The Inequality of School Choice: The Problem with DeVos’s Education Agenda
By Jamila Kareem, PhD
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos advocates a school choice agenda, because, according to Ms. Secretary, it is an “investment in individual children, not in institutions or buildings.” Yet this claim is only true for certain kinds of people in certain kinds of situations. In reality, very few American families would be able to utilize a true choice system. Even if they can choose between public and private, virtual and physical, traditional and charter, or religious and secular, financial, time, and other resources often limit access to many of these choices.
As someone who grew up in a working poor family without a car, entrance to quality education wasn’t only attached to where we lived but also the available means to access a superior class of learning. Like many underclass children of color from low-income, urban neighborhoods as well as poor White children from low-resourced, rural areas, we were bussed to school as required by state law. Many choice schools, such as charters and private institutions, are not held to such laws unless they choose to include these as part of their charters and agreements. The subjugated populations that agendas like school choice claim to serve have cultural histories and experiential knowledge that are excluded from the curriculum and from assessment of outcomes. What’s more, parents or guardians in these communities have little connection to the institutional policies and actions.
The purpose of formal institutionalized education is to indoctrinate young minds in the logic and norms of the dominant social system. For all of the critical thinking and problem solving that K-16 education claims to teach students, the insidious and under-analyzed tradition has been to develop new capitalist minds with a sociopsychological investment in western Eurocentric values. Children whose families or home communities do not valorize said values are met immediate attempts at assimilation through what education scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings calls a “White supremacist master script.” Even when teachers or administrators disagree with this assimilationist approach, this system coerces them into following because to not do so would be seen as preparing already denigrated students for failure. The best way to move towards inclusive, antiracist, and culturally sustaining education is not through school choice but to give input of curriculum, curricular outcomes, and evaluation of outcomes to parents, teachers, and students at the local and community level.
Such a home-to-school-to-home approach to institutionalized education places development and responsibility in the hands of the people most affected by the outcomes. Furthermore, it promotes community development and working across difference rather than playing into a system that creates hierarchies out of difference. Antiracist education practices like these give members of school and local communities the intellectual and practical tools to question and change what Tom Crean of the Socialist Alternative deems “class and racial divisions” deeply entrenched in mainstream approaches to education. Approaches such as charter schools and school choice promote inclusion under the guise of equal opportunity, but inclusion of access does not equate to equity of representation — representation in teachers, curriculum, or the labor force.
The fact of the matter is that “choice schools” often have the option to reject students in ways that public schools do not, therefore many of the underclass to middle-class, racially marginalized, religiously persecuted students who “choice” claims to serve have little to no choice in public education and remain systemically underserved and oppressed through education.
Rather than focusing on sending our so-called “unfortunate children” to well-invested and strong-resourced institutions, typically reserved for affluent white-collar families, communities should focus on improving the quality of education in “failing” schools. For example, models invoked by Afrocentric and indigenous education approaches see the interconnected student-teacher-parent-community relationship as integral to student and school institutional success. According to education scholars (C. Lee; Lomotey; T. Lee & McCarty), these connections go beyond developing business-minded, skill-driven future workers and leaders of industry. They allow young citizens of color and those from working-class families to learn what it means to contribute economically, spiritually, intellectually, and politically to society (C. Lee; San Pedro). For parents and students, the curriculum isn’t something they simply do or a set of artifacts they interact with. It is built from their histories and current lives to combat disenfranchisement and strip away “the myth of black inferiority” (Burrell) and the colonizing histories imposed on indigenous communities (San Pedro).
The best way to move towards inclusive, antiracist, and culturally sustaining education is not through school choice but to give input of curriculum, curricular outcomes, and evaluation of outcomes to parents, teachers, and students at the local and community level.
The recent uptick in research on culturally relevant (connection to students’ home communities in the curriculum) and culturally sustaining (application of students’ home communities in the curriculum) teaching and education practices is one viable alternative to school choice. Shifting these students around to institutions that likely do not know or respect their cultural histories, or forcing families in already perilous positions, to find the means to make use of choice is not a sustainable solution. Maintaining current oppressive practices such as high-stakes, irrelevant standardized testing and sponsorship by corporations will keep the same systemic problems in education in place. As much as Secretary DeVos claims to invest in individual children, a school choice reform agenda fails to do so.
