Author

John E. Coons

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."

Charter SchoolsCustomizationEducation equityJack CoonsParent empowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choicevouchers

A no-loser solution?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The City School District of the City of New York is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,800 separate schools. The department covers all five boroughs of New York City and has an annual budget of nearly $25 billion.

New York City’s “public” schools offer many parents a choice among providers – if their child happens to be gifted as measured by scores on a test.

The five most elite of the “choosable” schools require a score in the 99th percentile for admission. According to the New York Times (Oct. 11, 2019), “ … [D]ozens of other gifted programs … throughout the city generally require students to score in the 90th percentile.”

Parents of smart kids – and they alone – enjoy what amounts to a voucher. Their choices, it is claimed, can in many lower-income neighborhoods, intensify the racial segregation of those local schools as they are abandoned by the more brainy; or so we learn from the Times.

Any unnecessarily segregated system will be disfavored by many of the public, including those, like myself, who marched in Selma, authored several federal reports on segregation in Chicago and Evanston public schools and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Panel on Education – and would do it all again.

If New York’s very selective system of parental choice effectively segregated by race, it seems imperative to ask whether this is the only way to respect and preserve the very real value of high intellectual aspiration. Are integration and quality incompatible?

For critical consideration by the professional educator or critic, I cite the half-dozen model statutes and popular initiatives published over three-plus decades by Stephen D. Sugarman and myself. For the curious but busy, it may be more convenient to stick with our explanatory addendum or “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” (1978). I regret that this sounds vain; blame it on my age and the despair of watching the city schools and their hapless victims.

Somehow, this society must find ways of protecting the moral, intellectual and stylistic integrity of participating schools while treating both racial and economic integration of families as equally important and compatible with parental authority, which for this observer is paramount. Devices to serve all these values will, of course, require some compromise.

For example:

The school could be free to fill 75 percent of its seats as it prefers; the balance would be selected by lottery among unchosen applicants.

The schools must provide basic information about itself in a public manner.

If the school is private or charter (the teacher unions insist that charter schools are private schools; I agree) it could teach religion to all pupils but could not require an unbeliever to assent or participate in ceremony.

The school could enforce a minimum standard of learning by dismissal (with hearing). Ditto for behavior.

As for tuition imposed by the school above the value of the governmental support for the parent, there are various approaches. One is simply to disallow it for low-income parents, permitting graduated add-ons for those above. Of course, the basic grant should match, or at least approach, an amount sufficient to sustain a “common” school.

Enough. Let the union rise in horror. There is nothing in all we have written that would discourage the formation of strong teacher unions of the sort common to the private sector. There is everything to be said for tough teacher organization that can insist upon a fair share of the good stuff, always aware that, if they get too greedy, their own jobs will cease to exist.

Today’s “public” schoolteachers do not face that risk. They should.

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Education and Public PolicyEducation politicsJack CoonsSchool Choice

Good luck, Ms. Jones

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Dress’d in a little brief authority

Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d —

— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

In September, the California Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill forbidding public and charter schools to suspend or expel any pupil from kindergarten through eighth grade “… who disrupts school activities or otherwise willfully defies the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators or school officials.”

We are told this curiosity was intended primarily to ensure that minority children would no longer dominate the disciplinary statistics. In due course, word of this shift in the authority structure from Ms. Jones to Little Miss Muffet will get to every child; from there on, things will be unpredictable.

As a confirmed pessimist, I fear that various species of pandemonium will come to flourish in more than a few classrooms. Over the long haul, this invitation to self-expression by the children could have a profound effect upon both neighborhood and charter schools.

Brassy kids are not unknown even to the chosen so-called “public” schools of California’s wealthy suburbs. Of course, this toleration of puerile rant could, and might be, taken by every child as the invitation to maturity some defenders expect it to be. As myself an enthusiastic would-be classroom agitator of the 1940s, I find that hope a bit romantic. But then I was made to pay the price of my sins, hence my restoration!

