Confronting the seduction of choice: law, education, and American pluralism.
Author | Minow, Martha |
FEATURE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. "CHOICE" AS INDIVIDUAL RELIGIOUS AND CONTRACTUAL LIBERTY II. "CHOICE" AS RESISTANCE TO RACIAL DESEGREGATION III. "CHOICE" AS AN INSTRUMENT OF RACIAL DESEGREGATION IV. "CHOICE" AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY--AND A TRIUMPH OF RELIGIOUS SCHOOL CAMPAIGNS FOR PUBLIC FUNDING V. "CHOICE" FOR PLURALISM AND SCHOOL REFORM--AND RENEWED RISKS OF THE REGIME OF '"SEPARATE BUT EQUAL" SCHOOLING VI. THE PROMISE AND LIMITS OF SCHOOL CHOICE INTRODUCTION
Five distinct moments of legal, political, and cultural conflict over schooling in the United States have offered "choice" as the solution to conflict. Its seductive frame at times obstructs, and at other times serves, equal opportunity, antiracism, tolerance, and multiculturalism. The captivating appeal of the rhetoric of choice obscures the dangers and masks the influence of choice policies on the character of schools, social identity, and the polity. No single umbrella can contain our conflicting values, certainly not one as apparently innocuous as "choice." Yet choice offers a tempting avenue for channeling--or papering over--deep conflicts over religion, race, immigration, national identity, and even the meaning and content of "school choices."
By "school choice," I mean the explicit policies granting parents and guardians the opportunity to select from among more than one option for complying with state compulsory school laws. In the United States, these policies include options like magnet schools devised by public school systems to offer special curricular programs, publicly funded charter schools launched by entrepreneurial groups, and public funding for vouchers allowing parents to pay private school tuition. In addition, school choice includes constitutional protection of private--including religious--schools as an option for satisfying compulsory schooling but only for those parents who have or can find private resources.
How did "school choice" emerge as a persistent framework across more than a century of conflicts over schooling in America? During the nineteenth century, political and constitutional movements in the United States enshrined both compulsory schooling and the dual tracks of secular publicly funded schools and privately funded education, including religious schools; during the early twentieth century, public struggles erupted over religious differences as the compulsory school movement pressed for "Americanizing" Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Then, as the civil rights movement put racial equality squarely on the public agenda, school choice paradoxically surged as a means for Southern whites to resist racial desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. (1) Shortly thereafter, public efforts promoting voluntary racial desegregation constructed school options intended to attract students of all races. The slogan of "school choice" in this country has long signaled support for parochial schools. It has, at times, also been a vessel big enough to encompass both resistance to school desegregation and tactics to achieve it. School choice resonates with the liberal value of autonomy and the market conception of consumer sovereignty. School choice seems to have something to offer everyone.
In the abstract, giving parents the opportunity to choose schools for their children looks like a boost to freedom, altering government assignment of students to schools based on neighborhood. Yet there are reasons for caution with the rhetoric of choice when used to describe vital public policies. The rhetoric may belie reality; choice implies freedom when coercion or constraint may be the fact. Hence, school choice can involve "seduction," by which I mean powerful attraction and appeal that can also carry diversion, obfuscation, or deceit? The seductive attractions of "choice" as a framework imply that freedom and equality exist even when they are absent; the framework of choice suggests neutrality even when effectively tilting in particular directions. (3) In light of existing preferences and inequalities, the options of private schooling and public subsidies for school vouchers, magnet schools, and charter schools can easily undermine integration along lines of race, class, gender, and disability--unless the school choice arrangement includes deliberate integration dimensions. The polity needs to prepare the next generation not only for jobs but also for democracy and citizenship, making schooling a crucial collective good not necessarily best guided by individual family decisions.
This Feature explores unintended consequences and surprising developments following legal and political struggles over unity and difference, race and religion, and public and private. Each struggle circles around "school choice." Choice has framed five pivotal moments in American schooling, and each moment produced policies and dynamics that continue to shape debates and practices over schooling, equality, pluralism, American identity, and freedom. The first moment introduced the discourse of school choice with the fight over Americanization during the 1920s. In the second, the rise of private school options and "freedom of choice" plans used by whites to bypass court-ordered racial desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s associated school choice with self-segregation by whites. (4) In the third moment, federal courts and local school systems turned to magnet schools and other forms of public school choice in pursuit of voluntary dimensions of racial desegregation from the 1970s until the Supreme Court curbed such efforts. (5) In the fourth moment, longstanding constitutional campaigns to enable publicly financed vouchers to pay for religious schooling reached fruition in 2002. (6) And, finally, during the early decades of this new century, proliferating experiments with charter schools, magnet schools, and other forms of choice present occasions for local, state, and national debate over whether to renew commitments to integration within schools across lines of race, religion, class, and other student differences or to promote plural kinds of schools that enable variety and competition as well as permit increasing separation of different kinds of students into different schools.
The rhetoric of choice has appealed to religious free exercise, individual autonomy, free market values, American multiculturalism, and ideological neutrality. While choice in this regard may have much to commend it, enthusiasm for the notion of choice should not be used to conceal unfairness or to obstruct racial equality or genuine debates over American identity. Too often, the rhetoric of choice has papered over conflicts about immigration, religion, race, and national identity. This look into five moments offers cautionary lessons about what may seem attractive--even seductive--about school choice. It also identifies tools for how parents, other voters, and policymakers can interrogate "choice" options now and in the future. (7)
-
"CHOICE" AS INDIVIDUAL RELIGIOUS AND CONTRACTUAL LIBERTY
In the first part of the twentieth century, nativist anxieties about waves of immigrants and Bolshevism fueled movements to "Americanize" the children of newcomers. These sentiments took an extreme form in Oregon where the Ku Klux Klan, Federated Patriotic Societies, Scottish Rite Masons, and other groups pushed not only for compulsory schooling but also for required attendance at public schools in particular. The reformers sounded white supremacist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic tones while pushing assimilation of immigrants into "American" culture--meaning white Protestantism. The relative homogeneity of Oregon may have contributed to the success of the initiative even as it prompted civil libertarians, African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews to build a coalition to challenge the law.
Operators of two private schools, the Catholic Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary and the Hill Military Academy, persuaded the Supreme Court in 1925 to strike down Oregon's compulsory school law. Arising in the era of Lochner v. New York, (8) the case fell within the Court's view that government could not regulate private property in a way that destroys people's ability to earn a living--that is, the state could not put private schools out of business. But as the private property theme lost its appeal, the Court's asides respecting parental choice and pluralism have attained reverence and defined Pierce v. Society of Sisters (9) as a key precedent for religious freedom, parental rights, fundamental privacy, and a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. (10) Justice McReynolds's memorable sentences are frequently quoted from the case: "The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations?'" The decision accorded enduring constitutional protection to parental choice of parochial and other private schooling.
But the decision also produced a system in which only public schools received public funding, leaving parental choice of private schooling to private philanthropy and families with economic resources. (12) Hence, the rhetoric of choice in this context obscured inequality in economic resources that made the option of private schools available to some and not to others, whether due to the wealth gap between individual families or the funds some groups collected to subsidize the selection of particular private schools. The translation of intergroup conflicts into the rhetoric of individual choice also veiled the conflicts between groups--notably between Protestants, shaping public schools, and Catholics, preferring to fund a separate private school system rather than lose control over the socialization of their children. (13)
On the trail of fights over public power and religion, Pierce illustrates the...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.