I’m a longtime zealot for school choice. I think students, families, schools, and communities benefit when we have a variety of education options and parents get to match their kids to learning environments.
But that doesn’t mean the longstanding America system of residentially assigned public schools has nothing going for it. In fact, I think choice advocates have hurt their own cause by failing to appreciate the virtues of neighborhood schools. Always, but especially in this era of alienation and polarization, we need to take advantage of the institutions that connect us to others—and traditional public schools are one of those institutions.
There are two types of “community,” and both are valuable.
School choice prioritizes the voluntary understanding of community. This has particular resonance in America because of our enormous diversity and our unusual capacity for forming groups without government direction. School choice is built on the conviction that families can have very different preferences and that those differences deserve respect. This is made possible by the fact that lots of community-based groups and educators want to create and run schools that reflect their own visions of the good life. If policy supports an expansive, diverse educational landscape, we enable more families to find the right fit, and we give power to kids, parents, educators, and local nonprofits.
The types of communities that emerge are the result of voluntary choices—people choose to start schools, people choose to teach in these schools, people choose to enroll their kids in these schools. This elevates the “pluribus” part of e pluribus unum—out of many, one. School choice recognizes that we are many.
Neighborhood public schools are built on a geographic understanding of community. People live in a place and are part of that society because of proximity. They shop at the same stores, eat at the same restaurants, walk in the same parks. And their kids go to the same schools. Because of this familiarity, they build bonds, sympathies, networks of mutual support, and shared experiences that are good for collective life.
Because geographic areas can be diverse in terms of background, income, and more, neighborhood schools help bridge our differences. We meet, work with, and learn with others. These schools are part of a democratically controlled system, meaning the geographic community—parents and nonparents alike—shares responsibility for its schools. The community builds solidarity through collective power and collective duty.
Neighborhood schools can pass along to the next generation a geography’s customs and sensibilities. These schools can be entwined—after years of collaboration—with the local library, local charities, local health clinics. They can have longstanding relationships with close-to-home employers and colleges. They are the place where people vote and watch basketball games. They are an actual, physical representation of an area’s investment in the future.
Of course, school boundaries can appear arbitrary. Sometimes they cut down the middle of a street or split a town in two. But that’s because central-office administrators need to think about bus routes and classroom capacity. Yes, the lines a superintendent’s team draws can serve the purposes of the bureaucracy better than the community’s families.
And yes, school boundaries have sometimes been drawn to divide people by race and class. That’s awful. And yes, the very nature of school boundaries and the residence-based assignments they support can force some families into schools that are ineffective or unsafe. That is unjust.
All of these things should be addressed by policymakers and administrators. They can undermine the health of an education system and the satisfaction of families.
But those things don’t erase the value of neighborhood schools. The virtues of geographic-based communities should not be ignored, even if we decide, in particular circumstances, the school-choice side of the scale is weightier.
Editor’s note: This first appeared as a comment in Mike Petrilli’s Substack, SCHOOLED.
