Author

John E. Coons

John E. Coons is a professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, and author with Stephen D. Sugarman of "Private Wealth and Public Education" and "Education by Choice."

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A campus of choices

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Multitudes in the valley of decision

Old Testament, Book of Joel

Suppose that the legislature and governor of your state agree that some legal mechanism must be adopted to empower lower-income families to exercise their constitutional right to choose the specific school – public or private – they deem best for their child.

Assume also that these public servants have agreed on the forms of parental subsidy to be made available. And now they ponder the question of the forms of school that will be appropriate for the providers, public and private; each will seek to attract a share of choosing families sufficient for its survival, and probably for more.

The realties of the real estate market have, so far, scattered them wherever room could be found for each individual school. That probably will remain the case for these early years of choice.

I would here suggest a long-term possibility that might better serve the hopes of many schools and families. Steven Sugarman and I have long viewed it as a way of maximizing the choosing skills of parents (and our use of them) while perfection the schools themselves in the market that is to be navigated.

The concept is plain and fits especially well the demographics of the big city. It proposes the creation of urban campuses that consist of both public and private schools, each with their own style and mission (within the law). There would be relatively large schools in competition offering a more or less traditional general curriculum. Others, probably smaller in clientele, would focus more on particular knowledge and skills – STEM, social sciences, history, the arts.

The student would (probably) register in one of the more general schools; these would allow a degree of coming and going to classes at neighboring providers. Billy would be enrolled at P.S. 09 but can decide to take his music instruction at Happy Garden across the yard, then to Metric High next door for math.

Each school would be rewarded by the state according to formulas sensitive to the time spent there by the student and the cost and nature of the particular instruction. Time spent in the physics lab at Einstein High might be costlier than history at Ptolemy – or not.

Religion would be available. My guess is that larger, established faiths would consider having their own brick-and-mortar sites on the campus for the teaching of a full curriculum; but there would also be less ambitious, perhaps cooperative, inter-faith options.

The deliberate mingling of believers on the same site could be a most natural opportunity to better experience and value the humanity of persons who also seek the good and true but who see our relation to God differently. The atheist family would, I assume, enjoy the same option.

Will there be inter-quarrels and misunderstandings? Yes, and – from my own experience – personal reconciliation and growth in wisdom.

The sponsorship and management of such campuses could take diverse forms. Their founding might be reserved to the State, with statutory rule and regulation (hopefully designed to maximize the freedom of both providers and families). But, in my judgment, such control might be better left to private (for profit or not) organizers of individual campuses.

The concept needs up-to-date modeling of various sorts. I don’t expect, in my own time, to witness the opening of All Schools Campus No. 1; but the device is something to consider as we ponder the variety of our options to empower not-so-well-off parents as we have long managed for ourselves.

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In a word

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

A word spoken in good season, how good it is!

— Proverbs, the Old Testament

The various forms of government subsidy for parental choice of a child’s school have been pictured by leftist media, almost without exception, as a dangerous, politically conservative device. They stress that our modern hero of choice theory, the late “free market” economist, Milton Friedman, remains the patron saint of the political right; Betsy De Vos, et al., have remained his unshaken votaries.

Friedman deserves their eclat. His name still draws deep-pocket support for “right” minded think tanks, for whom conservative political banners are thus appropriate.

But is this libertarian connection so clear? Suppose that the proverbial visitor from Mars arrives hoping for wisdom to improve his own planet’s schooling. He is given a glimpse of a working voucher plan in our mythical state of Ohiowa. There, every family is provided a tuition grant sufficient to send each of its children to whichever participating school, public or private, that the parent prefers.

How different is this from food stamps? The two seem similar in many respects, including the paper qualification for the beneficiary – shall we say, the “school stamp.”

School choice can seem a social welfare program for those families subsidized. In addition, most such programs include commitments of various sort by participating schools which are meant to assure fair treatment of the family and child.

For example, voucher schools may be asked to set aside a modest portion of their admissions for random selection – even while remaining free to teach the religious creed or ethic of its own or to use some unusual method of instruction.

