Zoe Nelson

EPS 202

The Unequal Opportunities Created by School Choice

It is only when we start to think of education as the way to a better future for society that

we can value its availability to every child in the country. We can ensure all children get the

education they deserve by offering it through the public education system, which is accessible to

everyone. Today, students receive a different quality and experience depending on what kind of

school they attend. This is caused by school choice. In this paper, I argue that school choice in

the United States actually furthers inequality within schools, contributing to the social hierarchy

in society and the vision of education as a private good, thus, attending one’s neighborhood

school should be the only choice they have to ensure a common quality and experience for

everyone.

School choice is the idea that parents can choose from alternatives to the public school in

their residential district. Parents are able to choose for their kids at any point from grade school

to high school. The discussion of school choice started back during the civil rights movement as

an aim to integrate and equalize the education system. Advocates for it would argue that it

allows parents an option while serving underprivileged students who would otherwise not be

able to attend a private, magnet, or charter school unless given a voucher. Unfortunately, this is

not always the case, and the majority of low-income students never really have a chance at

getting into the school of their choice, so they attend the neighborhood schools.

The voucher system is one aspect of school choice that aims to fix inequality in schools,

but actually does the opposite. Under this system, students are given “vouchers,” which are

backed by state dollars, in order to attend the school of their choice, including public, private,
charter, magnet and religious schools. The problem lies within the fact that state dollars are

going towards schools outside the public education system. When we choose to ignore the issues

surrounding the public schools today, we are furthering the movement toward private education.

Vouchers were supposed to be a way to give underprivileged students a chance of attending

expensive elite schools, but if they do not serve every low-income student, then how can that be

any better? How does one decide which students are and are not worthy of a voucher? Why are

we letting public dollars fund private schools? School choice is supposed to give everyone an

equal opportunity to attend a better school, but vouchers do not attest to that mission. In fact, a

finding from economists Cecilia Rouse and Lisa Barrow states that “the best research to date

finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers,” so if they do

not work, why are we using them? (Orfield, Frankenberg, pg. 22). Why we are using a system

that has no educational benefits and potentially increases the stratification in schools to further

privilege the privileged? (Orfield, Frankenberg, pg. 7).

Private schools are one of the “choices” that a family has for their child’s education. The

problem with these schools can be seen in the name: private. It might be obvious that this creates

inequality just in the exclusiveness of private schools, but if everyone cannot attend their choice

private school, what is the point of getting a choice anyway? The value in public school is that

anyone can attend them. Though, in this paper I argue that families should only be given the

choice of their neighborhood public school, the idea is that if a family really favors a school, they

can move to that district. Private schools are also heavily white-populated, and studies show that

students benefit from diverse communities. Not only are they white-populated, but 79% of them

are also religiously affiliated (Broughman, Swaim, 2013, p. 7). This does not just create

inequality in education, but also in religion. The majority of religious schools are Christian, and
taxpayers having to pay for students to attend a religion they do not even practice is somewhat

backwards. This violates the separation of church and state, the first amendment of the

Constitution, where supporting religions is voluntary, but, in this case, citizens paying for private

religious schools is involuntary. This separation exists for a reason, and it should be enforced if

not merely because it is in our Constitution, then as a way to promote equality. How can we

place a monetary value on a religion? If one religion has a school, then why not all? Ideally, none

of the religions would have schools, and this problem would be solved. That of private

education, however, is trickier, because more and more people are rating it better than public

education. The solution I propose in this paper addresses that by removing all other choices, we

can better the one public education system using all of our efforts, rather than splitting them up

between different types of schools.

Magnet schools, another choice parents have, are institutions that specialize in certain

areas like math and science and are just as exclusive as private schools. “Many magnet

programs were opened within regular schools, which sometimes created apparent diversity in the

school’s enrollment statistics while hiding stratification and segregation within the school”

(Orfield, Frankenberg, 2013, p. 14) Basically, many magnet schools across the country can

appear diverse based on numbers, but inside the school, classrooms are racially segregated. This

is clearly a problem, because schools can label themselves as “diverse” and not use that diversity

as a tool for learning. Magnet schools promote inequality beneath the surface.

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch explores how

our aims of reforming education, like testing, vouchers, and charter schools, have failed us. In

chapter seven, she focuses on the role of charter schools in education. Promoters of charter

schools argue that they are free and open to all children unlike private schools. Although that is
true, charter schools are meant for students who cannot perform well in traditional school

settings. These schools “need to partner with public schools, not compete with them” (Ravitch,

2010, p. 8). It could be possible that the best functioning education system in the United States

would consist of a public and charter school partnership. In this system, public schools would be

what the majority of students attend, and the charter schools can take on the students who have a

harder time functioning in public school. What would we do with private schools? We would

get rid of them, and, hopefully, that would lessen inequality in education.

