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."

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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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The uncommon common school

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

“ … A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.”

— Saki, “The Blind Spot”

A few years ago, an eminent author-educator – let us call him or her “X” – renounced a short-lived flirtation with and promotion of school choice. X returned in remorse to a preceding career as supporter of the compulsory assignment of the children of not-so-well-off families to their local common school. Such mothers and fathers, like most parents, value their legal authority over just where, and from whom, their own flesh and blood will learn what’s what; sadly, they can’t afford to exercise it.

Now, X clearly knew this, and was, I think, in that brief defection to school choice, a would-be friend of the poor, yet, like too many of our pedagogical elite, was wedged in an intellectual bunker. That specific dark hole featured, and does yet, a set of empirical assumptions about government schools that picture their world as sufficiently uniform in method and message to serve as the common experience for both rich and poor – for every child.

Hence, justifiably, that same routine may be imposed, in whichever school, upon those families over whom the government holds sufficient economic (not legal) power. These, we see, are the poor who cannot escape by moving residence or by paying tuition at St. Athanasius. At the public school, everybody learns the same stuff anyway, so … no big problem.

This image of an education that is truly “common” may have been comforting to professional minds like that of X who longed to behold and be part of some “one best system.” And, by extension, the news of this reality lulled, and does yet, much of the American public conscience by its appearance as a happy truth coming from those who really know.

The mass of us thus can join X in the sedated apprehension of a school system truly common in its core mission and method. That ruling image quite logically encourages our widespread assurance that any “public” school serves as a proper place to teach successfully those young citizens who can be trusted to maintain our civic ideals (and, especially, that child of the poor whom it rescues from family ignorance).

Prudently, the apologist concedes that, human nature being what it is, this intended civic and intellectual payoff will be not quite universal; it is simply the best that the mind of man can deliver short of Plato’s recommendation that elite society snatch all babies permanently from their parents’ corruptive influence.

Furthermore, this flourishing homogeneity among the product of the common school would be insurance against those forms of civic and social division ever threatened by the disharmony of content method – and even civic purpose – represented in our motley-minded private schools. This image of an ideal and extant order of truly common state schools versus another of incoherence just could have nagged serious minds like that of X even during his/her season of pro-choice.

The would-be altruist was, and remained, in a personal vocation to the poor; but only for that one brief season did he/she suppose that even these have-nots could be trusted to choose from a broad private menu whatever would be best for their own child and society.

Soon, and to X’s dismay, in what now could seem the real world, he/she witnessed a near monopoly of the pro-choice conversation by apostles of a “pure” unregulated market in schooling, made as it had been imagined by the late Milton Friedman. That is, roughly, every child, whether rich or poor, would receive a voucher of equal dollar amount; government would leave the seller (school) free to charge whatever extra it could lure from the buyer (parent). If low-income families found themselves clustered in cheap and chancy private schools, such is life; there were to be no rules that would encourage their admission by the seller.

If in fact it was that cruel image of school choice which drove X (and many another) back to the support of our military-style draft of the poor, that could be understandable. X’s decision would then have been consistent with the popular conception that public schools all at least try to teach the same stuff in the same way. X went for what seemed the lesser of evils; and the poor would thus learn the same as the rich.

For better of worse, that picture of symmetry appears to me untrue, even among schools of the same district – even from room to room in the same school. It was untrue of our own family experience with five children who spent a bit over half their semesters enrolled in public schools. Our story is confirmed today, not only in professional media and tattle but, more directly, in the tales of today’s school parents – some in appreciation of such rich variety, more in disappointment.

Teachers, it would appear, are still free humans with their own world views, personalities and talents; they assign their own students ideas of history and civics quite incompatible with the classroom down the hall. Next year, some will feature the anomalous and discredited 1619 Project, others the profound scholarship of James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

This jungle of minds could be taken as the pride rather than the scandal of the “public” school, in part a happy, if paradoxical, effect of their very status as public – a governmental entity. Even our courts have shown concern for the (limited) “right” of the public teacher to speak her own mind. And, much more important, is the intellectual umbrella provided the off-beat instructor (ironically) by the hungry domination of the system by the teachers union which effectively shelters all teacher performance but extreme ideology or factual quackery.

