Driving School Choice
By positioning public education as a commodity, “school choice” risks re-entrenching segregation
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently told the Brookings Institution that school choice was akin to choosing between ride-sharing apps. But more worrisome was her implicit, disjointed, and ahistorical proposal for a wholesale re-visioning of the purpose and function of education in a democratic society.
In this vision, education is no longer a public good but rather a commodity. Families are positioned as consumers in an educational marketplace, responsible for interpreting a proliferation of data sources as they navigate a complex school system, or multiple parallel systems, governed by a logic of competition. That parents and young people will experience the process of school choice as empowering is taken for granted.
…Educational marketplaces disproportionately advantage those with surplus time, energy, social capital, and institutional knowledge.
It is well documented in the research literature that educational marketplaces disproportionately advantage those with surplus time, energy, social capital, and institutional knowledge. School choice policies have been shown to benefit the relatively privileged within all racial and social class groups. In the context of urban re-gentrification, such policies, and the carrot of a high-quality free education, motivate middle and upper middle class families to remain invested in public education (provided they have their pick of schools). This benefits the municipal tax base, while the social, cultural, and economic capital that affluent families bring is allowed to cluster in certain schools at the expense of others. The result is that many local zoned public schools are stripped of the socioeconomic diversity and resource cushion that is critical to the success of the less privileged.
The current public conversation around school choice relies on a characteristically American truism. It’s common sense: more choice is better!
Who wouldn’t agree that choice is a great thing, and that everyone should have it?
Yet the reality of its implementation involves a complex set of factors that may ultimately enable, if not actively support, the privatization and re-segregation of public education.
“People Like Having More Options”
“They like being able to choose between Uber Pool, Uber X, Lyft Line, Lyft Plus, and many others. Or when it comes to taking a family trip, many like options such as Airbnb. We celebrate the benefits of choices in transportation and lodging. But doesn’t that pale in comparison to the importance of educating the future of our country? Why do we not allow parents to exercise that same right to choice in the education of their child?”
The likening of a school to a ride-sharing service, which transports a customer’s body from point A to point B in exchange for a sum of money, is absurd. School is the most significant institution, alongside the family, through which young people develop. Over the course of a K-12 education, a young person spends upwards of 13,000 hours in a classroom environment, and countless additional hours in extracurricular activities.
Preferences and rights are very different beasts. Public education, which serves 90% of American students is, at its best, the primary institution for the production of citizens, leaders, and workers of the future. This is the official party line of those who advocate for “saving” public education, and it is infused with a notion of citizens as national resources and the goal of maximizing national competitiveness through the development of human capital. School is also, of course, the institution par excellence of social reproduction, and one could argue, as education researcher Nelson Flores does, that as such it has always been a tool of white supremacy as we live in a white supremacist society.
In a representative democracy like the United States, public schools have historically been understood as having a duty to equip citizens with the intellectual tools and civic knowledge necessary for self-governance. But it is worth noting that public schools have discharged this duty unevenly, which is symptomatic of our society’s systematic disinvestment in racialized communities and in the schools located in these communities.
Schooling is not a service, and it is not a commodity. It is — or should be — the means through which a society as diverse as our own coheres and develops a functional social fabric.
The frame within which this strange comparison of school to ride-sharing service was made warrants some unpacking. DeVos opened with the observation that people like having more options, which, by the end of her remarks, is transformed into a claim that choice is somehow a right. It is uncontroversial to observe that people find the idea of choice highly appealing. In the context of late capitalism, expressions of choice and selection, especially among products and services, are ways of enacting a sense of identity, of claiming a place in the social order, of performing good taste, and of distinguishing ourselves.
In DeVos’ vision, the individual is the unit of analysis, whose personal pleasure, satisfaction, and wellbeing is privileged over the health and coherence and sustainability of the social fabric. People may like having options, or feeling like they have options, but what people like and good social policy are often very different things.
“Invest in Children Not in Buildings”
“We must shift the paradigm to think of education funding as investments made in individual children, not in institutions or buildings. Let me say it again: we must change the way we think about funding education and instead invest in children, not in buildings.”
To my mind this is brilliant, deeply revealing, and highly problematic rhetoric. What monster would disagree with the assertion that we should invest in children? Implicit is the view of the atomized individual child as free agent and independent actor, a source of potential value ever threatened by the specter of wasted potential. Children’s bodies and selves are figured as sites of potential investment, with promises of future productivity.