School choice only became relevant when public schools started to fail. The only way to

fix that failure is to address it directly, not avoid it by giving parents a choice to leave. When the

majority of public schools prosper, the majority of students prosper, but when the majority of

private schools prosper, the majority of public school children are overlooked. The government

is made up of wealthy white people, so it is no wonder why they do not seem to understand how

to lessen the gap between the rich and poor in regard to schooling. Why would they want to?

What parent wouldn’t want their child to succeed even if it meant disadvantaging the already

disadvantaged? “They aren’t my kids, so why should I care?” The fact that our country prides

itself on equality for everyone should be incentive enough for them to care about the future of

our society.

Homeschooling is also an alternative to public school. Students can learn from the

convenience of their home with their parent as the teacher, never having to face the outside

world. The benefits of homeschooling do not outweigh the damage. These students could

sometimes be getting a better education, given their parent is an effective teacher, but most

times, they are a worse alternative to attending public school. The reason parents should not be

given the choice to homeschool their child is that there is little control over the quality of
education the student is receiving. Though this is not as pressing of an issue as the voucher

system, it is still a cheap alternative that should not exist.

The reality of school choice in many areas of the country is that “there are just not

enough good schools to go around” (Fessenden, Harris, 2017). In The Broken Promises of

Choice in New York City Schools, Elizabeth A. Harris and Ford Fessenden (2017) address how

the admission processes to get into schools continue to fail at delivering the promise of school

choice: “to give every student a real chance to attend a good school” (Fessenden, Harris, 2017).

In New York City, low-income students, mostly living in the Bronx, struggle to meet the criteria

of the high-end schools they can “choose” to attend. Is that really a choice then? Of course these

kids would choose a better school, but the problem is that these schools usually do not accept

them. When better schools are only available to certain students, that means that better futures

are as well. Most kids attending the neighborhood schools are not getting prepared for college,

because all of the college-bound students are attending other elite schools. The article states that

“those admitted to [the] most successful schools remain disproportionately middle class and

white or asian” (Fessenden, Harris, 2017). This is not a problem of having a choice, but in

certain groups having more resources that advance their chances of getting chosen.

School choice could work, however, only in the case that everyone is under the same

circumstances to choose. The reason why it disadvantages the underprivileged is that they either

cannot afford to attend a more elite school, or they do not have a parent or guardian involved

enough to put effort into choosing. School choice is an aim to further reward the students lucky

enough to be born into a privileged family that advocates for their education. The students

lacking that support are the ones hurt by school choice. Yes, some of them receive vouchers and

can go to the heavily middle-class populated private schools, but the others are left in the
continuously failing public schools surrounded by children who come from just as broken of

homes as they do.

In Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Education, David Labaree

discusses the history of education as a private and public good. A public good is simple; it is

merely something accessible to everyone and aims for the bigger picture. When education is

viewed as a public good it serves to better a society that depends on everyone to function

efficiently. Whereas, he explains that the idea of education as a private good is that it serves to

“advance the interest of individual educational consumers in the pursuit of social access and

social advantage” (381). School choice is a system based on this idea of a private good. People

choose their schools aiming to only benefit themselves. The problem with this is some have

better access to the “good” than others. Wealthier families are able to choose from many

different schools just because they are able to pay the tuition to go to them. Poorer families,

however, most often, only have one choice: public neighborhood school. If not everyone can

choose, then doesn’t that defeat the purpose of school choice?

This idea of the private good has created a view of education as a market, where

competition increases success, and the better a student is at competing, the higher up the

socioeconomic ladder they can climb. We might be viewing education as a market because it is

essentially preparing students for the market. This misconception is what is causing people to

only consider what benefits them when it comes to education. In order to give students an equal

chance to succeed in the market, we need to provide them with the same opportunities in schools.

We need to treat schools like schools and not businesses. A school should mimic the sense of

community that we value in society. We say we value a community, but our actions say

otherwise. Why is it that private schools are primarily made up of white middle-class students?
Isn’t that excluding the minorities (lower class or people of color) from the “community?” When

we make elite schools cost more than public schools, we are sending the message that only those

with money deserve to succeed. The privilege of a child should not be a factor in the kind of

education they are given.

In the Twelfth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, Horace Mann

(1848) states that “education...is the great equalizer of the conditions of men” (p. 2). This means

that “[education] gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the

selfishness of other men,” and it “can prevent being poor” (Mann, 1848, p. 2). Through

education, any man, even the poorest, can make success. He explains that this can ensure that no

“body of men should be permanently poor” (Mann, 1848, p. 1). The way the system is set up

today, catering to the privileged, it is likely for a person to be born poor and stay poor. When he

discusses “education” he means public education, which can propel the advancement of the

community. How could this not be ideal? The stratification that occurs in today’s school system

prevents education from being an equalizer. We are letting the rich become richer and the poor

stay poor. Why do we not realize this? We stopped thinking of education as a way to better our

society and started thinking of it as a way to better our individual selves.

