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Author

John E. Coons

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."

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingJack CoonsMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The pod: problem or opportunity?

John E. Coons November 6, 2020
John E. Coons

Were we still school-parenting, I’m confident that Marylyn and I would be “podding” our five kids – some here at home, the others in age-appropriate pods around the neighborhood.

Berkeley, at least in its overeducated neighborhoods, is fertile ground for the fashion. Of course, down the slope near the bay, there live parents who are not so ready to deliver the good of schooling at home; of that, more in a moment.

First: Podding has proved popular among us well-off parents, and Berkeley is no peculiar island of this phenomenon. Across the country, parents and kids alike enjoy this very social but controlled environment for the delivery of knowledge to their young. Whether the basic goods of the mind are effectively transmitted remains to be seen; I assume that we will soon and for years to come be buried in reports on the blogs from the statisticians.

There are plenty of homeschoolers whose work appears to have paid off for the child, but the present absence of trustworthy statistics with which to gauge the worth of these accounts has made most of the optimistic reports of today vulnerable. And, even going toward fears that the commonly valued information will never come easily.

In any case, given their apparent popularity, pods could occasion a substantial and permanent departure of middle-class families from the traditional modes of schooling. The obvious civic problem that this creates is that the skills necessary to the creation and operation of a pod are not universal. The unreadiness of many lower-income parents to assemble an efficient learning club is plain fact.

But so what?

These people will be no worse off than now. They are today systematically drafted for the local last-resort public school, and so shall they remain when the podding begins among the better-off.

Paradoxically, a principal effect of the odd exodus will be felt by those low-income families that are scattered within comfortable suburban districts but unable to move to a pod along with their neighbors. The whole of it betrays the essentially private character of the existing system for those who can pay. The teachers union will retain its essential monopoly of the poor.

It is, I hope, quite possible that this plain and simple confirmation of America’s essential serfdom of the poor family in order to maintain the comfort of their schoolhouse warders will stir some among us at last to cry foul. No doubt there will be a division among these critics. Some will arise from the never-silent stockpile of envy, to demand the subordination of all parents and children to the state in the name of “equality” – no pods allowed!

But there will be others who will invoke the flag of equality in quite a different way. Instead of forcing all of us back into the old system by eliminating pods for the rich, they will insist that the non-rich be empowered, with vouchers or other devices, to choose a non-public school that waits to prove its special teaching genius.

The wisdom of such liberation has been attested by a host of reports from neutral-minded social scientists, at least in regard to its effect upon test scores.

Are we ready to trust the poor with that constitutional liberty we so value for ourselves? The advent of a true system of choice for all will not come without a period of confusion.

The more adventurous states among the 50 will accept the challenge and discover for all of us the pitfalls that await – and how to avoid them. Others will learn and follow. No doubt the occasional self-appointed “spokesperson” for the poor will do his best to turn the project to his self-interest.

In the end, given the opportunity, the poor will have to liberate themselves; but this will first require their deliverance from the peculiar shackles so long reserved for them. And that awaits the collaboration of us comfortable folk.

Are we ready?

November 6, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCommon GroundEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionism

Against choice for the poor

John E. Coons October 23, 2020
John E. Coons

For more than half a century, I have listened to diatribes against empowering lower-income parents to choose a school for their own child. Even today, these reasons remain unclear to me.

 This brief essay will be an effort to clarify what is at stake in America’s battles over the role of the poor parent versus those public school professionals who have a stake in the survival of the established system. How do these folks defend their intact but quivering castle?

Here are a few overlapping but essentially distinct arguments against choice that thrive in the media and in private conversations. I will comment briefly on each.

·       Society needs to maintain control over the curriculum and pedagogy for children of unmonied families because these parents are typically poor choosers. They are unready for that important mission and would make serious mistakes to the permanent injury of the child and society.

·       The state governments know best how to prepare these children to be good citizens and humans. Their curricula and methods of instruction are superior to those of any private school that the parent is likely to choose.

·       Choice would foster disunity among our citizens. Poor parents, if allowed, would choose schools that disagree about the nature of the good life, thereby fostering disunity among our already diverse peoples. This is especially true of choices that would divide us by religion.

·       Choice will be too expensive for the taxpayer.

·       Choice will be destructive to the authority and political power of teacher union leaders who know and pursue what is best for these children; hence, the effect would be negative.

These five propositions inform daily conversations among citizens of varying persuasion. I suppose the favorite defense of the status quo is the first point – the unreadiness of the parent for responsible decision making because of his or her poverty.

This strikes me as the very eclipse of reason.

