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CHAPTER 1
PART 1
Historical Reflections on School Choice
But do you really want a skeptical, slow complexifier at the table when you're trying to sort through important policy dilemmas? Well, yes, you do.
— CARL F. KAESTLE, "Clio at the Table"
Arguments around school choice date back at least several centuries, and often with odd bedfellows sharing positions, as is the case today. Just in terms of voucher plans, for example, an ideological range of thinkers urged support in the eighteenth century. Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man (1791), advocated a plan to provide the poor ten shillings a year for six years of schooling, which included "half a crown a year for paper and spelling books." In a rhetorical flurry on behalf of more schooling in the new democratic republic, he argued that "it is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support." Paine also noted the varied interests to be advanced, on both the supply and the demand side: "To [the children] it is education, to those who educate them it is a livelihood," noting that "there are often distressed clergymen's widows to whom such an income would be acceptable." Though not fond of what John Adams called Paine's "yellow fever" of egalitarian "democratical" philosophy, Adam Smith also supported a "wide dispersal of educational expenditure and decision making," emphasizing it as an efficient way of letting the market's creative energy stimulate stuffy pedagogues. John Stuart Mill advocated a voucher program, but emphasized it as a means of guarding personal liberty: "A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another. ... [It] should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments." He almost sounds like an early advocate for portfolio approaches to public school management.
Yet the history solely of the arguments and theories about school choice will likely yield limited insights, for reasons a colleague of John Dewey noted early last century. In an attempt to understand the "controlling ideas in American education," George Counts decided to avoid the "natural temptation to write the educational theory of a people ... in terms of the names and the thoughts of its great educational theorists." Certainly, claimed Counts, their ideas seldom shaped actual practices, as "again and again the evolution of American educational institutions has proceeded with but little regard for the pronouncements of leading educators." Instead, we should "endeavor to abstract from the actual practice of education the principles to which it gives expression" — in this case, regarding school choice. For it is "through its concrete program of education a nation must give conscious or unconscious answer to every important question of theory"; indeed, "these practical responses of society ... constitute the living theory of education of a country, the theory which has been made flesh and endowed with the breath of life." Years later, historian and school reform leader Ted Sizer urged attention to actual practices over time; we should look at "what the people do for their young citizens. There are lessons in chalkdust."
Following Counts's direction and Sizer's urging, this chapter examines a few of the choices made by parents over time in the United States, so as to unearth what underlies Counts's "practical responses of society," particularly looking at three historical "moments." Each section, each "moment," foregrounds an aspect of our history worth recalling in the current school choice debate. The first section reminds us of both the fundamental choice of schooling relative to other means of education, as well as the wide mix of "providers" evident since our early colonial days. It highlights the question, To whom does education belong? The next section shines light on parents who chose to opt out of the public system, forming a private mass schooling system to compete with the public. What affected this, and how did both public and private systems develop within, and benefit from, an emerging shared regulatory environment? That section also highlights the struggles over innovative approaches to schooling and to the design of choice sets for parents, and illustrates the tensions between innovation and accountability and the ways in which regulation aims to permit both. Regulation of schools, as in numerous other sectors, became the means for balancing private and public interests across public and private providers. A final section reminds us that our extended history of alternative school choice struggles — intensified by schooling's growing impact on economic and social aspirations — has long reflected the impact of other social policies. How we sort and select our neighbors, for example, has long affected how we balance public purposes and private choices in schooling, usually reflecting adult political choices. This section illustrates the centrality of questions about shared or collective aims of education in the making of policies about schooling.