The message of the “public” schoolroom is neither uniform nor predictable. And that would be fine, if only the parent were empowered to choose, experience, switch – to be a parent.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Trusting John Dewey?

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

The curriculum and the teaching method that are ideal for children have long been in dispute and remain so. Favorite methods range from Montessori to Steiner to traditional classroom lecture, recital and ABCs; the same diversity holds for the perfect content – factual, moral and political.

Many, also, are the professional luminaries who enlighten us on these questions, each confident of this or that solution.

Up to a point, this variety seems quite understandable and even healthy. Long observation of schools of education at various universities convinces me that method and content in pedagogies for children are as little matters of science as are law and the visual arts. We can sometimes (to a degree) recognize the rare classroom teaching genius, but such heroes tend to be inconspicuous in education school.

Nor is their gift always obvious even when they have made it to the classroom. Happily, the great run of teachers are at least competent – and bless them.

The great diversity of teaching style and substance is plainly cordial to the issue of parental choice. Even John Dewey appears to have thought so, and almost said it. That great guru of schooling would be an interested observer of our current debate over the empowerment of low-income parents to choose for their own child.

In his definitive “My Pedagogic Creed,” written in pre-voucher days, Dewey offered these foundational pearls:

“ … the school life should grow gradually out of the home life; … it should take up and continue the activities with which the child is already familiar in the home.”

“ … it is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of the values bound up in this home life.”

Today’s public school professional might snicker. Dewey could have foreseen very little of life as it would come to be lived in the “inner city” of today where home is too often a place and environment to be escaped. Yet, is it absurd to wonder that one detriment of that very urban crisis may be the conscriptive style of those city schools whose leaders have, in the last hundred years, seemed more in tune with Plato, who despised the contribution of the home and parent, than with Dewey?

What would be the level of responsibility and authority among low-income parents of the city today if, during the 20th century they had, like the rest of us, experienced the dignity and responsibility of the choice of school for their own children?

But, conceding the civil calamity wrought by the urban school of the 20th century and today, might our trusting of today’s parents merely risk compounding the consequences? If we try to fix it all by trusting the poor, will the newly empowered parent prove already hopelessly corrupted, making the urban scene even worse with his new options? No doubt there would be plenty of parental mistakes; these could be expected as the fruit of our long disabling of the poor.

Worse, several generations of mistrust might prove to have been dehumanizing beyond repair. Can we be certain of the effect of the sudden experience of authority? Still, choice would at least allow the parent to learn by mistake and experience. Mothers and fathers have done well so far with the opportunities already given them in various states to decide for their own child.

I see no alternative but the adoption of systems of subsidized choice that are designed, step by step, year by year, to reach at last a universal empowerment of the poor. America cannot afford another century of the present regime of abduction by the state. The social structure of our public schools is poisonous, but it can be fixed. It will take time and patience, but there is no alternative.

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2020 Presidential ElectionBlog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation PoliticsFeaturedJack CoonsSchool ChoiceVouchers

The state of the (teachers) union

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Somebody in the White House has been thinking. President Trump’s recent State of the Union address, while wanting perhaps in style, included a truly clever turn of the screw.

Trump stole an issue only Cory Booker among the Democrats dared to touch – school choice for low income families. Booker was ready to face the teachers union; the other candidates for the Democratic nomination were not, and now really cannot.

Trump now owns the issue, and it connects him to those individuals who are sick of having their kids conscripted for a school the child and family despise. Those persons had found the president wanting in this area, but he now will be a hero to thousands who have been crying for so long for an end to compulsion.