The Ohiowans would suggest that our Martian visitor observe and compare the school system of neighboring Montucky, a state which still sends the children of its poor to whichever public school draws from their neighborhood. There, our Marsman witnesses the more typical urban American schools that await the poor.

Returning to Ohiowa, he sums up and compares what he has experienced in this planet’s schools. “I guess you are all socialists; your states empower different adults to decide for the child, but I suppose that is still socialism.”

The school folk try to correct him, explaining that government money to subsidize parental choice is free market capitalism at its best, even though it is a creature of government and a free ride for its beneficiaries – food stamps for the mind.

Whatever these civic-minded individuals on both sides believe, it might be helpful to their conversation to find a common and more precise vocabulary to distinguish their competing ideologies. Both “free market capitalism” and its “socialist” opponents seem semantically unprepared for clear conversation about these complex phenomena.

The consequent confusion has its costs.

A major one is the long-term effect of the old system upon both the private and civic image of the self, forged in the mind of the conscripted student. It seems to me even worse than that predicted for Oregon’s complete elimination of private choice in the 1920s; at least that mistake drew no distinction among social classes.

By contract, our message to the poor – child and parent – is their essential and unique unfitness to govern themselves. It is an insult that parent and child alike may continue to accept and to affirm in lifestyle; it becomes their identity.

Of course, the “free market” descriptions of choice by the unions, et al., are assisted by many an untrue indictment. Among these are assertions, rarely true, that the participating private school retains total control of its affairs – secret and public.

The poor family thus hears that the more popular ones will simply not admit people like us. Such fables endure even among our intellectual “liberals” whom I have often heard struggle to justify the old system’s abuse of those same poor whom these same elite claim to champion.

Perhaps we need a new vocabulary to describe more appropriately and precisely the concept of subsidized parental choice. Among available nouns, I would move consideration of the European term “subsidiarity,” invented by the Vatican in 1931 and prominent today in the various international agreements of the E.U.

Simply put, formal government should avoid preempting decisions that could be made as well or better at a level of control nearest, first, the individual affected, then the family, next voluntary associations, local government … and soon to the State.

Applied here to our schools, the State would recognize the low-income parent as the natural and proper locus of legal and practical authority to choose.

According to the doctrine of subsidiarity … social problems should be dealt with at the most immediate (or local) level consistent with their solution.

J.P. Wogaman, Christian Method of Moral Judgment (1976)

“Subsidiarity” is 12 letters and six syllables; if there be a more appropriate and simpler utterance, I have not found it. The word would a least have the advantage of clarity in our debates about school choice.

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From where will common sense emerge?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

— Macbeth, Shakespeare

Our national fuddle over the role of government (public?) schools during the pandemic is yet another throwback to the days of their inception in the 1840s. Their founders saw these conscriptive institutions as a mechanism for control and enlightenment of the children of low-income families, mostly immigrants, whose social and religions caste needed redesign.

What history confirms is that, while the specific ideology of the system was to change with the cultural winds, the public school has managed always to maintain its control over the minds and bodies of the poor, both parent and child. These remain the instrument of whoever controls the state’s “free schools” and enjoy their per-pupil tax support.

From Protestant patriots to John Dewey Nationalists, the Supreme Court and, today, the teacher union bosses, our public schools for the poor have ever functioned as a paternalistic intellectual dominion. As always, they serve the comfort and purpose of a controlling elite, even though these cadres have failed either to raise test scores or to achieve the civic enthusiasm of its drafters.

The advent of a Democratic White House has brought little hope of deliverance from the teacher union for lower-income parents, whatever has been their vision of the intellectual and social future of their child. To the contrary, the president for whom I voted has specifically endorsed the enduring vision of the unions with new money to maintain the conscription of their lower-class subjects.

Some today suppose that our epic indifference to the civic hobbling of child and parent shows signs of public remorse and possible repair. Indeed, states like Ohio and West Virginia have, over union resistance, taken surprising legislative steps to empower parents at the expense of the monopoly.

