Author

John E. Coons

John E. Coons is a professor of law, emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, and author with Stephen D. Sugarman of "Private Wealth and Public Education" and "Education by Choice."

Coons: A charter with God?

John E. Coons December 7, 2018

John E. Coons

The nation’s first strike by charter school teachers is underway in Chicago.

In Chicago, the teachers from a system of fifteen charter schools that serve 7,000 mostly Hispanic students have gone on strike. These schools are among the few charters in the country that are unionized.

Well, good luck to them all, but it is only fair to remind these folks of the essentially private and voluntary nature of these schools, and the risk that this entails. In the private sector, parents freely choose. A strike by teachers, just as a strike by widget makers, puts their own employment at risk. Their company’s product has competitors all hoping to see another one of them go belly-up.

Private schools are widget makers, only more so. Their customers have trusted them with care of the most valuable of all goods, to provide them the only service that is compulsory for every family. There is many another supplier waiting to serve these parents and children. Consider the competitive effect that the birth of public charters had upon the Catholic schools serving low income families in the inner-city. Consider the hovering presence of other choosable charters (and traditional public) schools upon these charter schools now under strike.

One possibly positive message of strike like these in Chicago is the clarity bestowed upon the truly private nature of charters. One day that reality may serve a high purpose in litigation before the Supreme Court. The issue will be whether ban of religion in the charters schools of Illinois or any other state prohibits the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment of our federal constitution.

Whether a school that teaches religion would want to put up with any of this very minor general regulation of charters would pose a judgment for its management. My expectation would be that many a faith-based school would find the burden tolerable.

December 7, 2018 3 comments

Jack Coons School Choice

On school choice and the teaching of equality

John E. Coons November 15, 2018

John E. Coons

Jack Coons of Berkeley Law muses that all parents should be free to choose a school that considers the concept of equality in class.

Are we clear what we mean (or even could mean) when we fight for “human equality?” In what would a truly “equal” world consist? As a lawyer, I have more than once invoked the equal protection clause of the 14^th Amendment:

“No state shall … deny to any person … the equal protection of the law.”

But let us be clear: These words do not proclaim humanity’s universal equality. They assert only the right of every person under our national law to receive the same treatment that is accorded every other person in his specific situation. “All six-year-olds” are entitled to the same benefit or subject to the same school requirement.

True, the Supreme Court has given a certain few of our human qualities special attention. For example, law must behave with extra care in enforcing classifications by race. To a point, it may favor person of a class that has historically been victimized; a little “affirmative action” may be OK. But law in general is required first to make rational classifications, then to accord the same treatment to every person who fits in that class. That’s what law means for us.

We must not confuse these rather unsurprising words of the 14^th Amendment with the very different proclamations of fact (not law) made in 1776 by the Declaration of Independence. It was “self-evident” that:

“ … all men are created equal.”

The founders plainly believed that, whatever categories of specific persons – thieves or mothers – that human law might come to adopt, nothing that law does could ever change this hardcore fact of equality. The Declaration of Independence clarifies this distinction ‘twixt law and fact by adding quite separately that, in addition to this “truth” of our equal natures, all of us deserve certain broadly stated guarantees:

“ … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

We simply are equal; we are so in such a way that our own nature deserves certain positive concerns, and not only from King George. This distinction between the fact and law of equality is seldom made clear in our own media discourse – and even among legal academics – but it is the most basic of human claims.

Are we in fact already “equal” as the founders assert? What could the expression mean, and how might it matter? To be understood as a fact not a right against government equality would require our acceptance of some particular and universal aspects of our own nature. But, how could this be when, at every moment we witness gross and important differences in our individual capacities – not to mention our luck? Susie is really smart; I’m not, nor could I ever be. Bill is agile and will star at basketball; I am a stumbling klutz. Is there really any meaningful quality that the three of us might share, and in the same degree? The founders plainly thought so. Or did they? Could Jefferson have found a way to ascertain human “independence” for his slaves without releasing their legal bond? Could a slave be his equal?

Equality as an existential human quality seems impossible to picture without resort to the transcendental – exactly as the founders put it. The concept, whether one likes it or not, makes Susie, Bill and myself equal in a way that the signatories could defend. We weren’t all endowed by creation with freedom from King George’s tea tax, but everyone of us can claim the same dignity as a child of God, and no less (or more) so than the King himself. We simply are equal.

How could this be so? I find no answer other than the design of every minimally rational human person freely either to seek or to ignore the true and the good – and whether or not the seeking individual always finds that true good or, instead, makes wrong choices out of well-intended ignorance. If perfection of the self comes by honest quest for right answers, we would all be equal in our freedom to make the true good our primary objective; we would thereby fit ourselves for a happy and timeless perfection we cannot imagine.

