Privatization and Educational Choice

...Privatization and Educational Choice will confirm the worst suspicions of the opponents of parent choice, that it is only the first step toward abandoning public support for education altogether...

...Now, of course, middle-class parents have always found ways to make decisions about the education of their children, either by where they decide to live or by paying for private schooling...

...Middle-class parents living in cities find many ways to avoid enrolling their children in schools with a high proportion of poor and minority children...

...The growing acceptance of abortion, Lieberman argues, "is certain to weaken support for public education...

...Those who call for parent choice-and I should declare at once that I am one of the few visible proponents among educators-believe that it will create the conditions for more effective education, as teachers are allowed and encouraged to create distinctive schools that express a clear pedagogical vision...

...He suggests that we begin by raising the age at which publicly funded schooling starts to eight or so, and change child labor laws so that those who are not academically gifted will leave school earlier...

...Schools will become accountable to parents rather than to distant bureaucracies, and parents will be challenged to take more responsibility for the education of their children...

...The real issue in today's debates over parent choice of schools is whether the structure of schooling should be changed to permit and encourage all parents to make decisions, either among public schools or among all available schools, public and private...

...But these individual decisions have somehow not called into question the belief that the unity of our society is guaranteed by educating children of the most varied backgrounds together-and that in fact we are doing so, all evidence of racial and class segregation to the contrary (see my The Myth of the Common School, University of Massachusetts Press...

...If the decision to have children is a strictly personal one, why should society pay for the cost of educating those children...

...Charles L. Glenn Whether to allow parents to choose the schools their children will attend is the hottest topic in education...

...Unfortunately, it may find an echo among those whose civic consciousness has been eroded by two decades of me-firstism, while bringing discredit upon responsible efforts to expand parent choice and educational diversity.ucational diversity...

...In Massachusetts, for example, we have strongly encouraged urban school systems to make parent choice the basis for enrolling students in all schools, as a means of increasing race and class integration and of stimulating improvements in schools...

...Detailed discussions of how to implement expanded choice while strengthening schools and advancing equity have been provided by California law professors Coons and Sugarman (Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control, University of California Press), by Minnesota educator Joe Nathan (Free to Teach: Achieving Equity and Excellence in Schools, Pilgrim), and more recently by a number of educators in Nathan's Public Schools by Choice (Institute of Learning and Teaching...

...Opponents fear that expanded parent choice will benefit the middle class at the expense of poor children and those whose parents are uninvolved, that it will increase racial segregation, and that it could lead to a splintering of society along ideological lines because of an abandonment of the "common school...

...A wide spectrum of business and political leaders have called for more choice, while education leaders (with the notable exception of Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers) are strongly opposed...

...Advocates of expanded parent choice are in most cases keenly aware of the need to assure that it does not work against poor children or indeed against the interest of society that all future citizens receive a more effective education than at present...

...After all, he argues, why should society provide extensive educational services "to those who cannot purchase it in the market" when the disadvan-taged themselves "often prefer a higher level of protection from crime or a higher level of shelter over a higher level of educational funding...

...In short, an appalling book arguing with relentless "logic" from libertarian premises and hostility toward all that we do together as a society to care for one another's children...

...Lieberman counts upon the selfishness of the growing proportion of voters who have no children in school to refuse to pay for the education of an increasingly minority public school enrollment...

...Myron Lieberman's new book breathes a very different spirit, in which choice is used as a blunt weapon to bludgeon a broad assortment of targets, including virtually everyone who works in public education, government, and the media...