My doom-scroll through “war-breaks-out-in-Europe” news was happily interrupted this weekend by the arrival of Jack Coons new book, “School Choice and the Human Good.”
In the foreword to Coons’ collection of essays orignally published on redefinED/reminaginED,Ron Matus, director of policy and public affairs for Step Up For Students, notes:
Today, Jack Coons, 92, stands as the most thoughtful and prolific school choice advocate in American history. Over the past half century, he has articulated a rationale for choice that is grounded in human dignity and parental authority.
Allowing the state to consign low-income families to its whims through assigned schools, he argues, drives a wedge through that most sacred space between parent and child. “The family,” he writes in one of the posts in this compilation, “needs the chance to regain the muscle that atrophied when the state plucked its authority.”
Jack and his colleague Stephen Sugarman, as faculty at the UC Berkley School of Law, won the Serrano vs. Priest decisions in the California Supreme Court in 1971 and 1977, which created national momentum for states to equalize funding between poor and wealthy school districts. If Jack had turned his attention from education at that point, he could have justifiably exited the field as a champion of education equity.
He was, however, just getting started.
A year after winning the second Serrano case, Coons and Sugarman published “Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control.” Coons and Sugarman envisioned parents, including low-income parents, having the power to create “personally tailored education” for their children, using “divisible educational experiences.”
If this sounds like education savings accounts, it is only because it is exactly like education savings accounts, except it was 33 years before the first education savings account program.
“School Choice and the Human Good” is a feast of moral reasoning. Consider picking up a copy.
