The Politics of Parent Choice in Public Education

The Choice Movement in North Carolina and the United States

W. Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137312082
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

This is the story of North Carolina parent choice advocates' push for the creation and expansion of choice policies. The exploration of the politics, ideology, and interests surrounding parent choice includes but also stretches beyond the most frequently discussed choice policies of charter schools, school vouchers, and tuition tax credits.

1

Rethinking Public Education

Americans like to choose. We like to choose our grocery stores, our dry cleaners, our auto repair shops, our shoe stores, our coffee shops, our restaurants, our places of worship, our doctors, our dentists, and yes, the places our children will go to school. Any number of factors go into making our choices. Kroger is the closest supermarket to my home and I shop there, but not because of its proximity. I am a fan of their organic food line. I drive about 20 miles to my church on Sunday, not because there are no Christian churches closer to my home, but because I enjoy the pastor, congregation, ministries, and music at my church. I frequent a Starbucks coffee shop 15 miles from my home, not because there is not one closer, but because I love the energy there. I take my suits and my shirts to different dry cleaners; one does a great job with my suits, and the other does a better job with my shirts—I like heavy starch. I have chosen to use the same auto repair chain for the last ten years across three states; the service is okay, but more important to me, their prices are competitive and they have high speed Internet—I can work online while I wait for my car to be serviced. I am assured that my choices are in compliance with legal and industry standards. Further, I am personally satisfied with my choices. If at some point I am no longer satisfied, I can choose to go somewhere else.

Saying that parents should be able to choose public schools for their children is pretty controversial in some settings, but it really should not be. Americans have been making school choices for as long as they have been choosing grocery stores. Parents with the means to do so often choose neighborhoods based on schools. Home flyers now frequently list the schools that serve specific neighborhoods. Parents with even greater means, if unsatisfied with the public school serving their neighborhood, can choose to send their children to private or parochial schools or home school their children. Still, other parents use their social and/or political capital to get their children into the public schools that they prefer regardless of the neighborhoods they live in. And just as with grocery stores, parents make school choices for any number of reasons. For some parents, school location is most important. Some parents choose schools for their innovative programs, like language immersion or STEM-focused schools. Some parents choose schools because they like the teachers there. Some parents choose schools based on standardized test scores. Some parents choose schools based on the race and gender composition of the student body and staff. Some parents choose schools based on history or family legacy. Some parents choose schools based on the reputation of athletics or other cocurricular activities for students. The simple answer to why parents choose the schools they do for their children is that there is no simple answer. Just as parents choose shoes and dentists and food products for their children for myriad reasons, the reasons that they choose schools for their children are no fewer.

A simple but unsettling current reality, however, is that all parents do not have the luxury of choosing schools for their children. For many parents, school choices are made for their children by local school districts; and in more cases than not, those boundaries have resulted in children from low-income communities attending schools with fewer resources and less qualified teachers than the schools their more affluent counterparts attend. Parents who live in states and districts with limited or no school choice policies, and who do not have the financial, social, and/or political capital that most middle-class and affluent Americans enjoy, often have no other option than sending their children to district-assigned traditional public schools that may or may not be high quality schools; that may or may not meet their children’s unique learning, social, and emotional needs; and that may or may not provide the kind of education they believe to be most appropriate for their children.

In August 2012 I had the opportunity to attend the new student induction ceremony for young men who would be the first students at Carter G. Woodson Academy in Lexington, KY. The academy is a new program grown out of the collaborative efforts of a local church and the Fayette County Public Schools (FCPS). With the explicit mission of preparing young Black men to achieve at high levels, in its inaugural year the program has enrolled students in grades six through nine and promises to offer educational experiences designed to help them realize their full academic potential. Any male student in FCPS may apply to the program. Applications are scored using a rubric and the school uses a tiered lottery system to select students.

The Woodson Academy induction ceremony was one of the most moving events that I have attended for some time, largely because of the excitement of parents about the availability of this unique learning experience designed to meet the needs of their young Black male children. These parents were so excited because few, if any, schools or programs in Kentucky have served Black male students as a group very well. According to data from the Kentucky Department of Education, in the 2010–2011 academic year 53.93% of African American high school students in Kentucky scored at the Proficient or Distinguished levels in reading on state assessments, and 45.32% scored Proficient or Distinguished in mathematics compared to their White classmates of whom 74.59% scored Proficient or Distinguished in reading and 68.79% in mathematics. In FCPS, while higher percentages of African American and White students scored Proficient or Distinguished in reading and mathematics, greater disparities existed between the percentages of African American and White students scoring Proficient or Distinguished in reading and mathematics.

