Why Educational Choice

The idea of parental choice in education is on a roll both nationally and in Vermont, and with good reason.

To understand why the demand for choice in education is rising so rapidly around the country, it is first necessary to understand the dramatic changes that have taken place in public education.

Fifty years ago the community public school was a well accepted ideal. Schooling was under the control of local school boards elected on Town Meeting Day. Teachers, though often scandalously underpaid, were treated as respected professionals in their classrooms and in the community. Communities were proud of their schools. The public school was a tangible demonstration of the community's commitment to educating its youths so that they might rise above the achievements of their parents, just as the parents had risen above the achievements of their parents.

There were few mandates from Montpelier and none from Washington. The role of the superintendent was not to transmit instructions from Montpelier and bargain with its bureaucrats, but to keep track of the money and assist in the professional development of the teachers.

In those days public education in Vermont could scarcely be called an educational system. It was a collection of local efforts with no standardized purpose, procedures, or direction. From this diversity the system builders vowed to create a true educational system. They succeeded.

Beginning in the fateful Sixties, a growing wave of centralization swept over the state. The state board and a series of education commissioners embarked on setting goals for all Vermont's children, enforcing public school approval standards, and creating a "Green Mountain Challenge". They made small schools close, forced the creation of regional education factories, made superintendents into commissars, and inflicted burdensome and usually nonproductive mandates on local schools and taxpayers.

At the same time the teachers' union became a major force in education. Gone was the teacher as underpaid, overworked but highly respected professional. In her place came the union teacher, militantly led by the leftist leadership of the Vermont-National Education Association. Unlike the "old" VEA, Vermont-NEA showed little interest in educational improvement. As a labor union, its goal is to get its members more money for less work, and to expand school employment so more people can be forced into paying dues to the union.

Certainly many Vermont teachers are professional educators who do not share this perspective, but the ones who will always rise to positions of union leadership are those most inspired by the dream of ever-larger government, a centrally controlled system of education, promoting liberal causes in the classroom, avoiding clear and potentially damaging accountability for results, and extracting more pay and benefits from taxpayers.

The rise of the centrally-controlled, union-dominated state education system made a lot of parents very unhappy. Their remedy is to create real choices for parents who want to escape the government education monopoly. Among the leading arguments for educational choice are these:

• Parents, not "the system", should direct - and participate actively in - the educational program of their children. When parents have real choices to make, parents pay attention and get involved. When their only choice is to ship their kids off to the local government monopoly school, there is a lot less participation.

• Different kids have different needs and respond to different challenges. The one-size-fits-all educational program of the government school cannot possibly serve the best interests of all children. Kids deserve the chance to learn where and how they will learn the most and best.

• Government monopoly systems never work very well. They inevitably cater to the desires of those in the system, not the consumers of the system's products. In education, the system takes care of teachers, superintendents, and educrats. They have little need to pay attention to the consumers - parents and children. Unless the parents are very well-to-do or willing to make painful financial sacrifices, their kids are stuck with what the government says is good for them.

Introducing real competition, where consumers have the wherewithal to make choices among home, public, academic, alternative, religious, and special purpose schools, forces all of the competitors to tailor their products to attract consumers. Choice makes the consumer king, not the provider, and it will invigorate, not destroy, today's government monopoly schools grown stale.

Finally, when government empowers parents to choose, low and middle income kids get the choices and opportunities presently available only to the rich.

Thanks to the leadership of Mayor Jeff Wennberg of Rutland, diverse advocates of choice came together on November 9 to organize Vermonters for Educational Choice. The new organization's proposed goals include parental choice, public school reform, protection of religious and home schooling from state control, creation of charter schools, and encouragement of teacher professionalism. They want to change the present state-controlled educational monopoly system to a lively educational marketplace, where consumers have the right -- and the means - to make the best choices for their children. May their tribe increase.

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