Moreover, there is a growing awareness that criticism of, and resistance to, our proprietary unions of government employees is something wholly different from the classic and healthy competition and compromise between employer and union in the profit-seeking part of our private economy. Incompetence or sloth of the worker in private business is hurtful to both employer and fellow employees; each has a stake in the survival and success of their joint enterprise.

As yet, there is no guarantee of a general reform that empowers families which are unable to afford private tuition and have come up loser in the charter lotteries. The charters themselves are under constant threat from the union. The Supreme Court, though it will annihilate the “Blaine” amendments, is not about to order vouchers or other specific remedy in the offending states.

And it is from there, our 50 “sovereign” jurisdictions, that fundamental reform must come. As always, the solutions will come out of practical politics and the awakening and broad engagement of those with most at stake – the not-so-rich family and its political heroes.

It is paradox, but fact, that the final rescue of parent and child could come, in large part, as a liberal enterprise.

Milton, enjoy the irony.

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Choice and the civic soul

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

G.B. Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Shaw’s wit suggests the primary harvest of our “public” school systems for children of the poor and for their parents. We have only recently learned of its relatively dim outcome as measured by standard tests of basic learning.

This monolith of 19th century design is, at last, damned by professional media for its dimming effect upon the intellectual, economic and social prospects for these children of poverty who are collected by the state with a warrant for their presence in a certain “public” school of the city. Like criminal suspects who can’t afford bail, these kids will stay here for rehabilitation.

The evidence of student learning today consists mostly of comparative test scores and their relation to parental social types. This much is no longer in doubt: Those lucky kids whom a lottery has delivered to mom’s chosen charter school learn more of whatever is taught; and this holds true whether the parent has any particular mindset or sophistication.

I am no statistician; I merely read the conclusions of these respected scholars of numbers and their significance. What I can hope to contribute comes only as a conviction of a long observer of this scene that the civic effects at stake in our wars over parental choice count more than any puff or decline in test scores.

These social consequences would be important even were chosen schools merely equal or even trailing in their scores. Our literature on this subject wants for insight that numbers alone can’t give – a sense of the long-term effect upon the souls and minds of those humans who experience intellectual and moral exit from the dignity and civic responsibility so dear to the luckier among us.

Shaw’s ambiguous tweet make us ponder.

For 59 years, I have written and/or taught the structures of schooling here and abroad and the roles of parent and child as I and others perceive them. Yet my experience as a middle-class human with five children, plus now their descendants, is still my best claim to insight.

It is limited and often flawed, but I trust it to be as reliable as that of other patriarchs who hail from the 1920s and claim some insight from experience. And, further, I can even imagine my message as common sense for old and young.

It is essentially this: There are two profoundly corruptive symbolisms in our making the poor family be the servant of the state, as we do. The device encourages a mindset in both parent and child that is (in manner, not content) faintly suggestive of that which Beijing seeks to secure among the Uighurs. Their child is to be made happy with a life of moral and intellectual suppression.

The American child of the poor shall, by contrast, be made happy by the state with no clear moral suppression at all; they will be assured that the good life is whatever one chooses for his or herself – but, of course, just so long as you remain good.

“Good?” But you just told me to choose the way I want; now you tell me always to be good to my neighbor. Just why must I do that when it gets in the way of my own plan?

Yes, okay, I’ll obey the law; one must. Is that all you mean? Outside of that, who is there to tell me what’s “good?”

In our public school, the mind of the American child of the poor could be, but is never allowed a clear portrayal of the crucial relation between human freedom and an authentic moral good. I will not here review what I think to be the necessary structure of that relation. My bibliography is full of the particular version of it which I would trust.

The second poisonous implication, and at least as corruptive of the social order, is the unsubtle message of the school system to the non-rich parent and her child regarding the role that each is being assigned to play in this society.

