Thursday, February 21, 2008

More on School Choice   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

My posts on the debate that Sol Stern has kicked up among right-leaning education reformers have brought responses of their own: from Stern, Jay Greene, Stern again, Neal McCluskey, and Adam Schaeffer.

Greene says he isn't sure what the debate is about. Since it is possible to favor both "effective instructional practices and improvement through competition," why can't we just promote both? Stern, Greene, and I seem to be on the same page in saying that we should indeed promote both. But Stern's argument is that education reformers should place more emphasis on instruction and less on choice—that conservative reformers have placed too many of their hopes in choice. I'm not convinced Stern is correct, but that is what the debate is about.

Stern closes one of his posts with a question directed at me. He allows that I might be right about the way school vouchers (or tuition tax credits) would restructure the educational marketplace. But while we wait for those policies to be enacted so that we can find out, should we let progressive educational theories run rampant?

But during the many years it might take to decide this question, shouldn’t conservatives and school-choice reformers be joining the fight to challenge the progressive education hegemony in the public schools that presently educate 50 million American children? After all, most of those children will be future voters. Do we really want to abandon them to the ideologies of Paolo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and Bill Ayers while we wait for market utopia?

I am against such abandonment—as I noted, I join Stern and Greene in seeking action on both fronts simultaneously. I don't think, though, that the question Stern poses helps us to decide the question of priorities that he has raised. You could ask the same sort of question from the other end of this debate. During the years it will take to overthrow the progressive hegemony, should we just abandon the kids to a monopoly it controls? In this case, too, the answer should be no.

02/21 05:39 PMShare