Moving chronologically across the republic's history, the first section discusses colonial/early republic origins, first of schooling as a more deliberate choice among educating agencies, and then of the great variety in the schooling market through the early national period, prior to the common schools. From the nation's birth, its educational pluralism reflected a decentralized political system, shifting roles among educating institutions, and a diverse range of providers and purposes for an uprooted people. A second section examines the coexistence of parochial and public schools as a single market, post–common school triumph, roughly 1870 to 1930, in selected northern cities where Catholic schools enrolled significant percentages of students. The period illuminates schooling trade-offs between assimilation and pluralism, the appropriate integration of private values and common schooling, the role of often invisible local adjustments, community leaders, and school boards, and the enabling role of cross-sector regulations in facilitating choices. A final section examines the drivers of the school choice landscape from World War II to recent years. Amid the intertwining influences of desegregation struggles, residential shifts, alternative school models, and growing conservatism, the nation shifted its educational pluralism to a bounded system of differentiated choices.
Our collective question is not whether to have choices for parents — we do, and always have — but how we will regulate who has which choices in this always-mixed market for schooling. To start, we turn back to eastern North American shores nearly four centuries ago; what choices did parents face then about the education of their children, and what echoes do we hear today?
Original Choices
Forasmuch as the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any Common-wealth; and wheras many parents & masters are too indulgent and negligent of their duty in that kinde ...
MASSACHUSETTS BAY SCHOOL LAW, 1642
Debates around the choices that parents should have regarding the education of their children, or of others' children, inevitably reflect the anxieties over the future direction of a community or society, and of its youth in particular. Even institutions that remain intact through a crisis may begin to serve quite different purposes, as their position in the ecology of educational agencies may shift. What does this mean?
One of the most striking examples arose in the early colonial period, in the fundamental crisis adults faced in transferring their European lives into, for them, a strange, new and often inhospitable wilderness setting. Historian Bernard Bailyn described what he saw as perhaps the "most important ... transformation" ever to affect US education, a set of primordial choices that set fundamental patterns in place which still shape US schooling. To understand the educational choices he uncovered, including who had what authority over schooling, requires "a broader definition of education," beyond "formal pedagogy" to "the entire process by which a culture transmits itself across the generations ... [as] when one sees education in its elaborate, intricate involvements with the rest of society."
In post-Reformation England — especially among the middling classes, whose offspring would emigrate to the North American colonies from England and northern and western Europe — printing and literacy had spread considerably. Indeed, one sixteenth-century writer, Thomas Nashe, even complained that "every gross-brained idiot is suffered to come into print." (And this was more than four hundred years before blogs were invented!) Children were raised in an instinctive, intuitive tradition of child-rearing closely tied to community and religious life. So then imagine that you, as an English colonist, survive the stench, disease, and weather perils of the boat ride over, settle into this strange new territory (strange and new to you, at least), and begin to implant your familiar institutions, habits, norms, and community life. You try to recreate the world you knew, in some way. For many, this meant patriarchal kinship communities, with youth taught to read and write, socialized to adulthood, and even taught their trade by family and friends, aided by the explicit moral instruction of the local church and, likely, a short spell of instruction in something we would recognize today as a brief, ungraded primary school.
But the colonists were not in anything like the world they were in before, though they struggled to recreate it. In many respects, it seems they were remarkably successful. Yet such a dramatically different environment did challenge some central tenets of how children were educated in the European countries they had left behind, leaving, says Bailyn, some permanent marks on US education. What was for centuries past an integrated ecology of extended family, community and church, with borders blurred, introducing youth unconsciously into a future of known roles largely defined by the past — all this crumbled given the pressures in a new land. Between the early days of European settlement and the end of the colonial period, the educational system was "dislodged from its ancient position in the social order." An unforgiving environment wreaked havoc on family discipline, often advantaging youthful energy, as abundant land offered an easy escape for white males.
Without the support of other established institutions as they had in England — local churches, universities, and so on — especially in the towns and urban areas, the colonial family seems to have taken on added importance as an educator. Many were alarmed at what they saw as a moral crisis among the young, were worried about their ability to raise their children in the faith of generations, and, for all their patriarchal trappings, turned increasingly to women to play a role in educating and catechizing the children in this new world.