“Here is your status as parent: You produce the child whom you then shall feed, clothe and care for until we call upon you to deliver him or her to a school which the state shall identify, there to learn this truth that it teaches. You shall continue to provide for the physical needs of the child until high school graduation; up to a point, the state will leave you free to express to the child your own view of the good life.”

This reality is corruptive of the civic order through its enduring effects upon the minds and hearts of both child and parent. Watching their loving but decommissioned parents, the child grasps that “Mom and Dad must surrender without alternative; being a parent is a form of intellectual and moral vassalage to some higher order called ‘the state,’ which makes P.S. 22 the vehicle for its message to me. At dinner, my folks may fret at my report of the day’s lessons or classroom events, but they can do nothing such as finding another school.”

Parenting and marriage itself gradually appear as downside experience with very little independence and authority, and lots of grief. “Who needs it? Will I ever want to lose my own freedom to such a trap? Not as long as I can hang with a gang – and probably never.”

The parents’ own experience of impotence in the shaping of their own child’s mind has its equally poisonous effect upon both their personal and civic visions. To strip them of authority is a clear invitation to reassess their own identify.

“This society wants me helpless to shape the mind of my own child in the manner so precious to the rich. Oh well, at least it has spared me responsibility for whatever happens in the streets and the civic order. It’s not all bad; I will just stop worrying about it and enjoy whatever government has to offer poor people like me.”

Shaw has his point. This corruption of the civic souls of child and parent is the poisoning of society.

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Equality, equity and reality

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“I am equal and whole.”

A.C. Swinburne, Hertha

“There is but one law for all … the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice … equity …”

Edmund Burke, Impeachment of Warren Hastings

To my mind, it is sad that many admirable political writers seem to overlook the utility in this distinction, thereby turning the words into an occasion for media conflict instead of clarity of expression in our hope for the welfare of the human individual and the civic order.

The more conservative among them tend to regard “equality” as the only proper term for describing not only what is a crucial fact of human nature but also for the moral and political implications that follow from that reality.

The more “progressive” voices seem to see and embrace this distinction between fact and act, using “equity” as the civic entailment of the datum.

The moral and economic implications that these “progressives” then draw from this distinction are seldom my own, but their vocabulary seems the more lucid in describing the political issues at stake. I am envious of their corner on this weapon of ethical thought.

For a very long time in the last century, I tried my best to grasp a clear and distinct meaning for our revolutionary gospel of 1776 retrieved from the Middle Ages – the concept that “all men are created equal.” In 1999, happy after collaboration with my then student (ever since professor) Patrick Brennan, that hope became our book, “By Nature Equal: the Anatomy of a Western Insight” (Princeton, 1999).

There is, we said, a need for a convincing recognition and description of a factual equality of every ungifted, inexperienced, uneducated human being with the likes of Lincoln, Einstein and Mother Theresa.

No such message was evident in that recent burst of political literature (not yet defunct) that, for me, was a dangerous intellectual mess but which purported to speak for our human equality. I refer to that slice of the academy that sees equality as an attribute of the three races when taken separately as a whole. Seen thus as clusters, each population, we are told, had the same share of the dull and the brilliant.

What these gurus are plainly saying is that we classic and superior geniuses are to be found in similar proportions among Blacks, whites and Asians (thus the same proportion of dodos). And this was the equality of mankind.

It is my happy impression that view of equality as a declaration of one’s own superiority is in decline. By now, many of these savants may be entering that same stage of human deficiency that they have attached to their intellectual inferiors. It should be a comforting possibility to these now fading savants that some of us think them still “equal.”

In the end, of course, each human must be so in order to merit equitable treatment according to his or her distinctive individual needs, deserts and prospects. Here we encounter the ideal structure of human law viewed as the response to the universal entitlement to equity in treatment.

Each of us has peculiar circumstances and deserts, and the law is to be rationally ordered to sustain, reward or punish accordingly. Equality demands it; equality delivers it.