Did the governor and company consider the effect of puerocracy upon the appetite of teachers to stick it out and of would-be teachers to join the profession? There was already a certain heroism entailed in the role of these necessary people; how many who were on the brink of volunteering will choose to be bankers? Did the teacher union simply miss this reality?

What could seem equally worrisome for our doughty legislators is the reaction of those suburban public school pilgrims whose fifth-grader recounts over dinner the classroom excitements of the day. These folks may be ready to shift Susie once again – this time to a private (or home) school where class just might be more peaceful.

Such a curious outcome; the supporting union will have shot itself in the foot! Of course, it would still have the poor in their inner-city cloisters, but … well, peace be to them all.

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Education equityEducation politicsJack CoonsVoices for education choice

Images of ‘equality’

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Kneeling ne’er spoiled silk stockings;

quit thy state;

All equal are within the Church’s gate.

— George Herbert, 1593-1633

Academics, politicians, journalists and the media invoke and celebrate the word “equality.” This is understandable; what often is puzzling is their meaning – simply, just what in this world are they talking about?

In my experience, too seldom do our public minds bother to define this term which has diverse meanings. On TV recently, I listened to a confident authority plainly unaware that his several uses of the word “equality” described different worlds. As I sat imagining Adams and Jefferson cringing, I resolved to comment.

The widespread confusion about this basic American slogan has relevance to our system of “public” schooling and its effects on the mind of the child. My references to equality will, of course, relate to human characteristics only, sparing the worlds of animals, mathematics and brute matter.

I see three principal meanings of human equality, the first being a primary attribute of any rational legal system; specifically, it is the uniform application of any existing law to all those persons to whom its words apply. Thus, if “every citizen of Minnesota who reaches 60” is by law to receive a $100 subsidy, so be it; no bureaucrat may cut me out of this benefit simply because I am already rich.

Of course, trouble can arise when, for no good reason, such a benefit (or burden) is written to exclude (or include) some human group, say members of the Chippewa tribe. A judicial vision of some substantive meaning for equality or merely the demand for rationality and fairness in law’s classifications may enter the scene.

There are certain distinctions that are forbidden to legislators, usually drawn from federal or state constitutions – most prominently the “equal protection” clause of the former. But, so long as a law avoids offending any such “higher” legal principal, the egalitarian precept is simply this: Whatever the terms of any rule of law, it is to be applied as written to those who fit its description.

The second meaning of “human equality” is an empirical claim about the world’s races, one intended to advance our appreciation of justice for all, but in fact, I will argue, with the opposite logic and effect. It is the claim of a vocal cadre of social scientists that the races of man – white, black, yellow – are in fact “equal” to one another in some respect that the particular commentator deems important.

Not surprisingly, for professional thinkers, that favorite and crucial quality of the person – hence of racial groups as a whole – is intelligence. Thus, we hear that, at conception, children of each race are on their way to being equally smart, whatever that is deemed to mean.

If, by test scores or other data, there seems to be a difference in acuity ’twixt one group and another, this is explainable in terms of prenatal conditions, family wealth, environment, schooling, etc. It is a plausible, if unprovable, notion. I will assume that these experts have guessed correctly; let race be unrelated to intelligence.

However, about this project to make the races equal, a warning as strong as I can make it! There is serious damage wrought the civic mind by this intellectualist enterprise, which, be it ever so well meant, would have it that blacks, whites and Asians are “equal” viewed as distinct groups. If it be a critical fact about humanity that these groups, each taken as a whole, are equal by this all-important criterion, what is it that we are saying about the significance of the very real and gross differences of intellect among us all as individuals?

If brains are king – humanity’s crucial trait – and that makes the races equal as clusters, what is the implication for the equality of the “common man”? What are we saying of the child who is conceived and born stupid – whatever his or her race?

The plain implication of this emphasis on equality of groups is calamitous. Individual persons are thereby rendered “unequal” and thus, inferior in the human quality that these experts would have count the most. Teachers who stress for their students that races are the same as intelligence are by obvious implication degrading the dignity of individuals of every race.

