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School Choice:
What’s Missing?February 17, 2006
By Julie M. Quist
Last month a TV show with John Stossel called, “Stupid in America” looked critically at the severe failings of public schools in the U.S. The subtitle was, "How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education." Stossel aired the problem, and he also pushed his solution: School Choice. He made an effective case for the corruption in the current system and how it’s cheating kids. Stossel makes the case that competition from charter and private schools is the only way to drive quality back into education.
The idea behind school choice is that parents and students become the customers. Schools are then forced to produce a product families want to choose. Otherwise, the schools fold, replaced with schools that can do the job, just like any business that competes for quality and excellence.
One thing is curiously missing from School Choice advocates, however – a demand for “no strings” on private and home schools from government.
“Strings” are demands governments make on schools in exchange for providing education vouchers. Government agencies expect to define the outcomes and influence the curriculum.
A shift takes place in private education when government directives accompany school choice: private and home schools are accountable to government, not to families. The customer holds the purse. When vouchers depend on government outcomes, parents are no longer in the driver’s seat.
Alaskan home schoolers, for example, experienced this. Alaska began offering correspondence courses and money to buy curriculum for home school families, who signed up in droves. Last year, however, the accountability measures began appearing: no curriculum which has any connection to Christianity, no matter how tenuous, may be used to satisfy graduation requirements, even if paid with a family’s own money.
A demand for school choice without an equal demand for “no strings” is begging for a government take-over of non-public education. Then all choices will be the same.
Julie Quist is an education researcher and analyst, Vice-President and Political Director of EdWatch and Editor of EdWatch Newsletter.
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