We disqualify those persons who know and love the child in order to have the decision about her made by whom? Nobody! No human mind decides that it is best for this child to go here: “Dear child, you live here. Your parents are poor, so you enroll in that school over there. You will be better off; trust us. But, if you don’t, you go here anyway.”

Justification No. 2 assumes that the learning experience in the assigned school will be superior to that offered in any school the parent would have picked. No doubt, in some cases that would be true. The problem is that the statistics show, overall, exactly the opposite; charters and subsidized choice of private school show modest but distinct improvement in test scores.

To my mind, much more important than scores is the reality that the parent who is armed with choice and is disappointed with one school is not stuck there. She can try another, and in the process, join the world of parental authority and responsibility. The experience of making important choices is the doorway to a complete life.

The third argument is the fear that trusting the poor will further divide us as a society. It is a direct descendant of the elitist 19th century conviction that choice by immigrants, especially Jews and Catholics, would encourage private schools, thus spreading a message of disunity.

Of course, both of these despised groups somehow managed to create schools of their own whose graduates not only learned their lessons in civics but grew up to be patriots and even presidents.

Objection No. 4 – the cost of choice – would be relevant in the first years of reform, as an unpredictable number of parents choose to depart the public system. Cost, of course would be minimized by introducing the new order a bit at a time, perhaps beginning with kindergarten and first grade, plus ninth grade, then, year by year, adding another grade at each level.

Presumably, the subsidy for choice would be worth a bit less than the per-pupil cost of the public school and would be progressively less in amount for families of greater resource and income per child. The plain reality is that the state could decide either to increase or to diminish the cost to the taxpayer as it saw fit.

Objection No. 5, protecting the comfort of the union bosses, is a bit sarcastic on my part, but it is politically oh so real. Choice would, indeed, end their institutionalized reign over the poor.

They – the bosses – of course claim to be serious educators. And, who knows, in the new order, they just might pull up their socks and compete for the parents’ favor in the now free market.

My guess is that the lingering image of a state school that is, at long last, truly “public,” would, properly framed, lure many a mother and father who are free at last.

October 23, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCharter SchoolsCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentSchool ChoiceUnionismVouchers

Truth, freedom, choice

John E. Coons October 16, 2020
John E. Coons

See! A disenchanted nation

Spring like day from desolation;

To Truth its state is dedicate,

And Freedom leads it forth, her mate;

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound”

Shelley got it right; truth and freedom are inseparable. And, when it comes to schooling, the two join in the long-established freedom of parents to decide the specific medium of truth for their own child.

And yet, it is the national reality that we have imposed the unchosen medium – the specific “public” school – upon the lower-income family; such parents have no voice in the matter. Billy’s school will be assigned to him by a completely impersonal system, one that lacks any plausible, or even intelligible, justification beside the welfare and power of the union chiefs who profit from it.

Will the empowerment of non-rich parents ever become a reality? Will these mothers and fathers one day be offered the dignity of making that fateful decision for their own child – that power and freedom that the rest of us so cherish?

Given his very specific and humbled submission to the teachers union by our most plausible next president, the federal government seems an unlikely champion of the poor for the near future. Yet, today, in a number of states, we watch politicians adjusting to signs of an awakening civic conscience; of course, it helps that the polls show a mounting preference for choice among all parents, the comfortable as well as the poor. The subsidized mother and father have become a spreading vision among our people.

When and if choice comes to be in a sustainable way, it will most likely do so in a variety of legal and economic forms from state to state. Vouchers that would subsidize and empower lower-income parents to exercise their legal right by paying tuition are merely the most simple and obvious remedy.

And, of course, we have already created the harbinger of parental empowerment in our well-functioning and very popular charters. Aside from their superior test scores, we can be confident that they work simply by watching the frantic (and too often successful) effort of union chiefs to minimize their numbers and/or to shrink the operating liberty of these precious quasi-public latecomers in our history.

Tuition vouchers for ordinary and poor families will be the simplest form for the subsidizing of choice. Imagine the real freedom for families that need financial help to decide for themselves if both vouchers and charters were to become available to them.

That will depend entirely upon the prudence and resilience of their current union overseers to transform themselves and, for the first time, rise to meet the competition in a free market.

In short, they would have to become worth choosing. Is that too much to ask?

October 16, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation PoliticsFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Comes the moment to decide

John E. Coons October 9, 2020
John E. Coons

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side

— J.R. Lowell

The president’s nominee for the open seat on the Supreme Court appears to be a highly qualified judge and scholar. She has set her moral convictions in the open, and, if not decisive, they are plainly relevant to the mission of this publication about parents and school.

