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."

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Of clustering, cloistering and class during the pandemic

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Little Miss Ruffit

Cried, “Mom, lets slough it

Who needs that school anyway?”

Said Mom, “Dear, we do.

Must work to feed you

You’ll learn your stuff there today.”

I see no handy solution to the “either stuck-at-home or stuck-at-work” dilemma of the Ruffit family. And I have sympathy, not only for the parent and child but, yes, for the public school systems – especially those in large cities.

Experts of every mind are announcing their own version of the ideal technique for reopening schools, and many of these sound plausible. This sort of civic conversation is good. Nevertheless, what stays plain and most regrettable is the continued assumption of most “authorities” that a small collection of government persons who are total strangers to both the individual child and parent still will be deciding where those kids from poor families in this neighborhood will learn their ABCs.

These outsiders will order the child to a school that the parents are unable to refuse because they can’t afford either to move to some well-set suburb or pay tuition at the private school they would prefer. They have tried to enroll Susie in the few charter schools that are allowed by the state over the howls of the union, but all are chock full or too distant.

One can admire the seriousness with which government authorities have taken today’s unique challenge; they have redesigned their programs for public schools with variety across the state. But sheer zeal is no solution to this deeper problem of choice for the poor, which is with us yet from the 19th century at the dawn of public education as we know it.

The motivation at that time was largely religious prejudice to be institutionalized in the kinds of schools which – with compulsory assignment of the poor – appeared most likely to rescue young minds from their ignorant parents’ un-American ideas.

I wish we could give this sudden swing toward decentralization of public schools three cheers as a retreat from prejudice and a salute to the dignity of the poor. Sadly, it is neither. The union can rest easy. There is no immediate threat to its dominion. And you mothers and fathers – best you keep working. You can still have late dinner at home and listen to your child’s experience of the day, wishing you could do something to help her.

I wonder what she makes of the role of parents in this society.

Pity Ms. Ruffit’s

Fate to go snuff its

Message from who knows where.

Well, sorry, but that’s how

We keep our world now.

Of parents so poor who’ll care?

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

Transcendence in P.S. 42?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

If all want sense, God takes a text

And preaches patience.

The Church Porch, Geo. Spencer

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given us a decision in Espinoza v. Montana, suppose that one day the state of Montucky were to adopt a broad and inviting program of subsidies for lower-income parents to choose among private schools that are free to teach religion. One systemic effect of such an act would be new pressure on the public school to begin behaving in ways that attract parents who would no longer be conscripts, but rather, free customers.

In a word, there would be competition.

Experience already tells us that one substantial effect of choice is to lure to the private sector parents who have religious beliefs that could at last be served and celebrated in private school. Plainly put, the governmental sector of schooling would be at some disadvantage in a market where, by law, it could not serve such families’ preferences by teaching about God as the parent would have it.

There seems little prospect of the Court in any future decision allowing public schools to compete simply by adding religion to its ordinary curriculum. Which religion(s) would they teach, and what of the rights of dissenting and atheist parents? Are there options for P.S. 42 – that is, could public schools at least do something that would recognize the importance of the intellectual, spiritual and moral issues involved without favoring any particular belief over others?

Could they do something more than offering an hour’s “release time” once a week with some unpaid priest, pastor or rabbi who sets aside all other distracting duties for this one, for which he or she may be poorly prepared?

The alternative available to the public school may be awkward, but I should not give up on making religion, agnosticism and atheism all teachable with enthusiasm in the basic curriculum – and without violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment. There is, I think a way for the classroom teacher (or better, a certified and scheduled specialist), in the regular curriculum to do justice to contrary ideas without betraying his or her own convictions; it would have its occasional moments of disaster, but no more frequently or damaging than the available alternatives.

Moreover, it could open young minds to ways of thinking and of respectful disagreement on this world’s most fundamental issue.

This method that I have I mind is very old and always imperfect, but I think it a plausible exit from the public school’s looming problem of keeping those families who would now have become its free customers. The effective teaching of religion in public elementary and high school should be taken seriously as part of the teacher training for the Master of Arts, and at least some graduates should finish sufficiently adept that their handling of the transcendental could claim neutrality.

Without settling upon a “correct” answer for the pupil to memorize, the child would at very least be helped to understand that there is a crucial question all humans have faced since the beginning – from Eve in the Garden of Eden to politicians in the Rose Garden.

