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."

Public schools and the bingo curriculum

John E. Coons September 5, 2012

John E. Coons

Among my vices is the collection of reports of conflicts between public schools and their parents over the moral and civic content of the curriculum at every level from kindergarten through high school. These battles seldom challenge directly the reality or authority of human good; though we disagree on which are which, we do agree that particular actions can be really right or wrong. Rather the bitter local fights concern two sorts of issues.

The first is at the very general level. Citizens disagree about the source of the good. What is it that makes an act wrong or right? Just why is male supremacy or greed or lying evil? Who is entitled to say so, to impose duties and then, to ask government to enforce rules through law? What or who is it that makes gay marriage or drugs, gold mining, guns, or gossip something that the school should either encourage or censure? The answers given include scripture, natural law and various forms of hedonism: There is a God, and he simply has willed it so; or this activity tends either to frustrate or fulfill something called human nature – or it maximizes the sum of individual pleasure.

As a moral authority, God is a subject forbidden to the school; and the claims for nature are difficult even for adults to understand. The pleasure concept by contrast is easy; it is unfortunately circular. It holds that it is our moral duty to maximize pleasure and thus minimize duty; in this escapist theme our schools can stick to a superficial utilitarianism, but call it civic duty or the pursuit of happiness. It is an idea with no identifiable content, offensive to those parents who believe in concrete forms of the real good. It is especially galling to parent-objectors whose income leaves them no other choice of school.

The second and more frequent subject of citizen conflict is the state schools’ teaching about specific behaviors – either to approve or to condemn. We witness this daily in the schools’ diverse treatment of the environment, sex, animals, marriage, abortion and national defense. If you live in a mining town, the classroom message about the environment may differ from the take in Chicago. My morning paper today tells of a 7-person school board, five of whose members are ultra-conservative Jews. Good, but in that district’s schools what is likely to be said in class about modern Israel? Many a public school (or its individual classes) simply clams on the hot issues of life; many others take sides – if only by the wink and the nod. It depends on the teacher. This form of relentless unpredictability I call the Bingo Curriculum.

As our national bingo dealer, America’s public school is a crucial reality in the debate about school choice. The unpredictability of any specific moral curriculum plus the imposition of this random ethic upon the lower-income family, which can’t escape, requires some specific and ingenious defense. I can think of none beyond that of settled habit plus the self-interest of the school establishment and the teachers’ union.

September 5, 2012 0 comment

Blog Administration Common Ground Parental Choice Policy Wonks Progressives and ed reform School Choice

Milton and I and the evolution of school choice

John E. Coons August 20, 2012

John E. Coons

Milton Friedman

Colleagues in the American Center for School Choice have convinced me to add a more personal note to my recent 100th birthday blog about Milton Friedman. They ask that I describe my connections with – and occasional disconnections from – the great man. I am honored to be consulted and hope to contribute light sans heat. Though there is no avoiding one’s perceptions of human limits, correct or otherwise, my aim here will be neither to praise Caesar nor to pester him. Our 40-year acquaintance centered on a very public issue – that of subsidized school choice. The civic importance of this question justifies a story or two and, inevitably, a rough and rambling interpretation of our own relationship.

These stories could bear on the historic and continuing question of whether Friedman’s free market style of argument was the most efficacious to advance his own project. It is just possible that his prodigious contribution might best be honored today by considering a shift in the civic and moral mood music supporting our common pursuit of genuine authority and responsibility for less well-off parents.

Milton and I met a half-century ago in Chicago. He taught economics at UC; I taught law at Northwestern. He was maybe 18 years my senior. Milton became a frequent guest on my weekly (unsponsored, largely unheard) radio talk show. Over the air, the two of us would argue about appropriate government responses to the various challenges posed by the young and diverse civil rights movements.