Our constitution recognizes the legal sovereignty of the parent over the decision about who shall school their child. However, a century and a half of our country’s discrimination has denied choice to those parents who cannot afford either private school tuition or its equivalent in a freely chosen suburban institution where taxes play tuition’s role.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett clearly would prefer that society protect that same parental authority for the not-so-rich parents (and for the larger family) over who shall mentor this child.

The sudden opening of a place on the high court comes at a uniquely awkward moment. There is time, if properly managed, for the Senate to decide Judge Barrett’s future, and with it, (maybe) the basic legality of our conscription of the poor family for “public” school. The Court’s recent decisions on religious discrimination do suggest the possibility, and the appointment of Judge Barrett might advance the odds of such an historic stroke for human dignity.

Hence, the intense alarm of the teachers union leadership as it sees its monopoly over the poor at risk. No surprise; but what of the reaction of the Democratic Party (my own!)?

These self-declared defenders of the common folk are caught in a political seizure, even at one point declaring 50 days an unsuitably short time to decide who shall sit at the high bench – and, in any case, the fate of Judge Barrett, who could threaten the monopoly of the teachers union so valued by the Bidens.

May we ask ourselves: Observing this reality of Democratic dismay at the prospect of this nominee deciding cases, who is it here who is the voice for the poor? Are we who are registered Democrats supposed to be proud of our party, so unstrung at the prospect of a justice who just might support the actual exercise of the low-income parents’ right to choose? Who is it that is actually pulling for the poor here?

Obviously, there is time to decide, and this Democrat is pulling for Judge Barrett.

October 9, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The silence of my clan

John E. Coons October 2, 2020
John E. Coons

redefinED commentator John Coons spent 30 years as a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley; he now serves as professor emeritus.

“When awful darkness and silence reign”

— Edw. Lear, “The Dong with the Luminous Nose”

In my 40-plus years of teaching law (11 at Northwestern University, 30 at UC Berkeley), I had the privilege of rubbing elbows with scores of faculty, all of great integrity and most of common wisdom. Not all were law professors, nor from Northwestern or Cal, though the majority were my close-up colleagues at both schools, and just down the hall.

Two-plus decades after taking “emeritus” status, still with an office (undeserved), I confess that I know too few of the younger faculty very well; however, I experience enough to confirm what I will say here about attitudes of academics toward the subsidizing of choice among elementary and secondary schools for lower-income parents.

Many or most faculty today see themselves as agents of reform to aid the poor. Yet they are surprisingly uncomfortable and inarticulate about “vouchers” and – for such analytic minds – have difficulty saying just why they resist change toward parental choice. The only prominent exceptions among my own cohort is a colleague who would have us force all children of every family into public school; Oregon’s Compulsory Education Act is with us yet.

Most of the other faculty that I know remain uneasy about empowering the poor but struggle to find a justifying rationale that is not plainly elitist. They don’t relish the discrimination that all can see, but the best they seem able to express as justification is an imagined improvement that can and must be wrought by more money for the learning experience in P.S. 99; it is not that of liberating its families so that they can remain there by choice or skip out and seek a school that works better for young Freddie.

Many or even most of these same academics do seem comfortable with the provision of charter schools, but only to a point; we shouldn’t let them become the norm. Few seem outraged by California’s very strict limits on the number and freedom of charters – this in spite of their superior test scores and evident popularity. More than 100,000 families seeking escape are left losers after the necessary lotteries for admission; for them it’s back as internees to Freedom Public School down the street.

I’m not confident that our individualist academics with their proclaimed focus on human liberty and equality have allowed themselves a conscious and open-minded grasp of reality.

How can this cast of the intellectual mind be explained? Why are these freedom-folk numbing themselves to the scene of these powerless parents living with all the poisonous consequences? What exactly is the “liberal” social good that they all achieved by this conscriptive device?

These good minds are (like me) virtually all registered Democrats; but they fear some yet unidentified monster waiting to reduce the state of the poor even more than today is realized by our very deliberate segregation and social gelding according to family income.

Could it be the fear of religion or some particular religion? Are we witnessing the permanence of the 19th century dread felt by our elites at the sight of those crude immigrants with their dedication to peculiar and un-American views of reality? At many a campus this seems credible, but at “Boalt Hall,” the law school at Berkeley? History seems against it.

Boalt faculty had, I learned, supported the private school plaintiffs in Pierce v. Society of Sisters; and, when I arrived a half-century later, the place was alive with good-natured but serious discourse among the sects represented. Religious diversity was natural, precious and fun.