Brennan and I concluded that there is no factual equality among humans save in that one concept seen by the Founders as “created equal;” this is intelligible as the claim that we humans, however clever, are in our freedom and power either to seek or ignore the good, embody the same (equal) “right” and “power” to perfect ourselves in some ultimate way that is beyond our grasp in its entirety but ours to embrace in faith.

This very American conception of reality might best be kept distinct from, though necessary to, the concept of social and legal equity and rights. But is this even relevant to schooling and the curriculum? To me, it seems to be the first and fundamental question for the human mind—however one answers it.

And it is an inequity to deprive the equal human child of its challenge.

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E pluribus bonum

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“That which purifies us is trial, and

trial is by what is contrary.”

John Milton, Areopagitica

My thanks to those eminent school choice advocates Larry Sand of California and collaborators Robert Enlow and Jason Bedrick of EdChoice in Indiana. I recommend reading their recent critiques here and here of the design of those half-dozen model statutes for choice that Stephen Sugarman and I pumped out from the 1960s until the 21st century.

These critics worry that our models are too complex, hence, self-defeating at the polls or in the legislature; and they fret even more that we are focused principally upon lower-income parents.

For them, the structure must be simple, as Milton Friedman imagined it, with equal subsidy for every child of every family in the same grade and with little or no regulation of private school admission policy or recruitment strategies.

Sugarman and I make them unhappy, because we would have participating schools set aside their unchosen applications for a final random selection of a fraction of its entries, giving the unchosen child of the poor a chance at subsidized admission. We would also require the school to make itself known in the open market, trying thereby to assure that lower-income parents have the chance to learn what their new responsibility requires in the way of sophistication about their options.

Our critics recognize the suffering of the lower-income family under the status quo, but they insist that this problem is best addressed by a Friedman-blessed system of subsidy that includes all parents, even those who least need it. It is this alone, they believe, that will bring the civic liberation of the poor.

They are best, also we hear, because this pure system which they favor is politically the most saleable; any focus upon the poor is unpopular.

I must have overlooked some such rousing success of the pure market approach in capturing the voting hearts of our 50 state electorates. For many years, the Friedman folks in many states have been running ballot initiatives for universal vouchers. Their level of success is unimpressive.

Still, this issue of the universality of any system of subsidized choice seems to me the lesser of two central questions.

So, let us try another plebiscite offering vouchers to the rich and poor alike. The core dispute will then be the nature and extent of state government regulation of participating schools.

Sugarman and I have long felt concern over such matters as admission policy advertising (targeted or universal), procedural rules for expulsion and so on. At least in the short run, parents who have never chosen will need to acquire some of the sophistications of the middle class.

I can understand how pure market minds could continue to draw the line at certain forms and degree of regulation; so would I. But, just maybe, they could help to make it “efficient” in the way least intrusive of the participating private school. What puzzles me is their reluctance even to consider how the untutored parental mind needs help to become a wise consumer and how the seller must rescue such mothers and fathers with simple information about just who and what this particular school is.

Most important, if a school participates, it should be ready at the end of the admission process to take a few children – say 15% – at random, children whom they had not already picked from among their applicant pool. In short, it has seemed fair and rational to ask the seller to undertake a wee bit of “social integration.”

Finally, and most important, we should ask these pure market folks ever to keep in mind that decisions about design will be made by 50 individual state governments. Might it not be to our civic good as a nation to watch and learn from the experience of those states with a variety of statutory models just what is popular and what works?

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This is liberal ‘equality’?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

Our national constitution recognizes the right of all parents to decide where, and by whom, their child will be schooled; this equal prerogative is assured not merely by the First Amendment, but by the rule of equal treatment that is assured by the 14th Amendment.

In the current media focus upon something called “equality for all,” it would seem that the good “cultured” liberal minds would lead in the national effort to empower the poor family to exercise this fundamental responsibility.

Tragically, Arnold was wrong.

The world of the elite liberal decided 150 years ago to treat the poor parent as serf to the new “public” school system that respects the power of the comfortable family to choose but delivers the child of the poor to the state and its highly organized agents. The principles of equal treatment and of honoring the right of both parent and child are flouted in the name of what?

