In a very useful overview of customer — that is, parental — dissatisfaction with an increasingly politicized “education” curriculum in many public schools, my AEI colleague Robert Pondiscio makes the point, straightforward but in need of constant reiteration, that many parents are unhappy with the insertion of leftist “culture war” propaganda into public school education. Such parents, therefore, represent a constituency increasingly receptive to variants of school “choice” systems, whether through a voucher program similar to the Pell Grant system available to college students, or some other mechanism designed to subject the public school system to competition, and thus to nontrivial constraints upon the ability of the education bureaucracy and the teachers unions to ignore the preferences of parents.
So far, so good. But Robert, I believe, really is missing the larger political dynamic, one that became obvious to me many years ago when I was one of the volunteer state spokesmen for the campaign in favor of California Proposition 174 in 1993, the original school choice or “voucher” initiative.
We lost 70-30, an outcome that may say something unflattering about my political skills. Many of my compatriots blamed that defeat on the power and utter mendacity of the teachers unions, and it certainly is true that an effort to confront that interest group is exceedingly difficult, in a state like California in particular, especially with a coalition comprising the inner-city poor, Roman Catholics, and orthodox Jews.
In other words, we failed miserably in our efforts to attract support from middle-class suburbanites, despite the reality that even back then the quality of public K–12 education was mediocre at best, obviously having declined sharply from, say, the 1960s — most public high school students simply were incapable of writing a coherent paragraph — and despite per-pupil spending rising at over 3 percent per year after inflation, in part due to utterly phony “professional development” training sessions for teachers, which qualified them for increased salaries while providing nothing, literally, of value in terms of increased education quality for the students.
So Robert’s point about the prospective political effects of parental dissatisfaction is correct, but it misses the larger picture. To a significant degree, suburban property values are driven by the difference between the qualities of suburban education and inner-city education; people are willing to pay significant housing premiums to live in “good” school districts. A serious system of school choice would narrow that differential, which means that any such system would reduce the market value of suburban property, other factors held constant. In other words, in 1993 we were asking suburban voters in effect to vote to impose a capital loss upon themselves. Why should they agree to do that?
So I believe that the efforts by the education establishment to replace actual academics with woke propaganda is likely to galvanize substantial numbers of parents, but in a direction different from that suggested by Robert. I think that the more likely outcome is increasingly confrontational interactions between parents, administrators, and school boards at PTA, “parents nights,” and school board meetings, yielding increasing efforts to vote out board members thumbing their noses at parents. This will yield an increasing gap between the political interests of the new board members on the one hand, and those of the administrators/bureaucrats and the teachers unions. That clash, I believe, will result in an increasing centralization of education policy in the state capitals — and perhaps in the Beltway — a dynamic that will evolve differently in blue states than red ones. I do not believe that Robert is correct in his prediction that school choice will expand systematically. But I hope fervently that I am wrong.
