Public schooling, the market metaphor, and parental choice

Educational Forum, The, Spring 2001 by Robenstine, Clark

Central to the school choice debate are assertions that public schools are both ineffective and inefficient, that they may be beyond salvation without sweeping institutionalized reform, and that the best educational policy for reform is school choice. On the surface, it appears quite reasonable to equate school choice with an egalitarian, democratic community-our social and political philosophy entails that we ought to have the fullest level of personal participation and choice within our form of government and society. In public and political conversation, then, school choice is becoming synonymous with democratic freedom. Though school choice plans vary from one location to another and from one proponent to another, educational policy that offers parental choice for school enrollment has gained political and public favor. Yet, as educational policy and practice, school choice remains an inadequately examined solution to the problems of contemporary schooling in the United States.

The doctrine that the government should facilitate rather than directly deliver education has a distinguished history. Adam Smith (1776) argued against the establishment of any monopoly in service provision or production, essentially establishing the foundation for contemporary school choice debate framed within laissezfaire market theory. Then, a few years later, Thomas Paine (1791) advocated the role of the state not as a direct provider but as a "friend" to education. This market theory and its inevitable market metaphor, applied to public schooling, were supported and expanded by Milton Friedman in the 20th century. Friedman (1955) envisioned a free marketplace in which the beneficial effects of economic competition would revolutionize both school efficiency and effectiveness. More recently, Chubb and Moe (1990) advocated the complete dissolution of the public school "monopoly" and its replacement with nationwide market-driven school choice. Chubb and Moe declared school choice as a panacea.

This essay examines school choice as educational policy and practice by engaging the market metaphor and its ramifications specifically for parents as consumers. The central premise of the market metaphor is that the provision of schooling can (and should, from some perspectives) be understood in the same way that economists understand the provision of all other goods and services in society. The intended lesson of the essay is that one should not accept school choice as reform policy without understanding the consequences of its conceptual framework. In the economic domain, competition is sovereign. So, within the framework of the market metaphor applied to school choice, parents (the equivalent of consumers in the economic domain) are a primary component. Parents are vested with the power to choose the best school for their children; schools must compete among themselves to attract a larger number of those choices. In the grand scheme of school choice, responsibility is devolved to the parent-as-consumer, and the aggregate of consumer choices provides the discipline of accountability that the school-as-producer cannot escape. For effective educational policy and practice, then, there are good reasons for understanding more fully both parents-as-- consumers and the factors or circumstances that may constrain their choices.

THE MARKET METAPHOR AND SCHOOLING

Smith's objection to any monopoly-inservice provision and his proposal for government payment to schools based on parents' choices expressed his basic principle. If all parents are given the chance, they will be able to safeguard their children's interests more effectively than will the state (Areen and Jencks 1972). In deregulatory fashion, the idea is to create a market for better schools by liberating supply and demand from what are presumed to be the fetters of a public monopoly. School choice-- based policies express an ethic of individualism, with all trust placed in self-interest. Such policies tend to collapse into economic laws all human interaction on matters of public schooling policy

Most free-market school choice plans have their recent origins in Friedman's (1955) essay, "The Role of Government in Education." In his view, the system of democratically controlled public schools in the United States is an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility far beyond what is required. According to Friedman, the freedom of the market takes precedence over all other considerations. In his plan, governments would require a minimum level of education and give parents vouchers redeemable for a maximum specified amount. As Friedman (1955, 127) argued, "Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum in purchasing educational services from an 'approved' institution of their own choice. The role of government would be limited to assuring that schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards."