October 9, 2005
School choice makes strange bedfellows
It’s not often that you’ll see me quoting articles in environmentalist publications. It’s not that I’m anti-environment, of course, as I want to see us keep our environment beautiful, where possible. It is more that the most rabid environmentalists are watermelons, green on the outside but red on the inside. It is often that they use environmentalism as a facade for their anti-human, anti-capitalist, and anti-development viewpoints, and even consider humans to be a plague on mother nature.
So it was odd to find a story on The Grist (byline: Environmental news & commentary) advocating for markets and taking power away from government. Daniel Akst argues that School choice could be an answer to sprawl. He starts out with a simple analogy:
Imagine a country — we’ll call it Hobsonia — that requires all its residents to shop at officially assigned supermarkets based on where they live. Now, Hobsonians care passionately about food, and since the law allows them to move if they wish, citizens decide where to live based largely on where they can buy groceries. Those with money move to the best supermarket districts, which tend to be in affluent areas where store managers know that unhappy customers have the scratch to move elsewhere. Hobsonia thus sorts itself into good supermarket districts and bad. While people talk passionately about improving the latter, nothing ever seems to make much difference.
In America, we understand that shopping is too important for us to forbid people from changing stores without moving. So we only apply this Hobsonian policy to public education.
Now, the article is one that suggests school choice as a way to improve inner-city schools, thus defeating the need for upper-income earners to move out to sprawling suburbs, where people waste land and live in multi-thousand square foot homes, drive everywhere polluting the environment, and generally destroy nature’s delicate balance:
As we trundle our little ones onto those yellow buses for yet another school year, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of schools in the frenzied conversion of open space to strip malls and subdivisions — a process known familiarly as sprawl. This car-oriented, low-density development on the edge of metropolitan areas isn’t pretty; it means more paving, greenhouse gases, and traffic fatalities, not to mention less mobility for the young and the elderly. Sprawling communities are associated with obesity, probably because nobody walks anywhere, and they also strike many of us as alienating and indistinguishable.
…
While some people genuinely like faceless suburbs, many of us who loathe them move there anyway because of our kids. We tolerate boredom, protracted commutes, and endless shuttling from errand to errand by minivan because, much as we loved Thai food and art museums, there was no acceptable place in the city to educate our children.
Now, I’m one of those people who does genuinely like the faceless suburb I live in. I’m not a big fan of living crammed into tiny spaces, having my life encroached by loud neighbors, city noise, etc. I’m a relaxed person who likes hanging out at home with friends, and not a big bar-hopping, museum-strolling, big city kind of guy. I enjoy all those things, so suburban life suits me. I have access to all those things (just a short drive away!), but I don’t let them encroach on my life.
So I don’t agree with the authors that we need to end suburban life. I don’t think school choice as an answer to urban sprawl is necessarily the right way to look at it. But I find it striking how my goals, as an advocate of personal liberty in school choice, can intersect with those of a single-issue lobby like the environment. I advocate school choice because I believe parents should take ownership of their child’s education, and that one-size-fits-all public schools forces the poor and lower-middle-income earners into bad schools. Daniel Akst supports school choice as a way to help parents who wouldn’t normally leave a city have options to help them stay. But where we intersect is important; we both believe school choice will lead to better schools.
Ethically, this notion is supposed to be anathema. Surely we can’t trust urban parents to choose their children’s schools. Why don’t we just improve the inner-city schools? Maybe more testing will work. Or how about vastly greater funding? Perhaps smaller class sizes, bilingual education, phonics, or school uniforms will do the trick.
These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school — except, perhaps, for the odd island of success in an ocean of pedagogical failure. These few thriving urban schools tend to be in expensive neighborhoods, or magnet schools with special programs. Either way, admission is essentially voluntary. So why not give everyone this choice? Why not let parents pick any school, public or private, that meets official requirements? Even excluding private schools, a sensible system could still let parents choose freely from among any public schools that will have their kids — even schools in different districts.
It probably won’t take long for Akst be labeled a blasphemer by some of the watermelons. After all, he is advocating capitalism, markets, and competition, which flies in the face of the all-knowing centrally planned government education factories they have supported all their lives. But libertarians like myself may need to make some strange coalitions in order to reform government-dominated institutions like education. If we can get the rabid environmentalists to support our cause, albeit for their own reasons, we might gain just a little more traction.
Owlish Mutterings linked with Carnival of Liberty
1 Comment
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Carnival of Liberty
#15 is up. The Picket line notes and partially fisks an interesting article-The Uses of Disaster. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the government acted as if the public consisted of reasonable adults? Oh, wait, then it might not have much…