In 1962, I had written what became a controversial report on racial segregation in Chicago public schools for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. My head was bursting with solutions for our educational calamities. These solutions included vouchers, but soon it was clear that I was bit more inclined than he toward government guardianship of equal access for poor and black families to schools that would participate in any subsidized system of choice. Milton was opposed to most of what seemed to me rather modest commitments by the school. He was confident that subsidy plus an unfettered market offered the best long-term protection for our civic values.

I think we liked each other. Milton was a tough guy and could be intimidating. Others may recall his classic trick of breaking into the middle of the opponent’s argument with “Excuse me,” and then proceeding to turn the conversation in whichever direction he preferred. But I never felt personally beset. When, later, he became a TV personality (the late ‘70s), Milton, to my glad surprise, invited me to represent the pro side in a TV debate on vouchers. The opponent was, like Milton, my sometime friend—the formidable Albert Shanker. It was fun and altogether coherent.

By then we had both moved to the San Francisco Bay area. I was pushing a popular voucher initiative that Steve Sugarman and I had designed; I was confident that my Friedmanic connection would generate financial support from business folk. We wined and dined with Rose and Milton and their admirers; we invested precious time and what was, for us, considerable capital in the campaign. In the end, to our surprise, Milton successfully urged our targeted business angels to wait for a more appropriate—i.e., less regulated—proposal. They took his advice. We bit the dust.

This turn of events was a bit difficult to digest.

August 20, 2012 0 comment

Jack Coons Parental Choice Policy Wonks School Choice

The too-modest Milton

John E. Coons July 31, 2012

John E. Coons

From redefinED co-host Doug Tuthill: Milton Friedman and Jack Coons were intellectual giants in their respective disciplines (Friedman in economics and Coons in law) and strong school choice advocates. But their rationales differed and this led to many interesting – and often contentious – debates. Despite their differences, their debates were always courteous and civil. So when Dr. Friedman died in 2006, his foundation asked Jack to write a chapter in a book honoring Dr. Friedman’s memory, and he agreed. Today is Dr. Friedman’s 100th birthday, so we again asked Jack to share some thoughts on Dr. Friedman, and again he agreed.

Milton Friedman was an economic libertarian of singular intellectual purity. I am less pure, and to me Friedman’s way of modeling the ideal educational triangle of parent, school and child has seemed a simplification limiting our perception of the social implications and, thus, of the politics of choice. I have said all this before. Why, then, do I gladly join this chorus of praise for what I have criticized?

It is not from mere personal fondness for the man. It is, rather, because it was Friedman’s specific application of free market dogma to schools at a particular historical moment that made it possible for a vigorous critique of the American model even to begin. His cry in the night may not have been the first; nor was it the sufficient cause of the great awakening—but it was probably necessary.

Our national mind had long been frozen in admiration of an arrangement comfortable to the middle class, but incapable of realizing education in a democratic way. There is no version of our historic district model of school assignment, even with charter schools, that can in practice achieve what the Europeans honor under the cumbrous but useful title “subsidiarity.” That word warns us to keep authority over the lives of persons either in their own hands or as close to the individual—and in as small a group—as possible. If bowling were our subject, few of us might prefer bowling alone, but neither would we wish to be directed by government to bowl with the people next door.

Left to themselves, humans cluster freely in diverse ways, most of which are innocent and some even creative; their clumps and hives are generally the better for having been chosen. And, if diversity and the smaller unit can serve the purpose, let us lodge the power there.

Subsidiarity could be realized only in a corrupted way by our old district systems. True, some of us can choose to bundle in Beverly Hills, but…and you know the rest of that story; it is daily thrust in our face by the media, and it is true. Many among us just can’t choose Beverly Hills. So at government command my child must learn whatever ideas happen to get taught and whatever behavior gets encouraged in Berkeley.

It was Milton Friedman who in our time rediscovered and announced that this fate of the have-not child was neither efficient nor necessary. A lot of people heard him. Most who did were at first shocked that this sacred cow of democracy, the public education system, had been labeled as a clumsy, self-defeating, anti-social monopoly. But some did begin to listen. And in spite of the system’s sputtering and posturing, they still do. Friedman’s defamation of the schools has begun to stick.