Ms. Goodheart may assure sweet but stupid Johnny that he is, nevertheless “equal” to his smarter classmates; but how can this be, if brains are the test? Even Johnny can see the problem; and the smarties can see their own superiority.

There is no natural equality of all mankind. We enter this world and remain, disparate and unequal in our material selves, intelligence and experience.

On then, to the third definition: Any claim of our factual equality must resort to the transcendental; else it is incoherent and can, as noted, be self-defeating. For the declarants of 1776, “created equal” was the expression of that reality. Whatever the seeming hypocrisy of the slavers among them, the concept was and remains clear. Eventually, it would help inspire the awakening of the Union to the supreme insult that is human bondage; sadly, it also has allowed later and current generations gradually to convert the term to a pliable instrument for political causes.

But there is something more specific, plain and simple to be identified by this word, a reality that we can honor in this life, one worth stressing to our own and all children. Patrick Brennan and I have long argued that human equality consists precisely – and only – in the capacity of every minimally rational person for normal self-perfection (and, thereby, access to the divine). It is realized in the individual’s response to daily moral problems and puzzles; specifically, it lies in our readiness to recognize them, if we can, and then to search for and undertake what one’s reason can best discern as a correct response.

Good intention and best effort are everyman’s reliable access to personal goodness and its ultimate laurel. For equality’s sake, this must hold true even though our ethical insight may differ from person to person, and some will make more honest mistakes that others. Self-perfection is secure from honest blunders; indeed, they advance it.

Again, equality rests upon our common moral freedom, and every human can exercise it in perverse fashion by rejecting the invitation to seek the good and, instead, pursuing his own pleasures and comfort, whatever the ultimate consequences to himself. As any public school teacher adapting to a purely secular environment may urge, “Follow your own star; find yourself; be free; set your own goals.”

In our society, what that teacher may  lack is the freedom, instead, to tell the student, “Look for the real good, the truly right way; then try to make it happen. Only in this way can you become the Judy or Joe you’ve been invited to be.”

Such pedagogy is risky. When a child hears from high authority that there is a real good that e or she ought to be seeking, it is all too easy for that young mind to wonder who or what made it so; the child is set adrift toward thoughts constitutionally forbidden to the public classroom. We have, it seems, denied our children unveiled consideration of the shared capacity that alone can make the fact of human equality an intelligible idea.

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Education and Public PolicyJack CoonsSchool Choice

The conscripted child as agent

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“A child’s a plaything for an hour.”  — English poet Mary Lamb, 1764-1847

The speech of Nazis and pornographers is properly protected by the First Amendment; the censor gets his licks only to curb obscenity and forms of “clear and present danger.”

Here, I very briefly consider a different form of speech right, that right of the child not to speak. More specifically, the freedom of the child enrolled in public school from enlistment by governing authorities for the explicit purpose of endorsing the political opinions of these reigning adults.

The issue arose recently as public officials in New York City offered a day off from school (with parental approval) so that students could march in support of climate control, a political cause dear to the mayor and to the city’s public school executives.

This action was taken expressly in support of one side in the great climate debate. There was no whisper of encouragement of dissent by children and parents who might not have shared the view of the government nabobs. The day off was explicitly to be in support of the one true gospel.

Children are in school by law – by government compulsion. Unless their parents can afford a home in a favored suburb, enroll in private school or find the charter that suits their values, their child’s assigned teachers and those teachers’ administrators will be utter strangers to the family.

What message is the government authority giving those children and/or their parents who disagree on the specific issue of policy? Without the least subtlety, the school bureaucrats have defamed them as civic fools. Is this a legitimate use of public authority or an abuse of government power over child and parent?

Imagine military authority giving conscripts the day off on condition they parade for an increase in the defense budget.

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Education and Public PolicyEducation politicsJack CoonsSchool Choice

A third-grade conversation

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Billy to his teacher: “Where do right and wrong come from?”

Ms. Bland: “Well, it’s in our genes; we’re made that way.”

Billy: “Then why do people do bad stuff?”

Ms. Bland: “People are free to choose the wrong; even if they know what’s right, they don’t always do it.”

