Don’t Choose School Choice

Don’t Choose School Choice

If everyone could choose where to attend school without consideration of cost, wouldn’t all children benefit? This is exactly what advocates of school choice are arguing for. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and President Donald J. Trump have argued that school choice will benefit our nation’s students. However, while it sounds nice to think that each student should be able to choose where they learn, the system as a whole can actually be hurt by this.

What is school choice? Simply put, it’s when students and their parents have the right to choose where they learn. This can come in the form of charter schools, or private school vouchers. Many currently have numerous charter schools, and yet there are still students who cannot benefit from them because there simply aren’t enough spaces for all of the students who want to attend. Private school vouchers allow students who are not attending public schools to use the funds that would have been spent on their public education towards private school tuition.

When President Trump said that school choice is “the great civil rights issue of our time,” he assumed that by giving all students a right to choose where they learn, we are offering equal opportunities to everyone. Unfortunately, even when people are free to choose, that doesn’t mean everyone has equal access. For example, what happens to a student whose parents don’t care, or don’t know how to choose the right school? Where will this student learn? If there is a default option for students who fail to choose, what are the odds that this will be a good school? It would likely be full of poor and low-performing students whose parents don’t have the time, ability or resources to make a good choice for them. Additionally, what happens if more students enroll in a school than the school is equipped to educate? Who gets the real right to choose in such a situation?

The truth is that we don’t need to speculate about what would happen if every student was allowed to attend their school-of-choice. Cities like Detroit are already experiencing the effects of such a system. Detroit is full of charter schools, and yet many of these charters are performing just as poorly as the traditional public schools were. To add insult to injury, because of the closure of failing schools, many students now have to travel extreme distances to get an education that is no better than what they could have gotten in the now-defunct neighborhood schools. Not all charter schools are successful, so banking on the fact that they will automatically be better than a traditional public school is foolish.

Proponents of school choice argue that competition breeds excellence and that it allows citizens to reap the benefits of their own tax dollars. The problem is, if the funds are spread thinly amongst too many schools, that people are choosing, everyone will have less resources. At the end of the day, there is still a finite pool of funds, and that may not be enough to sustain all of the ideal options each student thinks are best. And while it sounds nice to say that you get your tax dollars back, the truth is that there will never be a one-to-one correlation between taxes and personal benefits. What about people who are childless, or who no longer have children in the education system? Will they be given tax breaks? If so, how will the already-strained system support all of these new school options?

The main problem with school choice is that while it should benefit all students equally, it just doesn’t. Affluent, educated families learn how to take advantage of the system, and poor, lower-class people continue to suffer. Just because people are choosing a school, doesn’t mean that it will give them an adequate education. Rather than investing in all the trial and error of a new system that we already know is problematic, we should be investing energy in improving the one that we already have.


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