What is the relevance, if any, of “created equal” to school choice? Consider the classroom in some inner-city, low-income high school. Can the teacher invite her students – who are there by no choice of either child or parent – to reflect on this basic proposition and ponder any meaning for our true “equality” other than our universal access to self-perfection and its permanent reward? Or does the First Amendment forbid?

It is the only plausible – and happy – response I know to the many unchangeable and otherwise merciless realities of our differences. All parents should be free to choose a school that considers the concept in class.

November 15, 2018 0 comment

Common Ground Courts Faith-based Education Know Your History Religious Education

Separated and secular

John E. Coons October 31, 2018

John E. Coons

The legendary Jack Coons of Berkeley writes, “One of the primary effects of this exclusion of God is that the school must now present some picture of human happiness and its achievement that fades with death; and that picture must be consistent with a reason for good citizen behavior.”

Three score years ago the U.S. Supreme Court forbade the teaching and symbols of religion in public schools. God is neither to be discussed, pictured nor even sung to at Christmas; maybe at graduations and football games students may express their thanks to God – up to a point.

It is proper, of course, for the teachers to relate the truths of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. But, it is improper to invite the student mind to wonder about just how all that material reality came to be in the first place. Could matter create itself; could all this something come from nothing?

Q: Teacher, would you explain?

A: School doesn’t teach about that; ask your mother.

The social effect of banishing God-talk from the classroom is very difficult to estimate using the statistical lenses of social science. But, with observation and common sense, one can hope broadly to describe the expectations of the justices and, then, the degree of their realization in our time. The court hoped: 1) to clarify that using the public education office to make children aware of our God debates (or, worse, of course, to take sides) occasions an “establishment of religion,” hence is forbidden; and 2) thereby to assure an atmosphere in public school purged of transcendental ideology, assuring offense to none and, instead, making a contribution to social unity.

The court’s first hope appears realized to a considerable degree. Litigation and administrative persuasion have been successful at eliminating many books and teaching materials that suggest the existence of God and his role in human life. There is, I believe, little of the transcendental left lurking in our curricula. The court’s purge has, of course, been greatly assisted by many state constitutions that, since the late 19^th Century, have forbidden nearly all public assistance to religious private schools.

One of the primary effects of this exclusion of God is that the school must now present some picture of human happiness and its achievement that fades with death; and that picture must be consistent with a reason for good citizen behavior. Even without God we have to live together. With eternal salvation as a classroom no-no, the government must present a life-plan and defend it. And so it does. With God out of the picture, each of us is “to find ourselves,” set our own goals and do what’s best for number one. To teach the child otherwise – to recognize and honor an already established human rule and responsibility – would verge upon theology. Of course, the teacher and the system do have rules of conduct for the child, but these must be understood and defended principally as the assurance that everyone, to a point, lets the other fellow do his own thing.

Has secularization worked? I fear not.

October 31, 2018 0 comment

Blog Guest Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice Policy Wonks School Choice

Consider downside of denying choice

John E. Coons October 11, 2018

John E. Coons

Professor Jack Coons of Berkeley Law writes that defenders of the government’s subordination of poor parent’s right to choose must justify the profound and debasing distinction we have drawn between social classes.

Assemblyman Snodgrass would appreciate your thoughtful response to questions about school choice she will face this year in the legislature. You may respond at length if you choose.

Who is better able to decide upon the school that the individual child will attend?
a. Whoever draws the boundary lines of the attendance zones that determine the specific public schools to which individual children are assigned according to family residence?
b. That child’s parent?

If you answered “a,” is this because, without having met the child, the government is a better decider of this issue?
a. Yes.
b. No.

If “yes” to Question No. 2, should well-off parents still be permitted to choose a private school or to buy into the attendance zone for the public school they prefer?
a. Yes.
b. No.

If “yes” to Question No. 3, is this because wealthier parents:
a. Care about their child?
b. Know more about their child?
c. Both a and b?
d. Other? Explain [space at the end]

Would the system work better for child and society if lower-income parents received financial aid from the state sufficient for them to choose a private school? (And explain at the end.)
a. Yes.
b. No.

Should society worry that such indigent parents might choose a religious school?

***

And so on. Any reader can invent such a questionnaire. My point, of course, is that we sorely need a clearer recognition – and either justification or replacement – of our studied conscription of the lower-income child and parent for the local public school.

The social consequences of the system appear to me horrific but insufficiently studied. After 60 years in academia, writing as an observer, I worry that the social scientists in our ed schools remain focused on test scores as the sole measure of school excellence; of course, even by that standard, choice seems to improve things a bit. That modest improvement those experts hostile to school choice for the poor assign to tricky admission controls by the private schools.