Education could be the pathway out of poverty, but only if we start to view it as a public

good. Promoters of school choice, however, see it otherwise. They would claim that “choice and

accountability create incentives for excellence” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 3). They find that making

education a private good through school choice causes public schools to fight to keep their

students and funds. However, according to Ravitch (2010), “competition, accountability, and

choice seem like good ideas, but when they displace content and curriculum, educational

standards tend to get dumbed down, not raised up” (p. 4) One of the proposed benefits of school
choice is that it gives public schools initiative to improve, yet when that does not test out, school

choice does not seem as effective as it is made out to be.

Parents base their “school choice” off of the quality of a school, which is more often than

not determined by test scores. With so many issues surrounding high-stakes testing, I can only

focus on certain aspects of it in this paper. The overall problem is that this “changed the nature

of public schooling across the nation by making standardized test scores the primary measure of

school quality” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 17). This is relevant to inequality in education, because some

schools prepare students for testing better than others. Though schools should not base their

curriculum around getting students to succeed on standardized tests, right now, this is the only

way they can obtain a good reputation. If a parent is going to choose a school based on test

scores, they are going to choose the one with the best. This causes less students to be enrolled in

the schools that really need fixing. The only way to improve test scores is focus on training

students for tests, but that detracts from learning other skills. If all schools have the same

standards and requirements, we will not need to rely on test scores as much as we do today.

I am proposing that in order to fix inequality in schools, we must shift our ways back

toward the idea of the common school. The common school is simple; it is an idea in which all

students across the country attend public neighborhood schools that all have the same

foundation. With one system, the public education system, every student will have a “common,”

or similar, experience. This will also ensure that schools share common quality. We would no

longer have white elite schools preparing students for college just a few miles away from the

crippling public school made up of low-income minority students. In this system, no one will

need to choose, because their choices will be similar. One issue that can come up when dealing

with the idea of neighborhood schools is that some neighborhoods are primarily made up of one
race and one class. Though this is not ideal, it will still be more diverse than a private or magnet

school.

The reason that I address the issue of inequality in education is because our schools shape

the future. The students sitting in classrooms today will soon be functioning as citizens in our

society. We must ensure that they are well educated so that they can contribute to our

democratic nation. As stated above, education could in fact be the pathway out of poverty. If

our schools can educate everyone to a common quality, we can lower poverty rates and have

more adults willing and able to take on jobs that are important to the success of our society.

Ravitch (2010) states that “free, universal, and accessible education has been a cornerstone of

our democratic society. We cannot leave education to market forces. We must remember that

investing in our public education system enriches our democratic society” (p. 284). The worst

part of realizing that public education is the answer to schooling problems is knowing that so

many of our government officials stand and promote school choice. Moving to an all public

education nation will never happen as long as we still have school choice advocates in control.

Providing a common experience and common quality of the common school will further our

society in a direction we want to go. To gain equality in the education system, we need to stop

rewarding the students who were born privileged and focus on bringing low-income students out

of poverty.

Neighborhood schools have a bad reputation, but if they were our only option, we would

change and reform, rather than avoid them. “As long as there are low-performing schools, there

will always be children assigned to attend them. And who are those children likely to be?”

(Fessenden, Harris, 2017). Well, they will not be middle-class white students. The way to erase

the majority of these low-performing schools is to have middle-class students attend them. They
have the parents that are willing to advocate for a quality education, and, sometimes, schools just

need that push in the right direction. Advocates for school choice would argue that

neighborhood schools do not challenge the students that are moving at a faster pace. In an ideal

situation, public schools would be able to accommodate for all levels of students. Clearly, the

movement back to neighborhood public schools would be difficult, and it would take time to

bring each school up to standard, but the benefit of this work would be worth it in the long-run.

In the end, our society would truly be based on the idea of equal opportunity. When we provide

a common school, and only a common school, race and class should not matter when

determining one’s chance at success.

 Broughman, Stephen P., Swaim, Nancy L. Characteristics of Private Schools in the

United States: Results From the 2011-12 Private School Universe Survey. 2013. U.S.

Department of Education.

Fessenden, Ford, Harris, Elizabeth A. The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City

Schools. May 5 2017. The New York Times. Web.

Frankenberg, Erica, Orfield,Gary. Educational Delusions?: Why Choice Can Deepen

Inequality and How to Make Schools Fair. January 25 2013. University of California Press.

Book.

Labaree, David. Consuming the Public School. 1985. Yale University.

Mann, Horace. Twelfth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education. 1848.

Ravitch, Sarah. The Death and Life of the Great American School System. May 2010.

Basic Books.