The 19th Century design of the “public” school systems was intended to secure the position of Protestantism and to “Americanize” the poor immigrants and their children who were mostly Catholics and Jews.

Over the next century, that religious purpose wore thin and was gradually replaced by secular theories of schooling, but the structure that disempowered the poor has remained ever in place, eventually becoming dominated by the government unions whose leaders’ interest in the poor was, and remains, to insure their presence in unchosen, mostly urban, public schools.

Yet most of my “liberal” colleagues and friends continue to imagine that these institutions serve as primary hope for a truly civil society. The anti-liberal essence of our inner-city schools simply eludes their eyes.

If equal treatment of all our people is truly a vison of the self-styled liberal, let us pray that he or she awakens to this contradiction that has for so long eluded the liberal eye.

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Would Milton mind?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

American economist Milton Friedman received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His vision was to give parents, not government, control of their child’s education.

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman was my repeated guest on “Problems of the City” on Chicago radio KQED-KFMF, and later, I was a guest on his TV show to debate United Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker. We – Friedman and I, not Shanker – shared the hope for a free market in schooling but differed regarding both its justification and appropriate design.

He favored a subsidy of equal value for the child of every parent, then would let the market rip! It was to him an economic sin to favor lower-income families in either the amount of the subsidy or the design of regulation for participating schools. The focus for him was not on the role of the parent, but rather the achievement of simplicity and laisse-faire in the economy.

Friedman was never to change his mind; in fact, he took the opportunity along the way to promote just such an unregulated voucher as a popular initiative in California in 1978, designed so as to compete with a prior and more lower-income-oriented initiative written and promoted by Steve Sugarman and myself. So divided, neither proposal made it to the ballot.

He did, however, succeed at inspiring a covey of monied and dedicated marketeers who have to this day remained willing to support a let-her-rip approach to choice. Their generous enthusiasm has given birth to a covey of pure-market non-profit organizations, today’s most plangent cheerleaders for choice – that is, for equal subsidy for both the poor and for the already comfortable family, and with nearly zero regulation of the chosen providers. These well-intending market folk have succeeded largely in giving subsidized parental choice the image of Friedman himself.

This picture may have held very little glamour for voters, but paradoxically has been much appreciated by the captains of the public school unions; it allows them to picture subsidized choice as another deceit of the rich and powerful (other than themselves).

When Sugarman and I began designing model choice statutes in the ’60s, our first invention was a complicated device intended to arm the lower-income parent with an array of choices, including the level of the subsidy in both public and private sectors. Over time, our published inventions have become more simplified but ever with the central aim of empowering the lower-income parent to act as responsibly as does the comfortable suburbanite.

After this half-century of division between Miltonites and “voucher left” (their pet name for people like us), could it be that the time has come to consider what sort of compromise might give political life to our shared democratic hope? Could we learn a bit from Ohio, Florida and Washington, D.C.? Could it be both “fair and free market” for us lefties to concede at least a trophy amount to the well-off in recognition of their civic role as parent, while awarding the poor the full economic reality of that same parental responsibility and authority?

The success of any choice system in empowering the poor would, of course, require some commitments from the (freely) participating school – private or (at last) “public.” For example, the participating school could retain complete liberty to select two-thirds of its admissions, but then to select the rest at random from among its unchosen applicants.

In designing such statutory proposals, a half-dozen other forms of commitment by the participating schools would be considered to ensure fairness. Each of these compromises in design could be bargained by the “voucher left” and the Miltonites. These variations were examined in some detail and modeled in our 1978 book, “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” – and in our later published models.

It will not necessarily be politically hurtful to the cause of choice that Betsy DeVos will be gone, and that the president-elect appear as mendicant of the union elites. The individual state will still decide whether and in what precise form those who need choice should receive it. And, at some point, in another paradox, SCOTUS may well take occasion to lend its voice to the rescue of the penniless under the Constitution. This could well be the time for voucher folk, “left” and right, and in every state, to become happy co-conspirators.

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