Whoever is right, one thing is plain. A policy of subsidized school choice for the poor does no harm in respect to scores. I say, stop the fuss; there are more important things at issue. If defenders of our government’s subordination of the parent because of poverty are to make their case, they must somehow justify the profound and debasing distinction we have drawn between social classes. So far as this observer can see, our historic, and quite conscious, disqualification of lower-income parents may well be a primary cause of some of America’s most menacing social realities. To name a few:

The inner-city parent finds herself functionless as a decision-maker for the central hours and years of her own child’s development. Deemed irresponsible by the state, she accepts her demotion and proceeds to act out her assigned role as a nobody. The child’s father – well you know the statistics.
The child observes the parent’s impotence and concludes that parenthood is a role for nobodies. “I guess that’s what being a family is about. I don’t need that. Either I go with the school or the street. But if I go with the school, come June this teacher’s gone for good – then the same next year. Who has the stuff to help me? Maybe the gang.
In adjusted dollars our society now spends twice the dollar level per student of the “good old days.” Fewer than half of public school employees today are classroom teachers.

My wife was – and one of our sons still is – a public school teacher. Our daughter taught for years in inner-city Catholic schools. By chance and choice, our kids spent exactly half their total semesters in public schools.

We could choose, and we are grateful.

October 11, 2018 0 comment

Blog Guest Customization Jack Coons Know Your History Progressives and ed reform School Choice

“Public education” is anything but public

John E. Coons September 28, 2018

John E. Coons

Jack Coons of Berkeley Law writes that it’s time we all grasp that what we have called “public education” is actually anything but – and it’s long time to make it so through school choice.

In much of American society, children attend a school that has been chosen by their parents. Mom and Dad have picked out a home in the attendance area of a certain school that is owned and run by the government. At the very least, when they moved they knew its reputation. Whether or not the school was a major consideration, they accepted it as a substantial part of the culture that would count greatly in shaping their child’s worldview.

That school of theirs will be called “public.” My Webster’s defines this word in various ways, but most prominent among these meanings, and consistent with all, is this one: “Open to all persons.”

Think about it. Is that government school that you chose for your child open to all children? Of course it is, with one condition – namely that every American family can afford to live where you have chosen to live. Is this public?

Of course, your chance of location in this “public” school attendance area may have had little to do with your finding that dream home. You may be able to afford a private school, and that is your choice now. It may be Saint Mary’s or the Free Thought School, but it is there for the picking, and you pick it. Now my question: Is this private school any less public than the Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary in your attendance area?

September 28, 2018 0 comment

Charter Schools Jack Coons Know Your History Parental Choice Progressives and ed reform Vouchers

A school choice classic, revisited

John E. Coons September 6, 2018

John E. Coons

Coons: “What government has done is properly to recognize minimal education as a parental duty, but then improperly arranged its provision by a de facto conscription of families of lower income. “

The humble interim editor of this worthy school choice blog, one Ronald Matus, recalls to me the 40^th anniversary of a certain book, “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control” (University of California Press, 1978), hereafter EBC. I am to call up its conception, its ideological focus, its faults and future.

Jack Coons, pictured here, co-authored “Education by Choice” in 1978 with fellow Berkeley law professor Stephen Sugarman. It remains a must read.

To begin, my Berkeley colleague and collaborator, Stephen Dwight Sugarman, and I had already co-authored two books on school finance, the first with William Clune, long a professor at Wisconsin, and, like Steve, my student at Northwestern in the ‘60s. “Private Wealth and Public Education” (Harvard, 1970) was our expose of the irrationality of our then state systems of school finance. A substantial segment of that book was devoted to a critique of Milton Friedman’s pure market conception of subsidized parental choice. Still needed, we argued, was a full account of the arguments from all sides of the question of just why and how to truly empower the lower-income parent.

The second book, “Family Choice in Education” (Institute of Government Studies, 1971), was essentially the text of a model statute for parental choice with substantial comment by Steve and myself upon each section. The model presupposed the participation of public as well as private schools in the market created by vouchers.

The question of subsidized choice was, by then, in the academic air. What remained to be written, we supposed, was a more accessible display and critique of the various arguments for and against choice, one addressed to all serious readers. The existing literature was good but remote, academic and largely unread. The possible exception was Friedman’s brief but classic portrayal of an unregulated system that would bestow vouchers of the same dollar value upon parents of every income level. The idea was simple, clear and attractive – but a bit too much so.