Billy: “How did right and wrong get in our genes like that? Who put them there?”

Ms. Bland: “Excuse me, I think I have a call.”

Explaining for the child the source of nature and our moral responsibility is nearly as difficult as doing the same for that sophisticated adult who prefers to shun the question altogether, while the child’s mind at least continues to wonder.

“How can something come from nothing? I know that I should be good and that I can be bad. But what made it this way? Why aren’t we just good?”

Morality is a story; much of our fictional literature portrays the reality and tragedy of our choices of evil, and such drama depends for its tang upon the assumption of a real good that, to our shame, we betray. Billy knows this, but who or what made us this way?

Mankind’s non-fictional desertion of the good in daily life can occur despite the best of intentions, but with unhappy consequence on a large scale. Consider the classroom of the government school which is assigned to the low-income family as its child’s educator 180 days each year. Ms. Bland is its spokeswoman but feels unable to respond to Billy’s question.

When next they meet, if asked again, Ms. Bland decides to respond in the manner accepted in her profession – and the law.

“Billy, all I can say is that’s the way life is.”

This may be followed by the observation, also acceptable in the public system:

“Billy, you just have to find it in yourself; just don’t be bad.”

This vacuum of response to the most basic of human questions has persisted in our country over two centuries of history. As early as 1909, American educators recognized and pondered the problem, in a multi-faith society, of teaching a particular view of the origin and content of the moral order, and everything else transcendental. The plot thickened as the Irish and Jews began to arrive in numbers, making religious conflict highly political.

In due course, respected authorities would produce such classics as the 1988 “Romanism Versus the Public School System.” In those intervening 79 years, the “public” school had decided to confine its notice of things transcendental primarily to an eclectic opening prayer and casual ambiguous reference to a deity – plus maybe some Christmas carols.

The ecclesiastical war had produced a crude armistice, as the “Romans” founded their own separate systems of schools and “Blaine amendments” were added to a majority of state constitutions forbidding public money for religious institutions altogether. In the 20th century, the gradual dominance of public education by secular humanism gave schools new reason to chill all notice of things transcendental, and in the 1950s, the Supreme Court slammed tight the door of the “Establishment” clause.

Of course, God still sneaked in with the occasional release program, the renegade teacher and naughty commencement speaker. But no money for the transcendental – until states like Wisconsin and Florida began in this century to reinvent parental sovereignty for the poor with various forms of financial aid to the parents themselves (not directly to the schools), allowing them to choose church schools and let Billy hear that the moral order has a source more specific than Darwin – or the opposite, if Mom and Dad so prefer.

To the extent of these aid programs, the lower-income family has regained the dignity the rest of America enjoys.

The process of liberation is slow. The teachers union can still intimidate the state legislature, as it has and does most successfully in my own state, California. But the day is coming, I pray, when every poor family gets to decide for itself who made us free to choose between good and evil – and become an interesting species.

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Achievement GapEducation and Public PolicyEducation ResearchJack CoonsOpinionParent empowermentParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool ChoiceTesting and Accountability

A digression on the test obsession

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Measuring a child’s mastery of material taught in school is plainly reasonable, often necessary. To a point the same may be said of the ceaseless effort of statisticians either to equate or distinguish groups of children by scores on standardized tests.

Today a throng of experts, pro and con to parental choice, compare scores made by children who remain in their assigned “public” schools with those of former classmates who by parental choice have left for a charter or private school. The lower average scores of those who remain are then explained by defenders of the old system as a function of pre-existing social and other differences in the families. Simply put, the kids who get switched are ahead to begin with, either by nature or nurture.

Though myself a choice partisan, I concede some value to such accounts (if true) of the old-order schools and their parents’ decision when empowered. No doubt, social and intellectual differences could affect which families decide to try something new. The same inquiry should disclose which chosen schools are selective in admissions, and to what extent. These realities are worth knowing for diverse reasons apart from choice itself.