The details of any specific proposal will, of course, be crucial to its actual success. I trust this proposal will not be the sort of small and uniform voucher for rich and poor alike, the sort one associates with the late Milton Friedman. The rich do not need the help, and at most should qualify for a token subsidy. The need is centered on low and lower-middle income families who are simply stuck.

Could the federal government by itself afford to provide the necessary dollars for an authentic and sufficient subsidy for all the poor to have their choice of school? Of course not. But, properly designed, it could intensify popular awareness of the potential of reform at the state level.

One great stumbling block for school choice subsidies has been the 19th century adoption by most states of so-called Blaine amendments to their constitutions. These raised legal barriers to all financial aid to religious institutions. Such laws greatly limit the states’ ability to aid the parents’ choice of religious schools which make up most of the private sector. Happily, the Supreme Court has before it litigation which could well eliminate the problem by holding these 19th century relics of prejudice unconstitutional.

What will be the response of Democratic candidates to the dilemma Trump has posed for them? If they continue their hostility to forms of aid that allow the poor parent to choose, they will maintain the support of the teachers union but risk that of those low-income fathers and mothers who have enthusiastically stood for subsidies spendable in private school.

Trump now has in hand the sort of weapon he obviously prizes and perhaps should. He has his opponents clearly in his sights as hypocrites, the kind of slam they have so frequently given him. The Dems have made their careers as heroes of the poor. For whom will they be heroes now?

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCourtsEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFaith-based EducationFeaturedJack CoonsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The child’s right to the parent’s choice

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

Founders of the Oregon order Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, about 1859

Nearly a century ago, in 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The state of Oregon had, by popular initiative, decided every child of school age would attend a “public” school to satisfy minimum educational requirements. Every family was to deliver its child to the state; St. Theresa and Johnson’s Private Academy could no longer satisfy the law of compulsory education.

Hence, the Sisters sued for their professional lives and the litigation rose to the federal judicial summit.

The Court in the 1920s was at the zenith of free market protectionism. Its holding in Pierce was technically a victory for those schools that were the initial plaintiffs, but the Court took the opportunity to broaden its message, stressing:

“[Oregon’s] act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians … the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

The state, of course, remained secure in its capacity to impose a set of reasonable rules binding upon the private sector of schooling. But the parents remained master of the rest of the content of the child’s formal education; their sovereignty remains solid to this day, including the authority to choose the child’s formal educator. What seems worth adding to our focus is the court’s brief and ambiguous reference to the child’s own separate interest in receiving the parents’ choice: “The child is not the mere creature of the state.”

Children, of course, enjoy a cluster of legal rights, all of them protected both by and against their parent.  The state has an obligation to interfere in case of serious abuse by parents. But the state itself also can become the abuser. A parent’s power to decide is of great value to the child, one that is protected by law as a personal right.

But compare, then, the status of the child of the poor with that of the well-off created by our systems of compulsory education. Given the protection of Pierce, the parent of the middle class on up is recognized both in law and fact as the one who nurtures and directs his destiny throughout childhood – that is, unless the parent is systematically and unnecessarily shorn of this authority and duty by the state itself. And so it is with the child of the poor in respect to school.

That boy or girl whose life experience is otherwise determined by adults who know and love him or her sadly has 13 years of early life determined by no human decision at all. “You live here; the law says that you go to school there.” The child is delivered to an institution that has never heard her name, to strangers who will have no reason to remember her, or her parent.

Worse, perhaps, little Jim or Susie is made witness to the near irrelevance of mother and father in the child’s own life story. The best they can do for the child is to play the sympathetic listener to sad stories about which they can do nothing. They “… have the right coupled with the high duty,” but they have been disabled by their own government.

Enter the Supreme Court – maybe.

The child’s own distinctive and separate constitutional right to the parents’ choice could well be considered by the justices as a core element of decision in the Montana school choice case, the latest chapter in the battle over the use of public funding for religious schools. Its emergence here as a clear element of our constitutional law would be a recognition of dignity for the low-income parent and a workable application of the 14th Amendment.

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