This method that is plausibly lawful is generally labeled “Socratic,” thus paying tribute to that old Greek who left us nothing written but who gave philosophy and law a way of separating ideas that are either mutually  opposed or simply different, and to do so without taking a side.

And here is a confession: I draw upon forty-plus years of experience teaching law to (mostly) young adults and not to children (except our own five) and that experience may be too remote from childhood and adolescence to justify my pontificating about the ideal pedagogy for elementary or high school pupils.

Whether Socrates ever visited his style upon children, we don’t know. But were I teaching in the public schools of 2040, I would at least give the old Greek – and myself – a serious try.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentPrivate SchoolsReligious EducationSchool Choice

In Espinoza’s wake, is the Blaine bane at risk?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“Like to one more rich in hope.”

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

The media are calling the long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue a victory for “conservatives.” The Court has liberated a few low-income Montana families from conscription by the state and the teachers union, and yet we hear this rescue is “conservative.”

It is, I concede, an act of conservation, preserving the basic legal authority of the poor over their own children. These parents are, to a limited degree, made free to participate in the great school market. It is a victory for the lower-income family – but conservative?

Could it be that our English language is, for this scenario, simply lacking in resource to describe the reality? If you don’t like the judicial outcome of some dispute, you are free to call it whatever you think will give it a black eye in your own intellectual neighborhood. Hence, “conservative” we shall hear.

Last week’s decision is a powerful, if very limited, reaffirmation of the basic constitutional right, authority, and power, even of low-income parents, to decide just what style and content of formal schooling their child will experience – what teacher we shall allow to instruct their child in the skills she or he may need and what version of human origin and personal perfection will be delivered to these young minds for whom we are so full of hope.

The decision reminds us that 95 years ago, a case titled Pierce v. Society of Sisters et al. gave America the basic precept that parents – not the State – have the authority to decide where Susie goes to school. But a fundamental problem has remained: If you are not well-off, how can you exercise that authority by paying tuition? And, if you can’t do so, will the government that makes school compulsory leave you helpless with no option but P.S. 42? Must Susie go where strangers – i.e., “the State” – decide to send her?

So far in history, government has shown little interest in assisting the exercise of your parental authority. The primary concern of its legislatures and its governors has been to keep the teachers union electing them.

The Montana decision will not by itself end this great shadow on human liberty and authority. But the majority opinion justifies hope for development of ever more radical motions (“conservative,” if you prefer). The majority opinion by the chief justice relies exclusively upon the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, extended by the 14th Amendment to limit the states.

One can wonder (“conservatively”?) about the regimes of public schooling born of 19th century anti-Romanism by which schools became mandatory, but those elite who could afford it could, and still do, go private or religious at their choice.

Is it still constitutionally sound for a state to make schooling a parental duty, but then to protect choice only for the well-off? Will the Court let the inner-city “public” school last forever it its captive mission, thus saving the bacon for officers of the teachers union?

Talk to your state legislator – and stay tuned to the conservative Court.

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Commentary and OpinionEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParent EmpowermentSchool Choice

Whose truth shall set us free?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.”

— Henry IV, Shakespeare

Throughout the last half-century, the leading argument for subsidizing low-income parents to choose their child’s school has been an alleged positive effect of choice upon test scores.

The academy, and in turn, the media, have had us focus upon statistics to convey, in charts and numbers, a message that can reach a popular audience. Such reports do show modest improvements on standardized tests among those children rescued from inner-city schools by parents who have received some form of tuition subsidy.

At very worst, choice does no harm.

Well and good, but, paradoxically – and my theme here – this focus upon numbers has been damaging to the cause of choice by distracting us from other more human effects of empowering parents. It is most important that public discourse on the subject begin to recognize and stress these more profound, if non-statistical, consequences.

I mean simple observations that clarify the role of mothers and fathers as crucial actors, not only in the life of this child but that of the entire society. Perhaps it takes a village to raise a child, but so much more does it take a parent with the intimacy and financial capacity to exercise that responsibility and authority guaranteed in theory by our constitution.

Why then does society hesitate to recognize and respond to this reality? Was there, and is there still, some justification for our 19th century determination to save immigrant children from the flaws of their families? I fear not.