Parents attending the Woodson Academy induction ceremony were justifiably excited at having just chosen something new, something different for their children than the traditional public school programs that have not served Black male children well. More traditional public school systems are beginning to think about differentiating schooling approaches to meet children’s unique needs. Parents do not care what school type an innovative program is—traditional, magnet, charter, and so on; they care about the availability of school options that meet their children’s needs. The creation of programs like the Woodson Academy is long overdue and parents are beginning to demand more options like it. In Lexington, parent demand for the Woodson Academy alone already exceeds the program’s capacity.

There is really no question about whether parents want choice; they do. In my work on parent choice and throughout my career in education, I have yet to meet a parent who preferred that someone else choose a school for her child. So yes, parents want to be able choose schools for their children, but without choice policies the most vulnerable families are not able to make choices. The Woodson Academy in Lexington, KY is an example of an innovative program in a traditional public school district, FCPS. The Woodson Academy is not FCPS’s only innovative program of choice; they have a few and are busy developing new ones. Few Lexingtonians or Kentuckians would deny that FCPS is one of the more innovative school districts in the state. But with all of its specialized schools and programs, the district is not able to accommodate parent demand for its programs. Hundreds of parents apply for the district’s programs every year and are turned away. And because Kentucky has not passed charter school legislation, FCPS is the only show in town. If FCPS does not create it, parents will not have it.

The debate over parent choice policies is about whether choice should be a central tenet of public education in the United States, and whether we will support policies that ensure that all parents have the opportunity to choose high quality schools that meet their children’s unique learning needs. More and more parents across the United States are answering those questions saying they want choice to be central to American public education and they want an array of school options available to their children. Parents across the country are saying that all parents should be afforded the right to make school choices for their children, regardless of where they live, their socioeconomic status, their educational attainment, and their children’s educational needs.

Reconsidering Public Education and Public Schooling

Serious conversations are underway about what American public education should look like as we move further into the twenty-first century. These are not superficial conversations; instead, they get to the very core of what Americans have known to be public education and public schooling for many generations. One thing that is exciting about these education policy conversations is that they are not just taking place in policy think tanks, government agencies, higher education institutions, and schools. These conversations about what public education should look like and how it should work are happening with and among parents at dinner tables, in coffee shops, at places of worship, in public libraries, in chat rooms, on discussion boards, and on social networking sites. Parents are engaged and in many instances they are driving conversations on education policy, questioning decision-making about how, when, and where children are educated. There are no sacred cows in many of these conversations. Everything is up for debate and reconsideration.

Fundamental to conversations about rethinking public education in the United States is making the distinction between the concept of public education and the system that delivers it (Fuller, 2002). The concept of public education, most fundamentally and succinctly, is the idea that government makes provisions for the people to access education at the public’s expense, and ensures that such is adequate and equitable. Throughout the twentieth century and up to the present, the primary manner in which governments in the United States have chosen to provide education for children has been through government-run and regulated schools. Some parents, scholars, and lawmakers are now beginning to question, however, whether government provision of public education should be solely through government-run and government-regulated schools. Some state governments have decided to make provisions for public education in their states through combinations of government-run and regulated schools (traditional public schools), government-regulated-only schools (semiautonomous charter schools), and private schools through the use of tuition vouchers and tax credits for private school tuition and related expenses. I contend that the use of government-regulated-only schools and vouchers and tax credits to provide public education does not change the concept of public education; instead, it only shows the evolution and broadening of governments’ approaches and strategies for delivering the best and most appropriate public education in the twenty-first century.

The concept of public schooling must be separated from the concept of public education. Thanks to parent choice policies, there are many more types of public schools available to children now than ever before. These new public school types may not look or feel like the public schools many of us attended, but the examination of three, and only three, critical elements is necessary for determining whether a school is a public one or not. Those areas are access, funding, and accountability (Finn & Gau, 1998; Kolderie, 1990). A public school is one where the public has access to the school, access without a fee. Public schools do not charge students tuition to attend. The requirement of a fee to attend the school, no matter how slight, potentially restricts the access of students on the basis of family wealth. A public school is funded by public sources. This is not to suggest that a public school’s funding must be restricted only to public sources, but that the base level of support for educating students is provided by some combination of state, federal, and/or local government funds. Finally, a public school is one that is held accountable for outcomes and/or standards of operation to some government or government-authorized entity. Beyond these areas of access, funding, and accountability, there are any number of varying factors that make public and private schools both similar and different, but none of those additional factors have any bearing on whether a school is a public or a private one.

