Q: What's Behind the Politics of School Choice?

• Position: ONE QUESTION

CAROL BURRIS Executive director of the Network for Public Education

The simple answer is the destruction of our democratically governed public schools. The concept of "the money follows the child" plays nicely into the rightwing, libertarian goal of having families, not taxpayers, pay for K-12 education.

This scheme would allow politicians to, over time, reduce how much each family gets without community input. The rich will enjoy elite private education; the poor will receive minimal educational services.

School choice will further reduce the number of unionized teachers who pose a threat to rightwing power. And it will achieve another important goal of the right by giving parents the ability to isolate their children from diversity and the wide range of American opinion and thought. School choice has a popular appeal, but, in the end, it will deliver a fragmented market system with most Americans having no good choices at all.

MOIRA KALEIDA

National coalition director for

The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools

Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, public education in this country has been the great equalizer to achieve equity, economic prosperity, and an educated democratic society. Regrettably, the pathway to leveling the playing field for working families has always been a quest that has threatened millionaires and billionaires.

Instead of desiring a well-funded, highly resourced public education system, millionaires and their allies have been dead set on divesting from public education, demonizing public school educators, and limiting the accurate teaching of history.

Under the guise of "school choice," this well-funded and misguided movement has been laser-focused on siphoning funds from schools in Black, brown, rural, and impoverished neighborhoods. Neoliberals and conservatives have united around the idea of serving oneself, rather than providing for the...