In any case, as argued below, there is many a better rationale for parental control than its ability to raise scores (no one claims choice does harm). Sadly, and paradoxically, the pro-choice folks have allowed and encouraged the test rage to flourish, swallowing the critics’ bait, thus narrowing public discourse, and with it the average citizen’s access to the more human justifications for investing poor parents with that power that the more comfortable among us cherish and take for granted.

Nor is this media habit confined to pulp and TV. Recently I discovered 20 pages in an April 2019 edition of The Economist devoted principally to an international assessment and comparison of scores. Its authors seem to assume throughout that “successful” testing provides our primary justification for subsidizing parental choice. Only near the very end do they refer, and then but vaguely, to the range of personal and civic values at stake:

“Above all, government should stop regarding private education as an enemy. Its growth is the
result of people’s deepest urge: to look after their children.”

Were they to review a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, the Economist authors could well decide to reexamine and expand their brief observation. The WSJ confirms then extends their brief insight, describing a Barbados experiment with 7,000 public pupils who had test scores just above and below an arbitrary median point. Those parents of the higher-scoring group received tuition grants for private schools. Both groups were followed over a period of years, then reexamined.

The result: Children transferring to private schools had no higher scores over time, but their rates of graduation, college enrollment and completion, plus other “real life” outcomes were markedly higher. The conclusion: Parents prefer schools that teach values, morality and character, wanting their children to “be not only good students but good people.” The later life records of these same children are reported as remarkably richer than those left behind, in both economic and human terms – and in sheer happiness.

Choice awakens in the parent all those values, personal and civic, that can be realized only upon social recognition and protection of that wide responsibility and authority that law perceives to dwell in all rational humans over their own affairs and those of their own children. In the act of parental decision, that truth is passed to the consciousness of the child himself, confirming the unique dignity and hope that is experienced primarily in close family relations. In our context of school choice, when the child experiences something good or bad, he has a true audience which has the power to judge and, if necessary, make changes.

The real payoff from choice will come only over time – and with many a sad incident – as the poor gradually recognize this new reality and begin to reoccupy their zone of human independence so long shanghaied by the state and the teachers union. Parents will make mistakes, but for the first time realize their capacity to correct and learn from them instead of supinely accepting that one incorruptible mistake made for them by a faceless government authority. “Yes! Let’s try that New Hope school for Johnny next year!”

Parents with authority to choose will encounter, for the first time, educators who in self-interest must take them seriously, dealing with them as the free agents they are, all engaged in a join project. Seeing the relevance of their own lack of sophistication, many mothers and fathers will commence a self-education about schools, seeking deliverance from any previous mistakes that they now have the chance to avoid. There will be government, private, and religious sources ready to assist.

Sophistication will not come in a hurry nor be true of every parent. Such is the reality of man’s experience with extending civic trust to adult humans. But by stages most of us come to recognize and accept our role as responsible members of society. Raising test scores certainly is a worthy goal. But realizing the responsibility and dignity of the not-so-rich parent (and thus, the child) will be the true payoff of school choice. And may more voices, public and private, start saying so!

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Charter SchoolsEducation and Public PolicyEducation equityJack CoonsParent empowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Jack Coons: The needy need charters

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Overall public charter school enrollment increased from 0.4 million to 3.0 million between fall 2000 and fall 2016. During this period, the percentage of public school students who attended charter schools increased from 1 to 6 percent. Source: National Center for Education Statistics

The New York Times recently managed yet another article discrediting charter schools, this one asserting they have lost their luster.

This knock comes in harmony with the current kibitzing by the teachers unions, so far quite successful in persuading state legislators to limit the growing number of these competitors of our “public schools.” New York and California are among the states that have surrendered and put brakes on new charters.

Whatever “luster” was intended to mean, the charter has in fact lost none of its charm for the concerned parent. I recommend a recent article in the Journal of Political Economy by Christopher Walters, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

His article, “The Demand for Effective Charter Schools,” confirms the popularity of these new institutions, now sufficiently successful to constitute a real threat to union domination of our poor in city schools. Hence, the political panic among state legislators.

Meanwhile, of course, these same public servants prize and support parental choice of pseudo-public schools in New York City, which, as is not uncommon elsewhere, are reserved for those children who are the best test-takers and whose parents choose to have them apply. Here the state and union stand together for choice.