By those standards, charter schools in every state clearly and comfortably fit within the public school classification. Some critics of this definition charge that it has been custom constructed so that charter schools would fit it. I contend, however, that the standard is constructed relatively broadly to include even the various administrative and organizational arrangements of traditional public schools. For example, as some traditional public schools now contract with private entities to provide school services including management, counseling, therapy, food service, supplemental educational services, and in some cases even primary instruction for students, a definition of public school that required that all school workers be government employees would leave even many of those schools outside of a definition of public schools.

Truthfully, governments’ reliance solely on government-run and regulated schools for the provision of public education has never adequately served the needs of many individual families or society writ large. Government-run and regulated schools have served a cross-section of children pretty well, but many children have not been served well by these schools. For generations, children’s failure to learn has been placed at their own feet or at the feet of their parents. Only recently is the conversation about education in the United States shifting to where we recognize the limitations of a one-size-fits-all approach to public education, where we send all children through cookie-cutter schools, hoping that everyone gets something out the experience that they can use to build a life and career from. We are now recognizing that children have different learning needs, which to meet appropriately requires different teaching and schooling approaches. We are recognizing that one-size-fits-all schools have never served children with diverse learning and social needs very well. We are also recognizing that families have different preferences for education, reasonable preferences but ones that cannot be accommodated with a one-size-fits-all school model.

The current critical reassessment of public education and public schooling in the United States is overdue. Parents are participating fully in this reassessment and asking tough questions that should have been asked by policy makers and educational leaders long ago; the questions include: Who does the current system serve well and who it does not serve well? Are the current structures best for meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse population of students with diverse needs? Are the current structures best for preparing citizens and workers for the society and economy of tomorrow? Answers to those questions will inform the decisions we make about the future of American public education.

Conversations around what is public about public education are not new, and even the casual education policy observer might recognize that change is afoot regarding the delivery of public education. Miron (2008) writes of a shifting notion of “publicness” in public education, with the question of whether education should be seen as a public or a private good being central to how public education is conceptualized and delivered. Advocates of choice policies have generally emphasized education as a private good, while the traditional public schooling protectorate has emphasized it as a public good; but most scholars including many in the aforementioned camps concede that in reality education rests on a continuum between the two extremes (Labaree, 1997; Lubienski, 2000, 2001, 2003), with clear benefits to the individual student/family, but also recognizable spillover benefits or positive externalities to society at large.

Critics of choice policy argue that any redefinition of public education to include delivery of education through public schools, private schools, and public-private partnerships will move public education further down that public-private goods continuum in the direction of private good. I agree with them; it will move public education further down the continuum. But I believe where public education will likely settle on the continuum will be closer to the middle than the place it has rested throughout most the twentieth century. If public education is to be regarded as a hybrid of public and private goods, as I believe it should be regarded, then the current dominant conceptualization of public education in the United States, with public funding of education, schooling delivered solely by government-run and regulated schools, and parents having little or no say regarding how, when, or where schooling is delivered is wholly inappropriate. The current dominant conceptualization of public education would only be appropriate if it was a pure public good, but it is not.

While it remains uncertain what American public education and public schooling will look like as we move further into the twenty-first century, it appears highly unlikely that public education will return to a monopoly system, whereby government funds and has complete control over the delivery of public schooling. Parent choice advocates are set on fundamentally changing how public education is defined and delivered, and they will continue to demand that public schools be much more responsive to parents than they have been in the past. For many parent choice advocates, their conviction and beliefs about parent choice are fundamental to who they are as Americans. As Boyd (2007) put it, “Like rust, they will never sleep about the school choice . . . for it goes to the heart of their beliefs about liberty and the proper role of government” (p. 12). Choice policy advocates face fierce political opposition from teachers unions and their allies, but these reformers will not stop until they have a system in which public education is delivered through a variety of different mechanisms, and where parents choosing schooling options for their children becomes more the norm than the exception to the rule.

Research Methodology

Primary data sources used in this study included interviews with key informants and archival documents. In order to gather descriptive data in informants’ own words, the researcher conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 60 study participants. Participants were purposefully sampled, with each participant selected because he or she could “purposefully inform an understanding of the research problem and central phenomenon in the study” (Creswell, 2007, p. 125), and help to facilitate the expansion of theory development (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007. In order to include as broad of a spectrum of responses as possible, informants in this study included parents, journalists, legislators, legislative staff persons, interest group representatives, teachers, school adminis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Rethinking Public Education
• 2   What Is Choice?
• 3   The Politics of Charter Schools
• 4   The Politics of Charter Schools and Choice in North Carolina
• 5   Busing, Desegregation, and Parent Choice
• 6   Conclusion
• References
• Index