We should want real school choice

The left has accused school choice proponents of segregation and white supremacy for years. Now right-wingers help them make that case.

I've spent much of my adult life producing persuasive messages to convince you that school choice was a totally not racist force for social progress.

I stand by most of it, with nuances

My argument has been that determining how and what one learns is a human right. Historically, marginalized populations were denied control of intellectual development and have a particular case for choice that other groups can benefit from. You cannot achieve self-determination, the ultimate marker of overcoming oppression, without the right to self-education.

When I made that argument, the most vigorous opposition always came from left-leaning people who talk endlessly about "equity," only to abandon the concept the moment that people of color demand education outside of the conventional system - the system primarily controlled by white left-leaning people.

They love our push for freedom until it makes us free of them.

It's been easy to attack their duplicity because their double-takes are so gross. They say trapping us in the schools they avoid for their children is somehow our sacrament for democracy. Yet, a review of enrollment patterns, demands for exclusive public school programs, and educational gerrymandering that weirdly sorts the most progressive white families into little enclaves of privilege and hoarding show their NIMBYism is identical to that of conservative families.

Whenever Black, Brown, and Beige captives of the conventional schools nobody wants to attend seek avenues out of education ghettos, the privileged white moderates - the fauxgressives - who rush to the mic spouting bars about the “public good.”

Of course, they aren't comfortable saying, "listen, minorities, it's best for all of us if you have no choice other than the schools we want for you."

That would sound racist. And true.

Instead, they deflect attention from their maternalist oversight of our affairs to the paternalist aggressors on the right. We may think that the issue is about gaining control of when, where, and how our kids are educated, but they tell us we're just being dupes for super racist people on the right who want to destroy public schools and put us all in Christian national re-education camps.

It's been a good hustle.

I've tried fruitlessly to get progressives to live up to their declared values on this issue, pointing out that they don't have to agree with the choices marginalized people make, but they must respect our right of us to make these decisions for ourselves. Their blindspot - either sincerely ignorant or cynically obstructive - is that school choice for us is in line with a long legacy of civil rights theory. There are progressive origins to choice, and attempts to limit our educational opportunity to the conventional one-best system are antithetical to progressive values.

That seemed like stable intellectual ground to stand on until now. While we could dismiss liberal claims that choice was the sport of white nationalists who see the policy as a way to resegregate education, sabotage traditional public schools, profit from privatization, and further white supremacy, I’ll be damned if some of the right-of-center school choice folks haven’t handed the left everything they need to make that case bullet proof.

The school choice party line has been nominally inclusive in that it held together an uneasy coalition with platitudes about “pluralism.” Choice has meant “to each their own.” Choice could work because it could be each group’s tool for self-actualizing, whether that meant culturally affirming Afrocentric pedagogy, a classical education curriculum, indigenous practices, Montessori, etc.

It could be everybody’s everything.

But some within the white right tired of the movement platforming groups they opposed ideologically, politically, and in terms of faith. They formulated a plan to make school choice whiter, more partisan, and ideologically oppositional to what they saw as the threat of inclusion to America.

A 2021 “study” by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think-tank that acted as the outbreak monkey for the white choice virus, signaled toward a shifting political orientation for school choice:

Choice advocates might decide to focus on universal school choice programs without means-testing or caps on program size, as they successfully did recently in West Virginia. The 2021 Education Next survey of public opinion found Republican support is greater for universal vouchers than for low-income vouchers, while Democrats were more supportive of vouchers for low-income families than for all families. Choice advocates might also embrace efforts to identify school choice as a mechanism that allows families to find learning options that…reject curriculum they do not like, such as Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project.

Critical Race Theory panic was a useful nuke created in the political thought laboratories of the right-wing world. Education conservatives cast it as a global threat to white existence that can be explicitly defeated with a combination of vouchers and anti-Woke legislation that curtails the academic freedom of minorities. It is a clever way to mobilize white voters who fear the rapid social changes around them.

Look at how this AP story frames the growing push for school choice across states, and ask yourself if this is the winning message for a “universal” choice movement:

Nichole Mason first became concerned when she learned administrators at her children’s public school were allowing transgender students to use girls’ bathrooms. Her frustrations mounted when she felt her children’s next school went too far with how they enforced COVID regulations during the pandemic.

Now, the mother of five is among a swelling number of parents around the United States funneling those frustrations into a renewed push to get state lawmakers to create taxpayer-funded programs to help parents pay for other educational options including private school, home-schooling or hybrid models. In Utah, a proposal would allow roughly 5,000 students to apply for $8,000 scholarships.

“If right now my kid’s school is getting $10,000 a year to educate him, he’s not thriving and I could do a better job educating him with $8,000,” said Mason, who co-founded the Utah chapter of the group Parents United. “Then I feel a moral obligation to give him an outstanding education instead of a satisfactory education.”

At least a dozen other states are considering similar legislation in what has emerged as a landmark year for school choice battles.

With memories fresh from pandemic-era school closures and curriculum battles — particularly over how matters of gender and race are taught — Mason and legions of parents like her are trekking to the marble floors of their state Capitols to fight to create education savings accounts, also known as ESAs. Though they vary, these voucher-style proposals have been introduced in states including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

The driver is no longer equity, increased educational opportunity, or the peace a diverse nation can find in policies that support pluralism. Instead, choice in this new iteration is explicitly a vehicle for bigotry, division, and tribalism, with the white tribalists vaulted to the top of the power grid.

Choice now appeals to white moms who fear what a world where gays and coloreds are considered human might portend for their dominance. They are encouraged to use their social and political privilege to blunt any school program that does not explicitly benefit their children. When that anti-social premise fails to stop diversity and inclusion, school choice becomes their ticket to safe white spaces.

I feel bad for my moderate friends in the church of school choice trapped between their public talking points about choice lifting all boats and their private fears of being excommunicated if they fail to coddle bigots. What an awful dilemma. Either they speak vigorously about the immorality of using school choice policies to stoke hate for outgroups, or they risk losing access to the beautiful Waldorf salads at the next meeting on Massachusetts Ave. in D.C.

What to do?

As for me, I'm excommunicated. Yes, I remain unmoved in my belief that it is a human right for every individual, family, and community to decide how, when, what, and where they are to be educated. That case is solid for people who have had all their rights stripped from historical systems of oppression.

The only choice movement that will last into the coming generations will balance the needs and differences of families and students and offer affirming solutions for them all. But, it will take deft talent and colossal maturity to lead that effort.

For now, the left does too much to block our right to educational self-determination. To be true to progressive values, they must move hard and fast to make public school choice superior or competitive to other choice schemes.

Conversely, I see the right-wing choice machine without its Kimono. The bare naked instinct driving it from a multiracial, nonpartisan, pluralistic collective effort to get every kid into tailored learning environments to the darker goal of redefining diversity as a threat to America is too dangerous to ignore.

Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the ends of getting choice laws passed justify the bigoted means. Maybe labeling anything that offends the sensibilities of old straight white men and the women that love them as "woke" (and then criminalizing all things "woke") is the path to freedom for all.

Maybe, stupid is smart.

But I doubt it.