That elitist national venture with its misnamed “public” schools and its Blaine amendments was undertaken to ensue that the children of unmoneyed Jews and Catholics would get the true American message.

And when, in the 20th century, that phobia began to fade, there came John Dewey et al. to re-imagine teaching as a science, and then of course, the Supreme Court to insure that no talk of God be heard in the classroom. And finally came the teachers union to guarantee both the system’s rule over the poor and the gross power of the union bosses.

Once again, we may recall the late Albert Shanker telling the world repeatedly: “I’ll start representing children when they start paying union dues” – which is precisely what every child does by getting caught in one of Albert’s schools.

Teaching is a high profession. The devotion of the millions of its members is the rule. However, in the case of inner-city public schools, the personal greed and political behavior of its union leaders have corrupted its practice. There is no justification for treating the poor as incompetent decisionmakers unless it be our plan to keep them so.

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2020 Presidential ElectionBlog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

DeVos pathos

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government.”

— G.K. Chesterton, “The Man Who Was Thursday”

Our media rightly portray Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as enemy to our ancient order of officially branded “public” schools. She appears to feel a vocation to effect certain substantial changes that might prosper in our looming new society. In any case, for the moment I will assume so and agree that, to a point, if properly designed and focused, change in the system could be a blessing for many families and their children.

Paradoxically, I fear that, quite inadvertently, she has made herself an effective weapon for the defense and continuation of that relic system born of 19th century religious prejudice but today become the enemy of the poor and of any change that could empower such parents.

Ms. DeVos has been and appears yet to be a fervent apostle of the late Milton Friedman, sharing his free enterprise ideal for schooling as, in essence, just another arena of business, even if one of a unique sort.

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. DeVos in Michigan, probably in the late 1980s. The occasion for my visit was the organization of the campaign for her own designed and planned popular initiative for statewide school reform via vouchers for parents; someone had assumed that I would be a supporter. Sadly, the draft initiative was quite unsuited to the mission as I understood it – and would not be changed.

Before leaving for home, I explained my doubts to the good people who had invited me, drawing mixed reaction. I recall an elderly nun scolding me with the words of Pontius Pilate: “Quod scripsi, scripsi.” And she was right. What I had written I had written, and believed.

I still do.

The central problem with that first (then a successor) Michigan initiative was simply that Ms. DeVos had taken seriously the gospel of our mutual friend, Friedman, whom I had first known in Chicago as a repeat guest on my radio talk show. In his confident mind, both the end and means of any ideal system were to be settled, for schools as for any other salable good, with a virtually unregulated market, and, for reasons still unclear to me, he concluded that subsidies of equal value should go to all parents who applied regardless of their capacity to pay tuition.

With my wise collaborator (then and yet), Stephen Sugarman, I had always valued the efficiencies of markets, and, in the case of school, as a tool to rescue and empower poor and near-poor parents from futility and extend to them the experience of authority and responsibility already enjoyed in varying degrees by better-off families.

Any needs of the latter could be satisfied by graduated grants tending to zero at the high end of the income ladder. An ancillary hope was to diminish segregation by race as by wealth. Both purposes, we supposed, would be served if some modest fraction of every participating school’s admission decisions were to be made at random among all those applicants who had been rejected.

The DeVos Michigan-type initiative quickly became the model for free-marketeers in a dozen states, giving opponents the invitation to portray choice as a device for well-off parents to secure yet another free ride. Nor did it help then (or now) that such well-intended efforts for a wholly unregulated market secured most of the financial support for choice that came (and still does) from a relatively few wealthy sources.

Today’s activist centers promoting unregulated systems still label activists like ourselves “voucher left;” we, of course respond with “voucher right” while feeling truly entitled to claim “the middle.” By the way, all those Michigan-style initiatives were smashed at the polls.

That original DeVos choice has remained, for too many minds, the image of school choice as a right-wing threat to democracy, intended not for but against the poor. This calculated confusion has stayed well-financed by government unions, and, for a quarter-century, has remained an effective tranquilizer for the conscience of the open-minded but confused suburban voter who cherishes choice for his and her own and might otherwise be moved politically to take an interest in aiding the less lucky family.