This rhetoric pivots on a notion of what geographer Cindi Katz calls childhood as spectacle. While seeming to invoke individual children, DeVos is actually invoking the idea of the child — the child as innocent, in need of saving, at risk, and our only hope for the future. In contrast to the idea of the child, the actual child lives in the physical and social world — in a classroom, among classmates, with teachers, teachers’ aids, administrators, after-school program staff — in a world of institutions, people, and yes, physical infrastructure. To invest in children is to invest in the spaces they inhabit and in the social supports that make these spaces conducive to human flourishing.
Such programs are, by definition, disinvestments in the public sphere…
The language of “investing” in children rather than in buildings is code for “choice” policies in which dollars follow bodies. In its purest form, this translates into voucher programs that allow parents to apply public taxpayer funds toward private or parochial school tuition. Such programs are, by definition, disinvestments in the public sphere — not surprising for a Secretary of Education inclined to dismantle the federal Department of Education she leads.
But let’s be clear. Even in districts with robust charter sectors in states without voucher programs, when dollars follow bodies, inefficiencies result. Running multiple parallel systems (district and charter, not to mention multiple charter programs) results in higher administrative overhead and less money left over for student instruction.
When dollars follow bodies we dilute our investment in children.
“Parents Are the First and Primary Point of Accountability”
“The Education Choice and Competition Index is important, and unique, because it’s very parent-centric. Parents are the first and primary point of accountability.”
The Brookings Institution publishes an Education Choice and Competition Index, a methodologically transparent and quantitatively rigorous resource that is invaluable for anyone interested in cross-district comparisons of school choice policy. Like DeVos, I find much to admire in its effort to rank and compare mid- to large-sized districts in terms of the friendliness of their policies and practices vis-à-vis school choice. I found the 2015 version indispensable as I was designing a study at Data & Society of how families use and make sense of data as part of school decision-making.
But while she has characterized herself as not being a “numbers person,” DeVos seems to fundamentally misunderstand both the intended audience of the index as well as the historical context and current politics around accountability in education. The claim that the index is parent-centric is ridiculous, unless she means to suggest that families might relocate across state lines from a low-scoring district like El Paso or Atlanta to a high-scoring district like Denver, New Orleans, or New York City — simply because they “like to have more options.”
While people may well like having more options in theory, what does this look like in practice? School choice policy has great momentum behind it, but many of the conversations around it, beautifully illustrated by DeVos’ speech, dwell in the domain of seemingly “common sense” truisms, anecdote, and personal experience. There’s no reason to doubt that she believes her own claims, especially considering her lack of knowledge of public education history, policy, theory, practice, pedagogy, or even any personal experience in the domain as a public school student, parent, or teacher. However ungrounded in reality her statement that the index is parent-centric may be, it is fascinating as a clear expression that schools, figured as providers of educational services, should be primarily answerable to parents, who are consumers in a competitive choice marketplace.
Common Sense: Not So Common
We find ourselves in a heady moment in which the goals and purposes of public education have been thrust into the daily news. It is, I believe, a moment of great opportunity. The cultural and political winds are blowing toward undermining democratic education for all through the privatization of public education. Interestingly, this trend coincides with the growth of the open educational data movement, as data is increasingly gathered and reported openly, published online in municipal open data repositories or dashboards, sent home on flyers in students’ backpacks, or shared on message boards or parent-run listservs. And yet, as Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers recently commented, “The public in public education has never been more visible or more vocal, and it is not going back into the shadows.”
Brookings ranks New York City third out of 112 cities in the friendliness of its orientation to choice and competition, and schools in New York are among the most segregated in the nation. A causal relationship between school choice and rampant segregation hasn’t yet been established, although danah boyd and I have both speculated that the apparent correlation between the two may be an unintended side effect of the open educational data movement. The excellent work of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and our own work so far suggest that the narrative of parental empowerment through school choice advocated by DeVos is overly simplistic. As we embark on the Data and Equity in School Choice project to investigate how parents of rising kindergarteners in New York City make sense of all this data and the role of data in their decision-making, we’re seeking out more nuanced, and even contradictory stories from the front lines of the process.
Points: “Driving School Choice” by Claire Fontaine is a field note from the new Data and Equity in School Choice project at Data & Society. This research project aims to better understand whether — and in what ways, and to what ends — parents and youth draw on publicly available school performance data when making decisions about where to apply and enroll. — Ed.
