Jim and Alice have three children and a modest income. Should their income status justify our forcing these kids into their local assigned public school?
Are such parents unqualified to choose a school for their own? After all, it is their federal constitutional right to do so.
No doubt some may be less ready than the typical middle-class, college-educated mother and father. But, could it be that a primary cause of any such gap in parental competence is due precisely to our having so long denied them a voice in how, what and where their children shall learn?
My wife, Marylyn, and I had our own share of disappointments with schools, public and private, that we had chosen for our five children; quite naturally we took it as a parents’ responsibility to seek a better way.
We could afford to switch, so we did. In the process, we learned a lot about responsible parenting. We acted and learned by experience.
Are less fortunate parents incapable of the same experience and growth? That was the political decision made long ago in this country.
In the early 19th century, it gradually became apparent to our then Yankee elite that the immigrants “crowding our shores” tended to be unwealthy, unschooled and ideologically alien to “us.” They were different to an extent threatening to the model civic mind then favored by a (mostly) New England elite.
With the genius and eminence of Horace Mann and others, this fear of the un-American immigrant was to spread west and south and the “public” school was born – in a loosely Protestant form – to control this intellectual and spiritual threat.
Mann hoped it would capture and enlighten the succeeding generations of those families who could neither educate at home nor afford to go private.
In spite of the emergence of Jewish and Catholic schools, Mann’s intended mind-set came to dominate the learning of the lower-income, inner-city family until its gradual 20th century overthrow by the new public school emphasis on secularism that dominated our multiplying schools of education; and SCOTUS, in the 1950s, was to exclude religious instruction altogether.
Of course, all that long sway of class-driven school politics always left our better-off families the choice of private school. Why, then, did relatively few of them exercise that option?
In fact, they did.
The tax-supported schools near which they chose to live were never at risk of admitting Jim and Alice’s kids. They were “public” only because Horace Mann and Company had the prudence to choose that label in the 1840s.
It gave their conscription of the poor family the appearance of being democratic, though it was, and remains, anything but.
A family’s access to the public schools of Palo Alto or Beverly Hills is determined by the wealth that makes residence in the district possible. And, as the income class of the individual parents gradually declines below that of the lucky few, their neighbors and their child’s schoolmates will come to match the level of the local residential market.
Thus does “public” school account for much of our segregation by wealthy families. In this inner-city, it reaches the nadir, accounting for the segregation of a substantial percentage of those who can’t afford to leave the neighborhood.
Bad enough. But it also accounts for much of the seeming low quality of these schools whose customers are most unlikely to manage an escape to another attendance area or to win a scholarship to some private school.
Yes, there still are “charters.” For some, their market of hopeful families is substantial; however, the supply is shrinking even in the face of demand. The president (for whom I voted!) with the direction of the teacher unions and their supine state legislators wave their “no-no” for all forms of choice.
Viewing recent political shifts, will Democrats ever begin to recognize that it is their (my) party – not its political enemies – that maintains dominion over the lower-income family, deepening its isolation from both civic participation and personal responsibility over its own precious young kin?