Of course, I should and do applaud exceptions such as the schools of Milwaukee (per the great Howard Fuller) and those states, such as Florida which have painfully begun the rescue of the conscript family despite constant assault upon their efforts by the media at the coaxing of unions and pliant legislators.

For his own political reasons, Joe Biden – the could-be hero of the low-income family – has instead made clear his intention to avoid his chance to move the media debate over choice into the light of day. The opportunity for a federal clarification of the purpose and effective design of the necessary instruments of reform that can bring about the liberation of the family will be ignored. The fate of school choice will be left to the hero states.

Unless legislative leaders and governors receive some urgent vision, the poor family will unnecessarily remain an impotent institution. With the current population demand that we recognize the poor to be as human as the rest of us, might we instead begin to honor all parents as dignified fellow creatures?

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation SpendingFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

Let them eat cake

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

According to the U.S. Department of Education, our systems of public schools spend (in adjusted dollars) nearly four times what was paid to administrators in 1950. Maybe this is an exaggeration; but, even if half true, the reality would deserve our attention.

At the very least, one should ask: Has this spending policy been accompanied by an improvement in outcomes among our children and for American society?

A lot would depend upon what we take the word “outcome” to mean. The measure most cited is student performance on standardized tests; this is the only common gauge for all systems and ages. But if scores are all that counts, American schools have a rather steady record of failure to improve.

Of course, less easily measured consequences of spending should have their place in our reckoning. And one can reasonably assume that smaller classes, higher salaries, more counsellors, sports and so forth have had their place in developing the human person – to good or ill.

So, too, has the specific experience of the lower-income family and child in their relationship to the particular school to which the child has been mustered. From the day he or she was born, the parents knew where James or Susie would receive formal education – quite irrespective of that school’s reputation and of parental preference.

There has been no reason for the latter to dwell on the question of what might be best for the child. For eight hours a day, their responsibility will cease five days a week for the next 11 years. This reality will have its own consequences for the child, the parent – and civil society.

The character of the American public school experience varies among states, neighborhoods, districts, schools and even from classroom to classroom. The one thing the observer can be confident of is each classroom’s vulnerability to the authority who chooses the book and the film – and to the teacher who presents them.

The experience of the pupil in Berkeley, California, may be very different from that of the child in Beverly Hills, California – but then again, it may not. Our own children, now in their 50s and 60s, swam in the political waters of the public schools of the ‘60s and ‘70s with their diverse ideological currents and political intensity.

That is, they did so until, in specific instances, the experience became threatening – mostly to the mind but, on rare occasions, the body.

In such cases, we switched to private religious schools which, incidentally, were more successfully integrated. Yet we also switched back to Berkeley High from a private school that did not suit our daughter.

My point in this personal history? Marylyn and I had the resources to (as we saw it) rescue the child. In contrast, a considerable (and expanding) slice of America’s parent population is quite unable even to consider that course of action. This disempowering of our urban poor, from the later 19th century until this day, has been a given.

It has become so in many minds of the middle class as we observe this humiliation with its message of civic separation; worse, it dwells in the hearts and minds of the poor themselves: We are the despised; don’t blame us if we act accordingly.

Marie Antoinette had a point. The hunger of the poor for dignity could be addressed with cake or whatever else this society decides to force-feed the child. They must eat it; the law (of nature, but here of the State) makes it compulsory.

They may survive; but do not expect the poor to embrace the role of ardent citizen.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentSchool Choice

Choose your weapon prudently

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The modern school choice movement was born in the “intellectual hot house” of free-market economist Milton Friedman. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice.

“School choice is a political hobby of the rich.”

So goes a common indictment of the effort to subsidize parents’ preference of a specific school for their own child. Sadly, there has been a wee dash of truth to the charge.

The modern movement for choice did not originate in a widespread concern for the low-income family. It was born, rather, in the intellectual hot house of the free market missionary Milton Friedman. The professor of economics saw the flabbiness of our systems of protected “free” public schools available to all families living in each defined neighborhood. Competition from tuition-based private schools was, for most parents, reduced to near zero.

The public school monopoly is grossly inefficient. The obvious solution: Offer the parents a “voucher” for tuition at the school of their choice. Let the market decide which schools survive and prosper, thus lifting the quality of the entire system. More, competition would diminish every state’s investment in school bureaucracy, reducing the load on the taxpayer.

