Peter Greene was a teacher for 39 years. Since he retired, he has become the most prolific blogger ever, ever, ever, patiently exposing how things work and why the current privatization movement can’t replace public schools. Privatization is promoted by the rich under the guise of helping the poor, but it always ends up benfitting the haves and leaving the poor even worse off.

Privatization advocates are always stuck with the fact that the founders of public education were never on their side. Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and Catherine Beecher we re well aware that some wealthy families sent their children to private schools and would continue to do so, but they saw the public school as a hallmark of a democratic society, one in which the banker’s son learned alongside the laborer’s son.

So the privatizers can’t claim that they are returning to the original goals of the founders. In fact, they are justifying the inequities that the founders sought to overcome.

In a recent post, Greene reviewed the fundamental problem with school choice.

He writes:

There has always been an obstacle to public education in this country. It’s real, its effects are punishing and far-reaching, and school choice doesn’t provide the slightest solution.
Over at the Fordham Institute blog, Jessica Poiner is recycling an old reformster falsehood that is baloney wrapped around a kernel of truth. “Traditional public schools aren’t open to everyone,” she declares. The “So there!” is mostly silent.


Poiner spins the pro-public ed statement into a “falsehood” by interpreting it as “All traditional public schools are open to all students,” and she is absolutely correct that such a statement is absolutely false. Her assertion, however, doesn’t really advance the argument because nobody has ever tried to make that argument.

Poiner goes on to make the argument that between different schools and school districts we find considerable difference in quality and resources, and that access to the “better” schools is inequitable because of the American system ties school attendance to buying a house. Economic inequity is bakes into the US public education system; doubly so in areas where redlining (historically explicit or currently implicit). Poiner appears to be super-pissed that Ohio’s voucher program, EdChoice, has been successfully challenged in court by public school districts, suggesting that districts hypocritically trap families so that adults can enjoy the benefits of the public system; students can’t just go to the better schools because their parents didn’t buy a house in the right place.


I don’t know of anyone who denies that some schools are better supported than others (though there’s a whole discussion to be had about how we “know” that East Egg schools are better than West Egg). This points us to one of the most fundamental, long-standing problems of education– how are we going to provide a good (enough) education for Those People’s Children?
There have been a variety of solutions on the table:
1) Guarantee that every single child, no matter where they live, falls within a school district that must provide that child with an education. The use a system of state and federal taxation to even out the disparities between local tax bases.
2) Attach to every family some money and let them search out a school that they’d like to attend, public, private or charter.
3) Do nothing. Let people sort it out on their own. And maybe cut everyone’s school taxes.
Well, 3 is not an actual solution, but it’s the MAGA way. Cut all government support for health care, food and nutrition, and education. Some people will end up on the bottom– sick or ignorant or even dead– but that’s just nature’s way of separating the meritorious from the undeserving, and we should not be interfering with God’s Plan. But we need to acknowledge 3 because it is not only current federal policy, but it can also easily infect solutions 1 and 2.
The trouble with 1 and 2 is that they share a critical problem– both of them require taxpayers with money to help pay the education freight for families with much less money. When that doesn’t happen in the public system, the result is schools without enough resources to fully serve their students. When that doesn’t happen in a choice system, students just don’t get a choice. Which is really the choice supporters’ complaint. After all, we have always had school choice; the choice movement has not been about creating choice, but about getting tax dollars to subsidize it. Well, some of it. For some students.
The obstacles to school choice are not policy or bureaucrats or teachers unions or entrenched adult interests. The main obstacles have always been high cost and discriminatory policies.
Poiner puts it this way:

The bottom line is this: If you’re rich enough to buy or rent a home in a high-performing district, your kid gets to go to an excellent school. The world is your oyster. If, however, you can’t afford to pay your way into one of these districts, then most—if not all—high-performing public schools are closed to you.

She’s not wrong. My problem is that modern taxpayer-funded school choice programs don’t really change that at all. Your voucher dollars aren’t enough to get you into East Egg Academy. Worse, East Egg can reject you for any reason. The public school system promise is that wherever you are, there is a public school that must provide for your education; wherever you live, there is no charter or private school that has to provide for your education.
I posted that last bit on the dead bird app, and Derrell Bradford replied with an alternative reformster view.

Wherever you live there is a public school with the power of compulsory attendance and the ability to tax based on your inability to leave or choose no matter how near or far you are from it.

Bradford leads choice advocacy group 50CAN and works with pretty much every other pro-choice group out there, and he’s about the most civil reformster out there (sort of the anti-DeAngelis). And here he pretty much encapsulates the point of view that views a local public school as a “have to” instead of a “get to,” an infringement on rights rather than a means of exercising them. On this, we disagree.


What I see as a commonality between the two views is the need for more resources. I’ve seen one true school choice program in the country, in tiny Croyden, NH, where the deal was that, lacking a local high school, the district would pay full tuition to any school of a student’s choice.

But I only learned about the program because the local Libertarians were trying to chop its budget.


A choice program that fulfilled the promise of an good education for every child, would A) cost a bunch of money, B) require charter and private schools to stop discriminating against students they wanted to reject and C) require useful measures of “good education.” A public school program that fulfilled its promise would take whatever steps necessary to make sure that every school in every was providing a good job, which would A) cost a bunch of money and B) require useful measures of “good education.”

Both visions are up against the same challenge– people whose approach to education is some version of, “Yeah, education is important, but can’t we do it for a lot less?” And if you let them keep talking, some version of, “I don’t mind educating my own kid, and I welcome government help to do that, but I don’t want to pay taxes to make a nice school for Those Peoples’ Children.” Also, a suggestion that compulsory education is a bad thing.


It has never not been an issue, going back to the days when many folks just didn’t need a fancy education for anything (in 1950, 34.3% of Americans over age 25 had a high school diploma) all the way through to the days when Brown v. Board of Education spurred white taxpayers to bitch and moan about the Communist plan to take their money to educate Those Peoples’ Children all the way up through recent history when states argued that students on the McDonald’s track don’t need courses like algebra. As a culture, we wave vaguely in the direction of the importance of education, but we’d rather not pay for it for Other People (see also: health care, food, families, and children).
There are many many more issues to wrestle with in the larger education debates, but I’m trying to focus on just one point. Economic inequity is manifest in our education system.

Modern choice programs, welded to free market ideology, do not offer a real solution to that inequity, and in many ways promise to make it worse.