I think he actually underplayed his hand.

July 31, 2012 0 comment

Parent Empowerment Parental Choice Policy Wonks School Choice

Time for broader debate on school choice

John E. Coons July 3, 2012

John E. Coons

Much has been written on school vouchers that assumes they are primarily about economic efficiency and increasing the private sector’s role in education – a notion of educational choice that is widespread, understandable … and grossly incomplete.

Fifty years ago, the 18th Century idea of subsidized parental choice was reintroduced as a sub-species of free market theory. To choose a school became equivalent in form and in our discourse to the private procurement of insurance or apples; the parties exchange promises, then they perform.

There is truth to this; the school and the parent do make mutual promises that, by and large, the law will enforce. But to reduce parental choice to a simple bargain has been a tragic contraction of thought – an intellectual and political calamity. Any such contract to educate a child is profoundly more complex than the exchange of promises between A and B. Whether subsidized parental choice is a good idea thus is left an unintelligible question; it cannot be reduced to arguments for and against freedom of contract because children are not free.

This is a decree of nature itself. “Choice” is grown-up dominance of the child. This holds whether the deciding adult is a parent or a government stranger; one or the other will assign Susie to a school. The social and political issue, then, is more complex than a preference for or against free contract. Here in America the question is this: Should government continue to decide for children of have-not families, while the rest of us – as a matter of right – send our children to our own favorite school, whether public, private, or religious?

July 3, 2012 1 comment

Education and Public Policy Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice Policy Wonks School Choice

Zelman was a step forward; now empower all parents to choose

John E. Coons June 25, 2012

John E. Coons

Editor’s note: This is the first of two post we’re running this week to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the monumental U.S. Supreme Court decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which upheld the constitutionality of the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio and kicked open the doors for expanded school choice nationwide.

Zelman made clear that the federal constitution allows states to give money to parents that they can use for tuition at religious schools. So long as states don’t directly finance the school itself, no foul. Sadly, some states have constitutions with “Blaine Amendments” that do forbid helping parents this way. These are relics of bigotry; hopefully, the federal courts or sheer political shame will one day erase them.

Would a national commitment to parental choice be a good thing? Think about it. First, remember that the choice of a religious school by parents who pay is a long settled constitutional right. It is widely exercised by those who can afford it. Middle class people in fact have considerable control over where their children enroll and what they learn; they can move to a house in their favorite suburb or they can pay private school tuition.

Clearly, our society is committed to the proposition that parental choice is a social good—at least when made by those who can pay for it themselves. The real issue, then, is whether choice is a good for kid, kin, and country when exercised by families of ordinary means and by the poor.

More bluntly—do we or don’t we want inner-city citizens exercising their rights over their own children? Why have we made it so hard for them? And even where we do allow them to choose a bit (as with public charter schools), what do we, as a society, gain or lose by excluding religious private schools as one among many choices?

Long ago Plato gave arguments for having the state seize complete authority over the child at birth from all families—rich and poor. He thought he knew the one true way and simply did not trust any parent to do right. Maybe there are some platonic arguments for various goods that America achieves when it frustrates choice to the extent it does. Is it somehow productive to snatch the child the child from the authority of ordinary parents for the prime hours of the day for 13 years? What magic is worked by government monopoly over the core experience of the child outside the home?

Is it right that we assume that ordinary parents who cannot afford to pay tuition do not deserve that choice, even if they believe the choice would be best for their children? Crime is, to be sure, more common among lower income groups. But is it less common than it would be if the government were to allow choice? What is cause here and what is effect? Do kids (and all of us) really improve by having complete strangers decide what is worth learning? And do these unchosen strangers do a better job at transmitting the ideas that all of us think important?