That message sounded good to free market minds, especially those who had already experienced success in business. Thus, in the 1970s, conservative money began to settle upon these new organizations formed to bring Friedman’s ideal into political realty. The problem with the concept soon became apparent. It proved to be very hard for most Americans to embrace a completely free market of the Friedman design.

Buying a seat in a school is not like purchasing tomatoes. Whatever the good intentions of these now well-financed activists and their corporate supporters, there seemed to many citizens a disregard for an obvious need to design the new order with specific concern for lower-income families.

For example, parents who had long been financially unable to choose would, for some time, need a system of information guaranteeing a minimum of sophistication as they are introduced to this new responsibility and opportunity. Participating private schools would also be asked to comply with an admissions routine ensuring some places for the poor. In addition, the vouchers would need to be accepted as full tuition (or nearly so) from such families.

Proposals for such lightly regulated systems proved threatening to Friedman himself, his intellectual descendants, and most of the wealthy donors to pro-choice non-profits. Thus, the cheerleaders for the idea of a subsidized choice that is focused upon the lower-income family have had to make do with comparatively feeble political resources.

One consequence: Critics like the teacher unions have been encouraged to portray the concept as precisely what it need not be – another government bonus for the well off.

So, hail to the market, but empower us all to choose and encourage the schools to play fairly with those among us who will most treasure this new responsibility to our children. Choice need not be either left nor right, but at the center.

I think I see signs of hope.

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Blog GuestCharter SchoolsCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsSchool Choice

Give them our tired and our poor

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The leader of our teachers unions, national and local, appear to live in dread of our states subsidizing choice of school for the low-income parent. These mighty monopolies of the children of our have-not families seem convinced of their own schools’ vulnerability to competition; the liberated mother appears all too likely to execute a quick bail-out for her child.

Here in California, we get to watch the union function in constant paranoia; ever protecting the status quo, it has nourished a rare cordiality with Sacramento, where its influence has kept charter schools very limited in numbers far below the evident parental demand. Family choice threatens their sovereignty over the poor; hence, the charter gets labeled a bad influence, a threat to our otherwise ideal system.

Maybe some charters are, in fact, not so good; their teachers can be sloppy, their facilities second rate, the atmosphere gloomy, and test scores a point or two below average. Just because most of them are popular, who needs such disasters becoming available to all parents?

We all do.

Markets, in due course, can dispose of the inferior few that will always exist; we can happily risk the short-lived, third-rate charter in order to secure the only mechanism – choice – that works to clear the system of failures. Competition among institutions allows customers to decide which school should live. If Happy Hollow Elementary disappoints, mothers and fathers can choose again in hope of getting it right this time.

All of us make mistakes (or so I hear). But these inevitable errors can be part of a valuable learning experience for both parent and child. Mother and father may come to realize that Joey was better off back at his underrated assigned public school. Or, more likely, their empowerment will move them to try a second charter (or private) school, one that appears free of the faults of both schools they have decided to abandon.

Learning from our mistakes can have happy consequences for us humans; in our school domain, there are four such outcomes that seem quite obvious:

·       The public school that loses students by parental choice just might awaken to its own failures and mend them, hopefully making itself competitive for the future.

·       The parent will, at last, experience the stimulus of real authority, power, and sheer dignity – hence of responsibility.

·       The child will begin to appreciate the parent as sovereign and caring, hence of family, as a blessing.

·       The society will have given its citizens the chance to become responsible actors in the human story.

Unless our civic aim were to maintain our historical regime of servitude, there is no real downside.

The securing of school choice for the impoverished family can take a wide variety of practical legislative forms. The design of state systems that will truly protect that family from discrimination in the private sector and that will do this without threatening the scholastic identity of the school itself is a challenge.

Over the years, Stephen Sugarman and I designed a half-dozen or more diverse models, all aiming to protect the uniqueness of both seller and buyer; none is perfect, but all, I can hope, would be workable and politically prudent. Of course, the form adopted would very likely vary from state to state in their structure.

Reform in pursuit of choice for the poor may, in many states, entail political earthquake in order to become reality. However, that reality excuses none of us from rejecting this nation’s indefensible and degrading treatment of families lacking the resources that the rest of us carefully display in the parental hope to realize the latent capacities and vision of our descendants.

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