Dispatches From The Land Of Luxury Beliefs

With the start of the new year, state legislatures across the country are beginning their work. Most will run though the spring and wrap up just before summertime.

School choice has been high on the priority list in several different states. Iowa has already passed and signed into law one of the most expansive school choice programs in American history and Utah followed in quick succession. In Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wyoming and numerous other states, new programs or program expansions are on the table with serious chances to become law this year.

The reasons for supporting school choice are as diverse as the 72% of Americans who support it. For some, it is about fairness. They believe it is wrong that some families get to choose where their children go to school because they have the money to pay for a house zoned for a good school or private school tuition. Others recognize that relying on residential assignment for schools will only serve to reinforce the racial and economic segregation that exists in American housing patterns. Others believe that the public school system needs some competition to spur improvement. Still others are pluralists who believe in supporting a wide range of school types to reflect the diverse needs and desires of a diverse country. Still others are themselves trapped in schools that are not meeting their children’s needs and want a way out. The list goes on and on.

But whenever school choice starts to get discussed, opponents take to social media, op-ed pages, or in Iowa’s case the balcony of the Capitol Rotunda, to voice their opposition. In their minds (or at least in their words), public schools are the bedrock of American society and democracy and supporting people when they opt out of them constitutes an assault on a key American institution.

This position is a luxury belief. Cambridge University’s Rob Henderson coined that term to describe “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” Opposing families having the ability to exit public schools that you would never send your own children to is about as perfect of a luxury belief as you can imagine. It might play well on your university campus or at your suburban coffee klatch, but it has real, tangible, negative effects on the lives of some of America’s most disadvantaged students.

And over and over again, school choice opponents are exposed for either attending private schools themselves sending their own children to private or charter schools. Take President Joe Biden, an ardent school choice opponent, who both himself graduated from Archmere Academy, a Catholic school in Delaware, and sent his own children there. For reference, tuition at Archmere is $32,400 per year. (The Iowa Balcony Shouter apparently went to private school as well.)

But some protest, I send my children to public school!

Equating your active choice of a public school to a family that sends their child to public school because they have no choice is tone deaf. Did you buy your house so that you could attend that school? Did you enter magnet school lotteries or line up early on enrollment day to get your child into a top-performing school? Will you pull your child out and move to a different catchment area or put them in private school if you don’t like what is going on? You are not the same.

There is the idea of public education and then there is the reality of public education. The reality is that far too few public schools are bastions of integration, upward mobility, and educational excellence. To be clear, great public schools absolutely exist. There are thousands of wonderful public schools that are doing an amazing job educating children. But there just aren’t enough to meet the wide-ranging needs and priorities of more than 48 million K-12 students across the country. Incredible inertia from established structures and forces arrayed in the American public school system prevent the creation and growth of more excellent and responsive schools.

But even outside of the powerful interest groups that shape what public schools look like, there is the simple reality that we live in a big diverse country that would struggle under any single educational system. By granting a geographic monopoly to a single educational entity and democratically electing the people to run it, you are begging for minorities (of any kind) to not have their voices heard. School choice creates space for people who think differently, have different needs, or want to do something different with education. Perhaps some of the luxury believers don’t appreciate this because they are in the majority and have their views, values, and priorities reflected in their community’s schools.

At the risk of my fingernails flying off my hands in protest as I type what follows, I have to recommend our luxury believers “check their privilege” and remember that not everyone has the same options that they do nor the luxury to support abstract ideals in the face of an untenable reality. Perhaps rather than shouting at parents celebrating the chance for a better school for their child, they should listen to them.