School Choice and the Future of American Democracy

6 | The Personal, the Political, and the Economic

6 | The Personal, the Political, and the Economic How unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of business should be itself a culture of the imagination, in breadth and re‹nement; that it should directly, and not through the money which it supplies, have social service for its animating principle and be conducted as an enterprise in behalf of social organization ! —John Dewey, Democracy and Education1 Citizens who are forced to take a part in public affairs must turn from the circle of their private interests and occasionally tear themselves away from self-absorption. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America2 I began this book with a puzzle: “What is the connection between equality and liberty in American education?” I argued that a careful and critical exploration of this connection is crucial to our understanding of the likely effects of school choice policies and their larger effects on the functioning of American democracy. The tension between liberty and equality, between politics and markets, is real. It appears to be unavoidable and complicated, but not necessarily hopeless or without the potential for remediation or a careful application of school choice reforms. By framing the argument in an absolutist sense—one that asks if we should have politics or markets in the provision of education—we miss the possibility for a deeper understanding of the hopes and challenges of introducing market forces in an endeavor that relies on institutions of democratic control for its support and governance. An uncritical faith in either politics or markets is unjusti‹ed and reduces effective policy options. I believe that it is more useful to recognize that the tension between equality and liberty is fundamental to American democracy and to use this realization as a basis for providing choices and competition while also securing the political and economic resources necessary to the collective enterprise, 101 thereby helping to minimize the collective costs of individual choice and maximize the individual bene‹ts of competition. In many ways my story is one of unintended consequences. A reform aimed at improving bureaucratic accountability is going to have substantive consequences on political mobilization and participation in public education. School choice has the powerful potential to make public school principals more responsive to their parents. It makes public school bureaucrats pay attention to their newly empowered parent communities. Exit appears to increase the power of voice. There is also evidence, however , that exit changes the expression of political voice. The louder parents , as Albert Hirschman warned, are likely to be the ‹rst to exit, and they appear to become more effective in the process of exit. The effects of these movements and transformations, however, are institutionally and contextually determined. Where parents go matters, both for the schools that they exit to and for the schools that they leave behind. The characteristics of these communities matter as well. John Chubb and Terry Moe are correct in their argument that democratic political institutions can have deleterious effects on the ef‹ciency of public educational institutions. However, market forces, once unleashed, also have negative consequences for the distribution of political control over the democratic institutions that govern the educational enterprise. The situation, however, is not hopeless. That researchers have found social capital formation to be a dynamic process can be a source of hope or despair for resource-poor communities in the presence of choice, opening up the possibility of reinvigoration in the communities whose active voices have been drained by choice options, particularly if exit is restricted to the public sector.3 Based on the simultaneous possibilities of destruction and regeneration, I conclude the book by reviewing what I have learned about school choice, bureaucratic responsiveness, and democratic participation and offering some suggestions for educational policy debates and discussions as we move forward from here. In chapter 2, I examined the effects on political participation brought about by the Milwaukee voucher program and speculated on how the effects of activist skimming and social capital formation are likely to be determined, in part, by the resource levels of those communities. Much of the concern over private school voucher programs is their potential to blur the separation between church and state, in that they provide public funds that can be spent on religious schools. I have not commented on, and have no empirical basis to weigh in on, the constitutional issues involved in private voucher programs. However, I do have evidence to suggest that this is only part of the story with voucher programs, and perhaps not...