Thoughts on School Choice
The following are some of my thoughts on school choice, after reading a 1986 Star Tribune article on former Minneapolis school superintendent Richard Green for one of my classes. Green made a contentious argument: That privileged parents should be willing to sacrifice a bit of the quality of their children’s education for the common good. They should leave their children in failing city schools and fight to improve these schools, rather than moving their kids out of these schools. At first I was undecided on this issue, but if the goal is a politically engaged community, I agree with him. Green was angered that privileged parents have the attitude, “We can do something else; what are you doing to keep us here?� It is only the privileged parents who have this option of “something else�. If they move their children out of failing schools, they will most likely cease to be advocates for their improvement. There will be families who are left behind: those who do not have the time to inform themselves on their options, apply for scholarships, etc… and most likely these will be the families who have the least time to give to advocate for their children’s schools, as well. The only argument that I can see for this “free market approach� to our school system is that the bureaucracy of schools makes it impossible to change the system from the inside, so this is the only way schools will ever improve… to let the “bad� ones die out. This of course sacrifices a large part of a generation of school children in the process.
While Green argues that people who “opt out� of the public school system and leave it to rot will be sorry when their grown children are walking “side-by-side down the Nicollet Mall� with the “abandoned� former public school children, I think he’s wrong… and this is one of the biggest problems of our culture today. Because of the lack of community and contact between different strata of society, most likely those grown privileged children will not have to walk side-by-side with those who were left behind… they will therefore not see a reason to become engaged in community, and the cycle will continue.