A Noxious Covenant
Still, there are those who will never be convinced that including the wealthy is a good idea (despite recent trends in related policy choices, such as making free school lunch universal) and others who see universal private-school choice as harmful to equity. The former individuals notwithstanding, the latter are mistaken, and we need look only to the public schools themselves to understand why.
The public schools have the rich in their coalition, and they pay handsomely for them with a noxious policy concoction that secures their backing. The proposition works like this: “Support us and we will give you a publicly subsidized school, but it won’t be open to the public at large. It will, instead, only be available to you and your neighbors or a small group of students who can afford to pay tuition to attend, if we allow them to enroll. We will draw an attendance boundary around the school to ensure its exclusivity, and we will fine, arrest, or prosecute anyone who violates that boundary by lying about their address or through other trickery. You will also get to thump your chest and describe yourself as a ‘public school parent,’ which may be of great use to you in certain social circles. Finally, in the greatest subsidy available, your housing value will appreciate as a function of this exclusivity. In return, you’ll oppose schools or methods of school finance that would break the link between you, the house, the school, the boundary, and us.”
While it may seem flip to describe “the proposition” in this manner, we sadly know the covenant is as real as its effects are deleterious to the expansion of educational opportunity. Charter schools and, of course, education savings accounts, vouchers, and the like often circumvent the lines that hold this coalition of the rich together with their exclusive public schools. While some residents of affluent districts may still opt for private school, the relationship between housing value and school exclusivity remains a crucial factor in retaining their support.
The well-off are a powerful constituency, and the public school apparatus has offered them an educational and financial package so lucrative that few people could (or do) say no, whether they reside in red states or blue. Thus, in building a “diverse” constituency to ballast themselves politically, the public schools have appealed not in a targeted way to the needy, but broadly and most beneficially to those who need very little. And, to date, this strategy of subsidizing the rich has worked brilliantly for the system.
Incentives work, and it’s unrealistic to expect people to act against them. It’s also naive to ignore what is at work here as we think about what it will take to create and grow charter schools and other choice programs for low-income students in America. For all their excellence in the Northeast, charter schools there are growing slowly (if at all) despite high demand, not because low-income kids of color attend them but because that’s who predominantly attends them. Contrast this to the state of Arizona, where more than 200,000 students from families poor and rich attend charter schools, and where models range from classical to gap-busting, ensuring that they draw support in all places and from a wide variety of people. Arizona’s exemplar is powerful and doubly ironic, as it was, for many years, the bête noire of charter purists on account of its open authorizing approach. Now it also features a wildly popular universal education savings account program. We have, indeed, come full circle.
Although my work focuses primarily on improving educational opportunity for those of lesser means, I begrudge no family, of any income, their ambition or their desire to obtain the best possible education for their children. In the end, I am a pragmatist, and that is why I support universal forms of school choice. For me, the “how” of including the rich in these programs (for example, possibly implementing a sliding scale or giving priority to certain groups) is a discussion worth having, but the “whether” is not. If we want choice programs of all types to grow so we can expand opportunity for the needy, the wealthy must have access to them too, or else they will oppose them—and their voices are loud. Politics is about addition, and I would urge advocates who may be on the fence about the issue to consider that before opposing a larger and more economically diverse coalition for choice that could make it permanent for all families.