Let me, yet once again, cite the message approved (at my first faculty meeting) in our (successful) effort to lure the great David Daube from Oxford. (“Kuttner,” in this epic rhyme, was the equally distinguished [but Catholic] Jew drawn to head our huge and unique collection of canon and religious law.)

Catholics are fine, but so are Jews

Kuttner’s coming, how about youse?

I knew that I was in the right place.

The faculty (and student) discourse of those times seems to have lost much of its nonchalance, hence much of its liberating function. It has, of course, become carefully WOKE about sex – fine, but about religion too?

I fear that this sort of social-intellectual prudence starts early in the schooling of most of us; the questions that matter most never get answered or even considered and become de trop in polite society. Minds with experience and sophistication go silent – and, in this case, by personal choice.

Let’s open up. That’s why society gave us this fancy platform – to help make public issues clearer and, maybe, do a little good.

October 2, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation ChoiceFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

A win-win for Darwin

John E. Coons September 25, 2020
John E. Coons

What happens to the mind of the school child who each day dwells in the land of Charles Darwin, focused solely upon what becomes of matter and the ever-evolving elements of natural life, never asking how this stuff came to be in the first place?

Darwin’s own mind simply withdrew from that question, settling at last into an airy atheism. For him, the stuff of this universe was the only reality, thus the mind’s departure into metaphysics or religion but a wasteful diversion into nothing at all.

Hence, there is no point in telling the student about anything but matter and the course of its ever-evolving reality. There is simply no story to be told about the world’s coming to be. It just is, and that’s all that matters.

Tenth-grader Joe finds the details of evolution fascinating, as do most of us. It is quite easy to engage the mind, young or old, in the gorgeous reality of physical stuff. It’s fun. But, viewed as Darwin saw things, that fun is not endless. Like the butterfly, and even the redwood, we die.

That’s the only story young Joe is allowed to hear at P.S. 99. What, then, becomes of Joe’s capacity even to ask himself that nagging question that Darwin ducked: Did a non-existent physical world simply make itself out of nothing? Even to ask the question seems juvenile; from nothing comes what … ?

But, back to school. What is the effect upon young Joe of this classic shunning of the greatest of all questions?

My own observation of its probably lasing influence on the learner is drawn from daily discourse with mostly adult human beings. They are generally lovable, but seem too frequently out of touch with, and incoherent on, the question of all questions. Most are obviously uncomfortable at its emergence in the occasional but unavoidable exchange that implicates the “meaning of life” – and whether there is one.

In my own experience, this verbal inefficacy becomes most evident in expressions of shared grief at the death of a loved one. The genuinely caring friend can find himself “so sorry,” but from there on, has difficulty in finding words of hope beyond the assurance that “she will be remembered” or “she was so kind and good.” Many warm-hearted and generous mourners seem uneducated in the language of hope – of faith, and of love.

This near incoherence on the occasion of death is replicated in many another context that hints at the transcendental. Politics is a rich example. Religious belief or the lack (or feigning) of it is always a matter of public interest, but the discourse on that issue is too often juvenile. The typical American mind and the media that serve it seem to find simple discourse about God/no God an effort.

Where does this stammering of ours about the transcendental have its genesis? What is it about the divine that strikes so may of us dumb? Its sources are complex, and its subsequent history even more so.

Paradoxically, it began in the 19th century as an intended protection of American culture from false religion and the imposition of a monopoly for true belief in the classrooms of the new public system, compulsory for un-monied immigrant families. This religious behemoth was, of course, fated to fall prey to its very opposite as the new “realists” of the secular elite gained control.

The Supreme Court, in due course, made the exclusion of God from the curriculum a matter of civic faith. For good or ill, the narrowing of young Joe’s vision and ventilation was a simple sequitur.

September 25, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation SpendingFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

Is that the way the money goes?

John E. Coons September 18, 2020
John E. Coons

Official reports of public school budgets and spending seldom have been easy for the common taxpayer, like myself, to understand whether such disclosures come from state, district or individual school – and, whether the numbers that actually are reported for expenditures are those for non-teaching personnel, sub-categories of pupils, or for equipment, repairs and security, they rarely are easy for the common reader to understand.

The official reporting accountant often lacks incentive to parade the employer’s relative wealth, federal and/or private charity. Thus, when we hear that the District of Superport spends $15,000 per child, while a bordering district spends half again that amount, this doesn’t tell us a lot until we learn more about what these respective districts included in their calculation.

When co-authors and I were writing “Private Wealth and Public Education” in the 1960s, we found that states, districts, individual schools and, in turn, the media, often were not telling it all, whether by design or innocence. Some were silent about debt or the interest paid on it, and often the costs of discharging or sidelining unperforming teachers; the same often was true with respect to income such as federal aid, gifts from private donors, rents received and the like.

