By Harrison Blackmond, DFER Michigan State Director
The parental choice movement has enjoyed great success politically in Michigan and many other states over the last year. Michigan has lifted the cap on charters and given parents the right to convert an existing traditional public school to a charter school among other changes. Other states, in addition to expanding charter schools, have expanded the use of vouchers so that parents can enroll their children in any school, public or private.
We at DFER are primarily interested in excellence and equity. We care more whether efforts to give parents the option to enroll their children in schools other than the one the district wants to assign them to meet these two goals – excellence and equity – and worry less about who runs those schools.
However, many “free market” advocates are more focused on getting government out of education than they are in excellence and equity. You need look no farther than recent so-called reforms advanced in Michigan that ignore both principles. Many free-market absolutists believe that the job will not be complete until the “government” is completely out of the picture, having no role in education except to distribute the checks or vouchers to the parents!
Under this scenario, parents would be left to determine whether the school is a quality school, whether: the teachers are qualified; the school is safe; the school is nondiscriminatory in its admissions and it’s hiring practices; and whether it carefully selects the adults who come into contact with the children. The “free marketers” will argue that, eventually, the market, through competition, will eliminate those schools that fail to meet acceptable standards. What they do not say is that, while the market determines whether this is a quality school, children are being harmed educationally or perhaps in other ways.
During the debates on expanding charter schools in Michigan I frequently heard, “who knows what’s best for my children, bureaucrats in Lansing or me, the parent?” That is not the question; no bureaucrat would argue that they know more about what is in your child’s best interest than you. The real question is, what role, if any, can government usefully play to assist parents to make the best educational choices for their children? Another question is, do our state and federal governments have an interest in seeing that children learn important things at high levels so that we as a state and a country can compete economically on a national and global basis?