Over just the last 24 hours, I have seen several videos of rage and recrimination at school board meetings, including a mob screaming at and threatening people who had just testified for mask mandates in Williamson County, Tennessee (video below) and this meltdown in North Penn, Pennsylvania. These painful videos join this June brouhaha in Loudoun County, VA, and many other anger-soaked meetings over the last year or so.
It is hard to watch these often-incensed exchanges and be anything but saddened at neighbor pitted against neighbor.
Recently, Robert Pondiscio at the American Enterprise Institute has been highly critical of something I emphasize about school choice: it offers more peaceful coexistence among diverse people than does public schooling. Instead of forcing one answer on everyone, which is the crux of the wrenching scenes we see playing out across the country, choice enables people to pursue what they think is right – masking or no masking, critical race theory or no critical race theory – without having to impose it on, or deny it to, those who disagree.
In a piece last week, Pondiscio framed this argument as saying “public education sucks,” and even wrote, oddly, that the message seems to be pulled “from a mob movie: ‘You’ve got a nice family. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to ‘em.’”
Part of Pondiscio’s complaint is that saying people should be able to avoid imposition of ideas they find unacceptable is basically the only argument choice advocates like me make, and that it is an unsatisfying—or maybe just too pacifistic?—retreat from societal debates. Whether Pondiscio is concerned about pacifism is unclear because he both laments people going to their “side of the river,” but also “hoping the other guy stays on his.” Is the problem disengagement itself, or that other people will keep trying to force things on you whether you like it or not, so your only real choice is to stay in the war and vanquish them?
Pondiscio is wrong that choice-as-peacemaker is the only argument people like me make for school choice. He apparently has not read School Choice Myths, edited by me and Corey DeAngelis, which offers all sorts of arguments for choice, including that it creates better citizens, empowers families of children with disabilities, helps taxpayers, and as my own chapter discusses, holds the key to building lasting togetherness. He also might have missed my post from January about the power of choice to provide more progressive schools, not to mention my writing on choice as key to equality under the law.
That said, Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom has long run the Public Schooling Battle Map, to which Pondiscio gives a nice shout-out, and I have certainly emphasized choice-as-peacemaker over the last several months. But the recent emphasis is because our public schooling battles have reached a fever pitch over the last year or so, including over critical race theory, transgender student athletes, and, most recently, mask mandates.
When there is war, it is natural for at least some people to focus on avenues for peace…thankfully.
Of course, nothing about school choice says if you get it you have to be silent about things you do not like. No one requires that you have kids enrolled in public schools to join a protest, write letters to the editor, or just share political opinions with your neighbors. Heck, you can even join Twitter without having public school kids!
What choice does is lower the stakes on intensely personal and controversial issues because, unlike public schooling, it is not winner-take-all. Indeed, the stakes on something like mask mandates, in which schools either require all kids to wear masks or not—they cannot do both—can be seen as nothing less than children’s lives. As a school board member in Norman, Oklahoma, said a few nights ago as she pleaded to implement a mask mandate in violation of state law, “It’s just not okay for kids to commit murder for coming to school without a mask.”
Notably, many countries have implemented choice for peace, allowing people to select schools in order to defuse sometimes centuries of religious, social, and political warfare. And it has frequently worked.
Peace is not the only argument I or anyone else makes for school choice – indeed, peace stems from liberty, which is the ultimate value I argue for – but peace is important, especially now, and I will not stop pushing for it.
Related Event
Peace through School Choice: Examining the Evidence
March 22, 2022 • 12 - 1:30 PM EDT
Public schooling, by forcing people with diverse values and needs to fund a single system of government schools, inevitably produces conflict. Such conflict has reached a fever pitch over the last several years, with Americans battling over critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, COVID-19 masking, and more. Logically, school choice would defuse such conflict, enabling diverse people to choose what they think is best rather than having to fight for control of a single system. But is there evidence of that working? If so, where? And how does that not lead to Balkanization?
