A Student's Right to Choose

Choice is a loaded word. Essential to the very act of choice is a decision between two or more options. It is no accident that a variety of passionate political agendas have co- opted the word, for choice is rarely neutral.

School choice is a topic that raises the political passions of those with a stake in education, including families, students, teachers, unions, politicians, lawyers, taxpayers - in short, all of America. Education is the most democratic of all America's ideals, and everyone has an opinion about what students should be learning, what schools should be teaching, who should attend schools, who should fund schools, how students should be evaluated, how schools should be evaluated, how, who, what, when, where, why. Parents are experts, teachers are experts, academics are experts, politicians are experts, lawyers are experts. Sadly, those experts who are perhaps the most qualified - the students - rarely are asked for their opinions and even more rarely are heard.

Despite what most experts believe, America has enjoyed a long history of school choice. It is a choice rooted in the fundamental belief that individual states are responsible for the education of their own residents; federal government has played, and continues to play, only a limited role in the education of American youth. Long before states passed compulsory school laws (beginning in the 1890's and including secondary education by the 1920's and 30's), a variety of private schools owned by churches, chartered corporations, and enterprising individuals competed for students.

The 1925 landmark Supreme Court case Pierce v. Society of Sisters guaranteed the legal right of private schools to exist alongside public schools. In Pierce, Justice McReynolds wrote that "the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control" is vital to the health of America as long as the State maintains the power to "regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise, and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers should be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare."

In addition to the private sector (comprised of parochial, non-sectarian, and independent schools), recently the democratic right to school choice has expanded to include home schooling (the responsibilities of teacher-parents vary from state to state), vouchers (the use of private and public monies to allow students to attend schools other than those in their immediate geographical area), and charters (new schools chartered by the state). These school choices have found themselves at the center of numerous philosophical, legal, and political controversies which have threatened to obfuscate what is in the best interests of the one population who would most benefit from having a choice - the students.

All these choices rely at least to some degree on privatization: home schooling may be the most private of all private schools; some vouchers are privately financed and, depending on the state, can be redeemed at private schools; and some charter schools may be run by for-profit corporations. Critics of school choice decry the influence of privatization as an insidious perversion of equal opportunity inherent in the ideal of public education. However, if equal education is not available to all students and families, then equal opportunity demands that at least all students and families are able to choose an education so they can make their own opportunity.

A democratic society needs educated citizens. American society is a democracy where choice is protected by the Constitution and practiced by the people, and the opportunity to practice choice in education is protected by law. School choice has the possibility to become a reality for all American students . . . and supporting school choice will help all students be able to make the right choice.

--Steve McKibben
11/13/05