Now, an important concession: As currently structured, charters do not solve every problem. Walters’ title, again, is “The Demand for Effective Charter Schools.” While the relish for charters does increase, a disproportionate share of these would-be choiceniks are the better-educated and informed parents. Hence, though they are popular, “… charter expansion is likely to be most effective when accompanied by efforts to target students who are unlikely to apply.”

In short, our charter systems will become even more successful as society takes steps to insure that the least educated parents become aware of their options. This is hardly surprising; 40 years ago, Stephen Sugarman and I addressed that issue at length in “Education by Choice,” even imagining the following sections of a model statute:

“The Legislature shall provide for a thorough system of information concerning public and private scholarship schools which system shall serve all families including the non-literate. The Superintendent may terminate the certification of any public or private scholarship school which refuses to cooperate in the disclosure of information or which provides inadequate, misleading or inaccurate information. The Legislature may provide parents with separate grants redeemable for the services of educational counsellors who are without financial or other interest in any common school.” (“Education by Choice“ p. 227)

This seemed, as they say, a no-brainer. Of course, it does burden the school, and hence was unacceptable to Milton Friedman and his still-much-alive “voucher right” followers who preferred a completely free market for sellers of education.

Up to a point, I agree; if the school cannot maintain its identity, choice loses its purpose. But the schooling of children is not a free market. The buyer here is conscripted for the product; school is compulsory, and the child is drafted. If the parents are to choose, they must, to some degree, understand what their widely differing options will be. That’s the whole point.

The happy side of such regulation is that it challenges every parent to get in the game. I agree that some form of compulsion is necessary to insure, for most children, an understanding of our social and civic order. But one sure way to miss that boat is to confirm for that child that the parent is useless.

And that same message to parents assures that they find themselves just as the child sees them after a bad first day of school – powerless and futile.

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Charter SchoolsReligious education

Time for faith-based charter schools

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Like every traditional “private” school, charter schools are held to basic legislated standards of curriculum and safety with one major exception. For better or worse, the most serious governmental imposition on the charter school has been the exclusion of religion.

The teachers unions have discovered that charter schools are enemies of the good society.

Bernie Sanders is with them, warning us that these institutions are anti-democratic and must be brought to heel – that is, in reality, to the heel of the union, which insists that charter schools are essentially private and threatening to work evil among the poor in our cities.

And private they are in varying degrees depending to some extent upon the terms of their particular compact. The point of the original charter concept (1971) was to aid the liberation of the low-income parent and child from subordination to those unchosen strangers from government and union who control the self-styled “public” school located in their compulsory attendance zone.

Charter schools were to give the poor a taste of the personal and civic responsibility enjoyed by wealthier Americans who can and do freely cluster in chosen government schools in the suburbs or pay tuition in the private sector.

Like every traditional “private” school, the charter is held to basic legislated standards of curriculum and safety with one major exception. For better or worse, the most serious governmental imposition on the charter school has been the exclusion of religion.

Though the parental choice among charter schools is completely free, the schools themselves are unfree either to recognize or reject God. They must secure their students’ ears, eyes and thoughts from any suggestion of the divine, either positive or negative, with all the predictable effects of this upon the child’s mind.

In many states, this censorship is defended as a requirement of 19th century “Blaine Amendments” to the state constitution forbidding public aid to religion. The non-Blaine charter states have accepted this intellectual taboo as the norm and as the diktat of the union.

Given relevant precedent and the seeming attitudes of a majority of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, there seems no barrier under the federal constitution to the extension of the state’s authority to subsidize its parents’ choice of religious charter schools. The larger question will be whether the states are forbidden by our national law to actually exclude aid to the subsidized choice of such schools by parents. Next term, the Court will consider Espinoza vs. Montana Dept. of Revenue, presenting this very issue.

If we have vouchers, must they be for the choice of all legitimate schools? Here the school and parent may one day have reason to thank the teachers union for its clear insight that the charter school is indeed private.

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