148 or about 31% come from families making at least 150% of the Reduced Lunch threshold or ~$67,000/year.
As Doug stated, if we really wanted to target kids “trapped” in low performing schools the rules would be written in a way that wouldn’t produce the results I noted above.
Love this post….well said!
Doug, et al., Greetings: I’ve just discovered this blog via your op-ed in last Thursday’s Fort Wayne Journal gazette, “Keeping the ‘public’ in public education”. It rang bells for me in that especially in recent years, although I applaud public institutions in theory, my own pattern is to increasingly recede from being a public presence myself. That being so, your article led me to step back and see that, between work, home-bound chores, books, the internet, etc., face-to-face engagement can become a vanishing skill. It then strikes me that patterns not unlike my own may well play a significant role in the much lamented, seemingly inescapable polarization now stalking our sagging democracy.
I’m currently part-way through sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land. It records her in-depth attempt to connect with and understand Tea Party conservatives living in the heavily industrialized region around Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hochschild, from Berkeley, CA may have prepared for her study with months of empathy push-ups. Given the title, as I read, I’m looking for her success in that. Even so, I myself am finding people she renders in some detail seeming more approachable than my own bag of stereotypes would have suggested. Your paean to institutions anchoring face-to-face public engagement is for me a useful jolt. First, Thanks. Then, Now What?
Glad to hear from you, George. I don’t have too many answers, but I think there is some value to just getting out and about in the community and talking to people. In particular, I think participating in the community on projects that aren’t overtly political is probably the route to making us a stronger country. When you’re directly debating or discussing politics, people are going to retreat to their respective tribes almost reflexively. When you’re doing something else, picking up trash, helping a school fund raiser, going to basketball games, etc., that reflexive tribalism doesn’t kick in so quickly.
Alexis de Tocqueville described early Americans as a nation of joiners. I think that sort of in-person civic activity is what will bring us together. Easier said than done, of course.