Democratizing School Choice

The great scholar of deregulation and later Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told a (possibly apocryphal) story of the late Senator Ted Kennedy. During the 1970s, Kennedy held numerous hearings about deregulating the airline industry, a cause supported by everyone from Ralph Nader to Milton Friedman. Kennedy, the story goes, was approached by one of his Boston constituents and asked, “Why are you holding hearings about airlines? I’ve never been able to fly.” To which Kennedy replied, “That’s why I’m holding the hearings.”

A decade ago, Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, summed up the effects of airline deregulation. Airfares fell 50%. The per-mile cost of flying did too (even including fees). At the time Senator Kennedy’s constituent was complaining about what issues he was devoting his energy to, less than 20% of Americans had ever flown. By 2000, more than half of the country was taking at least one trip every year.

By breaking the vise-like grip that the federal government, through the Civil Aeronautics Board, had on controlling the prices and operations of airlines, air travel was democratized. Millions have benefited.

This year’s wave of school choice legislation has been about democratizing school choice. Historically, lots of people in America have had school choice, if they have the money to purchase a house zoned to a good school, to pay for private school tuition, or to homeschool. They have also been able to supplement their child’s traditional education with a host of other choices, from therapies to extracurriculars to tutors. Universal Education Savings Accounts democratize both of those sets of opportunities, supporting families in their choices of schools and the surrounding services that they want for their child.

For those wondering why legislatures are spending so much time on the issue, especially if you haven’t chosen your child’s school. Well, that’s why.

But clearly some people are not happy about this development. It is hard to open twitter or the op-ed pages of newspapers in states debating these bills and not see gallons of invective-soaked ink attacking them. Critics are not happy about who is going to get to participate. They’re upset about what types of schools or other learning options families are going to be able to choose. They’re angry about why families are choosing. To them, democratizing choice is bad. Better a narrow set of choosers and choices than the “Wild West” that ESAs create.

It is a fair criticism to say that democracy is messy. If we only allow a narrow set of people to vote, or to write in newspapers, or travel on airplanes, we will have a neat and tidy politics, a neat and tidy public conversation, and airplanes where every man is dressed in coat and tie and every woman is in a smart dress with a string of pearls around her neck. But, of course, the majority of people’s needs, opinions, and desires will be excluded.

When we allow everyone to vote, to have platforms from which they can share their opinions, and to live out their preferences, we get a raucous and rambunctious polity. But we get a polity in which everyone gets their voice heard. Call it the Spirit Airlines principle.

The same is true of school choice.

If we only let a narrow set of people choose where to send their kids to school, we will have a neat and tidy system of schools that doesn’t rock the boat or stress anyone out. This is the response I tend to see from educated, left-leaning professors and other professionals that exercise choice themselves but argue against it for others. No, you see, we can be trusted with choice because we have the knowledge, education, and vision to choose the right type of school for our child. Start talking about extending the same choices to others who might be poorer, more religious, of a different political stripe, or a different race than them and hoo boy see how the tune changes.

If we only allow a narrow set of choices for that narrow set of parents to choose from, the same will be true. Schools will reflect the elite consensus. We never have to wrestle with the fact that different parents want different things for their children, that there is no one best way to educate every child in America, and that maybe, just maybe, someone different from us might actually be on to something.

It will be messy. People will make choices that we disagree with. It will be imperfect, because humans are imperfect. But it will maximize the likelihood that schools will reflect the needs, wants, and values of the families entrusting their children to them.

And we should never underestimate the value that exit has on pressuring public institutions to change. (This, of course, sets aside the basic issue of fairness that children should not be left to languish in schools that are not meeting their needs.) Parents have a limited set of tools at their disposal to affect change in their child’s traditional public school. They can vote for the school board, but the deck will be stacked against them by the powerful interests that control the timing and nature of those elections. They can complain to school administrators, but those administrators are under no obligation to do anything about it. Threatening to leave, and potentially taking some portion of their public funding with them, is a powerful incentive to push schools to do better. It is another dimension of democratization that gives power to ordinary people to make the institutions of their lives more responsive.

Tidiness is overrated. Give families and educators the space and support to form communities and institutions. Live with the headaches that democracy creates. It’s much better than the alternative.