The forbidding new surroundings challenged parental authority, where youth might adapt more easily than adults; bouts of starvation and disease could shatter traditional family discipline, even beliefs in Divine Providence; available land could loosen the bonds of familial allegiance; the demands of adapting to a harsh new physical environment might distract families from religion and home education. The fate of the culture, of civilization breaking down before it was passed down, was seen as hanging in the balance. Elders and clergy condemned the disorder, the moral breakdown of familial hierarchies, and even "the great neglect of many parents and masters in training up their children in learning and labor." The choices seemed dire. If the family broke down, then, per Ulysses in Shakespeare's famous speech, "the rude son should strike the [sic] father dead," and
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their fixure.
To face this moral threat, colonists increasingly turned to schools to complement an already increased burden that families felt in educating youth, especially for proper moral upbringing — an echo we still hear so often today. Parents might not be trusted to carry out their duty, and the challenges grew. Massachusetts's "Old Deluder Satan Act" of 1647, following on the heels of its 1642 mandate, required towns of fifty or more households to appoint a teacher for the children, to be "paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general." At one hundred households, Massachusetts towns were required to set up grammar schools in order to prepare students for university. Lack of compliance brought possible fines, though compliance proved very incomplete. Clear student outcomes were sought; all students should be "able to answer unto the questions that shall be propounded to them out of such catechism by their parents or masters or any of the Select men when they shall call them to a tryall of what they have learned of this kinde." An early restraint on parental choice, then, appeared in the form of the first school laws, as well as in early publicly set educational standards for youth. The jolt of a new context surfaced a core question: Who can be entrusted with the decisions of how to educate the children?
But the new environment also challenged the natural order of educating youth to the world of work. You might learn your trade at home, or often, with a friend or relative, as an apprentice in their shop. The master tradesman, consequently, would also assist in your moral upbringing, with his own rules and guidelines, serving in loco parentis for the apprentice away from home. This was, in Bailyn's words, part of an "extensive network of mutual obligations." Yet, as the colonies grew, labor grew more scarce, youth were more in demand, and the legal servitude that the master could insist on diminished. Apprentices now had a few more options; they could leave and find another placement if life was too strict or the promised benefits not realized. For example, at age 17, a disgruntled Benjamin Franklin, who was to become the greatest printer of colonial America, threw down his apron, bolted from his apprenticeship to his overbearing brother James in Boston, and headed down to Philadelphia to seek his fortune. More broadly, shops urgently needed apprentices as much if not more than young laborers needed apprenticeships. In turn, apprentices sought greater options by furthering their own learning in evening schools or clubs, as in Franklin's famous Junto — a "club of mutual improvement" and North America's first subscription library — and many others. Cut off from an inevitable place in the social order, many coalesced in various self-improvement efforts, what Bailyn saw as "the beginnings of a permanent motion within American society by which the continuity between generations was to be repeatedly broken." In the northern colonies especially, young Americans and their families responded to shifting conditions, shaping their own educational paths, with new institutions arising and old ones evolving to support new paths and patterns. The increased demand outpaced the traditionally private means of financing schools, marking them early on as an institution subject to the designs of their funders as much as their pedagogues. Lacking sufficient state moneys or independent benefactors in this hardscrabble world, schooling depended on those who would pay, on "repeated acts of donation," creating a deep tradition of local dependency, reinvention, and a lack of self-direction.
The English colonies also had a greater religious, cultural, and ethnic heterogeneity than northern and western Europe. Religiously and culturally diverse groups of colonists jostled for their place in the colonies and early republic, including among them a motley variety of infidels, "Papists," defiant sectarians, varied nationalities, royalists, and revolutionaries, as well as various "backsliders into savagery." Native tribes represented ethnicities, world views, and ways of life quite alien to colonists.
As committed denominational Christians, many colonists felt compelled to proselytize to, as well as to educate, their native brethren and other wayward souls. Perhaps the most aggressive and systematic early use of formal education during the colonial period had been for missionary work with the native tribes. While we may view such efforts as tragic, farcical, or horrific — especially when conjoined to the spread of European diseases across the continent — there is no doubt of the resulting transformation of education into a more explicit tool of indoctrination, persuasion, and transmission of culture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Making Up Our Mind"
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