June 25, 2012 0 comment

Blog Administration Parent Empowerment Policy Wonks

It takes a village? No, when it comes to schooling, it takes parents

John E. Coons April 16, 2012

John E. Coons

Editor’s note: As momentum builds across the United States for expanded school choice, it is important to understand the movement’s legal and philosophical foundations. For more than 40 years, John E. Coons, redefinED co-host and professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, has argued that parents – and not government – have the primary legal and moral responsibility and authority to educate their children. Coons is a powerful thinker whose reflections are best consumed slowly and with respect. Enjoy this special post.

It takes a village to raise a child—or so they say, and perhaps it’s true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village -whatever that word means – has influence, for good or ill.

But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a “sufficient condition” of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.

An equally strange interpretation converts the term into a moral proposition: The thing called “village” actually ought to raise the child, displacing all competing influence; whatever its peculiar norms and culture the village itself is the official moral standard for child-raising. If there is strong variety among villages, this proposition would be hard to swallow. At some point one begins to grasp that – in minds that love the metaphor – the word “village” has come to imply more than the old neighborhood.

As we watch these enthusiasts we gradually understand that this transcendence of the village is a two-fold concept: First, the all-good village has morphed into an idealized version of the nation itself; but, second, the corporate mind of this perfected nation mirrors the preferences of whichever speaker is using the expression. Village means what he wants it to mean.

I remain thoroughly puzzled by this modern mystique so often introduced to justify our coercive assignment of children from have-not families to schools of the state. The claim seems to be that, for such a kid, it takes a village and therefore … Therefore what? One awaits today’s favorite battle cry inviting us all to go out and occupy something – in this case the mind of the child. Let us occupy Jimmy!

In all these village slogans it seems forgotten that, in the first place, it took families to create the village. While the village may be important, it is not the concept of village, but that of parent (as part of family) that will allow us to disentangle the intellectual mess we have made of the various relations of the child to village, to state, to parent and to family.

This state of our culture and its favorite metaphors bears upon educational choice.

April 16, 2012 0 comment

Blog Administration Education and Public Policy Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Policy Wonks School Choice

Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

John E. Coons October 12, 2011

John E. Coons

Editor’s note: This entry comes from John E. Coons, who has championed the cause of school choice for four decades and co-founded the American Center for School Choice. He is Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and with colleague Stephen D. Sugarman is the author of Private Wealth and Public Education. He is our newest host of redefinED.

We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good—for the child, the parent, the family, and society.

We begin with the delicate subject of authority—that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.

Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.

The debate on authority dates from Plato’s vision in the The Republic of an ideal state that would completely disempower parents for a utopian common good and continues up to modern times. But in the U.S., the question of who has authority over the child has been universally resolved in all 50 states in favor of parents. In every state the custodial parent, whether natural or adoptive, holds a very wide ranging legal authority over his, her, or their own child. This sovereignty includes every experience of the child that the parent can physically and intellectually control short of neglect and abuse. It encompasses diet, hours, church, pets, exercise, and television as well as the power to decide who else shall have access to the child. This power to control access and environment includes, again, within broadest limits, the satisfaction of the parents’ obligation to school the child and the child’s own right to be schooled.

This authority has been tested in a steady line of Supreme Court cases since 1925. The parent who is legally fit to govern—99% of our parents—in truth has the right to govern. And the point of the law is not that parents make particularly good decisions for the children; individual mothers and fathers may or may not act in what you or I consider the best interest of the child or society. They are not necessarily good deciders; they are merely the best our culture, law, and history have discovered. They also have accountability in ways that are impossible to the world of American professionals, of doctors, lawyers, educators, and so forth. These people see clients for a time, do their best, wish them well, and head on home. The custodial parent is stuck—for better or worse and maybe for life—with what emerges out of whatever effort is made.

This wide acceptance throughout American society and its legal system of deference to and accountability for parental authority forms the foundation for broadening the support for choice in education. Our current system is an aberration of the way the rest of American life functions.

October 12, 2011 4 comments