Very often, no clear legal standard of reporting bound ether state or district authorities. As our research proceeded, it became plain that folks responsible for composing the “public” message sometimes were serving purposes of their own.

Fifty years later, spies tell me that things have changed but a little; more than one reliable expert friend who has some window on the California system has been unable with confidence to estimate the actual overall per-pupil cost to the taxpayer. The public system, to a considerable degree, operates as if it were part of that private market in which competing schools often prefer to remain inscrutable on the subject of resources and budget.

What is clear about the numbers of the public sector is the steady half-century swell in our expenditure per child and the overall enhancement of spending for non-teacher personnel. The latter now represents something over half the budget in most corners of our society. That this shocks me is, I suppose, the effect of its radical difference from my own childhood experience.

I hereby concede that today’s reality is not necessarily bad; those assistant principals, librarians, nurses, bus drivers, coaches, janitors and security may be necessary, and even a blessing.

In any case, this shift in economic focus is a reality of which taxpayers should be aware. The traditional public school has become increasingly expensive even as it has consistently failed to graduate better educated kids. That happier outcome has been left to parentally chosen charter schools which have shown themselves able to teach more at a smaller cost per-pupil to the taxpayer. Some do so even while turning a profit.

Again, I am not suggesting any unlawful behavior nor pushing away a formula for setting the best level of spending for any specific purpose or for total investment per pupil. I pray only that one day the media will be given – then report in an intelligible manner – a clearer picture of just where the dollars went. While grossly overstating the problem, English humorist, novelist, playwright and law reform activist Sir Alan Herbert showed the effect on many a frustrated taxpayer:

Fancy giving money to the Government

Nobody will see the stuff again!

— Herbert, Too Much!

Whether too much, too little, or just the right sum, there are many among us who would like the chance to see that the “stuff” got to its assigned place and is performing its assigned task.

September 18, 2020 0 comment
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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCommon GroundEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionism

Why bully the low-income parent?

John E. Coons September 11, 2020
John E. Coons

The rulers of our teacher unions and those of allied non-teaching school staff need at long last identify and explain the justification for their forcing un-monied parents to deliver 5-year-old Mary to P.S. 99 instead of that private, maybe religious, school they preferred but could not afford.

The cost of choice to the taxpayer would not have increased the budget; indeed, a substantial and sufficient parental subsidy can be designed to save public money if that be a civic objective. Religious schools tend to be less expensive anyway.

So, what is the problem? Do we have reason to fear that private schools are bad for inner-city kids? So far at least, test scores suggest the contrary.

And what then does our no-choice military-style draft of the poor for their own “neighborhood” government school gain for either the child or society?

The union sovereigns softly encourage a justification with a more subtle assumption about poor parents. It is one seldom addressed in public or even casual private conversation; yet, from my own experience, it is widely shared by educated middle-class minds, even if seldom uttered in direct conversation.

It is simply the observation of the poor parent as somehow diminished either intellectually, morally, or both. In either case, they are in want of a certain something that only the Hoover public school just down the street can provide.

In short, these parents are viewed as dodos or even bad actors; clearly, that Hoover place is this child’s and society’s single best hope.

Meanwhile, we middle-class folk are sufficiently bright and sophisticated that we are the best judge of just who will serve our own child’s and the state’s interest (and then there is Pierce v. Society of Sisters).

This vague assumption of an incapacity of the low-income parent (combined with unique government insight of this child’s needs) endures today in the unspoken mystique supporting our public school conscription for the children of these impaired city-dwellers. It may constitute a gross defamation of the slum parent, but it continues as one of those subtle diseases of our cultural and civic souls.

It is difficult to recognize its presence and influence in oneself because so often it remains “in the air” but unspoken – an assumption of the true citizen but seldom allowed to emerge as a conscious and express working datum. In the real world, it remains a subtle constant that makes it easier to close our civic eye to the plague we have wrought upon the parent and child of the inner city.

Finally, suppose it to be true that such limited capacity to choose were in fact an authentic characteristic of the poor. We would still have to ask our leaders: Why is it that among all accessible schools, private and public, this one local public school knows best how to maximize the potential of this particular child whom no one of the school folk has even met?

The entire concept is an absurd non-sequitur. The perpetuation of this system of educational strong-arm is strictly a political achievement empowering the teacher unions. It is a uniquely destructive contraption built upon a foundation laid in the 19th century and prospering since.

Truly, it can claim no justification whatsoever for monopolizing education service to the minds of the poor family, its child, or our civic order.

September 11, 2020 1 comment
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