I had known Friedman rather well in Chicago. He had been an oft-repeated guest on my half-hour weekly radio show – later I appeared on his television show. Both of us had, in the late ‘60s, moved west to the Bay – he to San Francisco, I to Berkeley, where Steve was soon to be my colleague. About 1973, the latter and I concluded that the market of serious readers deserved a more complete and accessible argument for a form of parental choice more inviting than that of the “libertarians,” a system that would take a form more engaging for political centrists. It would describe a form of governmental engagement that would in practice empower those parents of low or modest income who had for so long suffered de facto conscription of their child by the public system – literally segregation by wealth.

So at last came EBC in 1978; and at long last I have re-read it. I feel the satisfaction typical of geezers who rediscover, then relive, something to be proud of, some deed or artifact that is still in the game. EBC now appears to me sufficient as a battle plan for beginning the rescue of the conscripted parent and child, not trying to exterminate public education but, rather, inviting it to become truly public. This just might be a time and place where interested parties can join freely in common cause – the enhancement of young lives, the professionalization of education, the strengthening of families and the good of the civil order.

September 6, 2018 0 comment

Blog Guest Charter Schools Customization Faith-based Education Parent Empowerment Parental Choice Religious Education School Choice

Child, Seek the Good!

John E. Coons August 7, 2018

John E. Coons

America has too long cheated the poor family of the tone and substance of education that is so cherished by the rest of us in raising our families.

“… the modern world is organized in relation to the most obvious and urgent of all questions, not so much to answer it wrongly as to prevent it being answered at all.”

– G.K. Chesterton

It would have come as no surprise to GKC that the “most obvious and urgent” of human issues – our eternal destiny – is undiscussable in the classrooms of the American public school. For any child’s insistent inquiry about God or no God – heaven and all that – the scripted reply must be “ask your mother.” Thus, it is that – for seven hours a day, 180 days a year for 13 years – the aspirations that can lawfully be pictured for the schoolchild will be variations of “find yourself,” “follow your stars,” “set yourself a high goal,” etc.

Love thy neighbor is, of course, allowed and common in the classroom; the problem is that any pitch for it must be stripped of the transcendental. Thus, a polite justification for brotherly love becomes that “it will make you happy.” Charity itself is made the occasion of self-lore.

Indeed, in the atmosphere of “follow your own star,” the love of one’s neighbor carries the educator’s message that “good deeds” just might catch the eye of potential contributors to one’s own comfort and career – first mom and dad, later your supervisor. The concept of goodness as the pure assent to moral duty – apart from any positive consequence for the actor – is seldom encountered in the public school. The justification for loving thy neighbor gets reduced to utilitarian tips and “moral” inducements like the following ambiguity from Michael Shermer’s new “Heavens on Earth”:

“We create our own purpose, and we do this by fulfilling our nature, by living in accord with our essence, by being true to ourselves.”

Does our law, then, disallow the school’s recognition, for the student, of unselfish justifications for acts useful to another? I suppose that the public-school teacher could safely deliver some less self-centered version of natural law or the universal ethic of Immanuel Kant; both systems are admirable, but, for me, a bit dense and remote, and mean the same for most seniors in high school – maybe college. Here, too, it is only fair to concede that virtually all the public-school teachers I have known well (in and out of my family) themselves have beamed a love that is anything but self-seeking. If only they could, with their students, consider just where such pure charity might originate and where it takes us!

August 7, 2018 0 comment

School Choice

School choice bookshelf: Intellectual help is on the way

John E. Coons May 21, 2018

John E. Coons

Two new books lend intellectual heft to the idea that families are the primary educators of children. Photo via Neeta Lind.

I finished a couple of books that bear upon the fate of the ordinary family in its hope to maintain authority over its own affairs, and specifically the governance of its children.

Herewith, a brief report.

Professor Melissa Moschella’s book asks the right question: To Whom Do Children Belong? Parental Rights, Civic Education and Children’s Autonomy. (Cambridge U. Press) The author is a philosopher in the natural law tradition. I have read some of her previous work and can, with great confidence report that she is a master of the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to ethics, private and public.

Her book proceeds from a lesson or two in the method, gradually to a description of the problem and on to the solution. If nature is the method, the problem is the corruption of what is nature by society’s and government’s collision against the authority of the parent, and (most flagrantly that) the ordinary and low-income family. The primary scene of the crime is conscription of the child for the school called “public” and for a message that is predictable only in its exclusion of anything transcendental. Its effect on the child, the parent and society in quite predictable. The experience of responsibility is left to both parent and child, all to injury of a society drifting toward sheer confusion in our common life and in what is supposed to be home sweet home.

May 21, 2018 0 comment