Episode 44: School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy

A book ‘review’

I’ve been so busy editing college admissions essays and dealing with election stuff that I’ve got book ‘reviews’ piling up. Let me set the table for this one:

I grew up in inner-city St. Louis, and all the kids in my neighborhood were assigned to Roosevelt High School. They were not given any choice about that. I mention that they were given no choice because here’s something you might want to know about Roosevelt:

“In 1984, 515 students entered Roosevelt; by 1988, only 21.6% had graduated, while 14.2% had transferred to another school or district, 4.7% had withdrawn from school, 38.8% had officially dropped out, and an additional 20.8% did not return but did not transfer to another school or district.”

I and my neighborhood posse entered high school in 1986 and 1987. The posse all went to Roosevelt, and not one of them graduated high school. I was lucky; my parents rented half our house to another family and carefully squirreled away that rent while I was in my public middle school. By the time I was ready to enter high school, the money they’d saved gave them the choice to send me to an excellent private school: St. Louis University High.

Which brings me to two points: number one, no parent in their right mind would ever choose to send their child to Roosevelt for high school. If they were offered a choice, they’d send their kids pretty much anyplace else. Over 50% of the kids back then dropped out, effectively deciding that Roosevelt High was so bad, being literally anyplace else was preferable to attending there. And point number two: everyone above a certain income level already has school choice. They exercise that choice by either moving to a neighborhood with good public schools, or, as my parents did, by choosing to send their kids to private schools. 

In the end, it is only the poor who are not allowed to have school choice. It is only the poor whose hopes and dreams of upward mobility for their kids must be sacrificed so that we don’t suffer a school-choice-induced “betrayal of democracy,” as our author refers to it. It is only poor, overwhelmingly minority kids who are fed year after year into generationally failing public schools. It’s never the children of white folks with cushy middle-class jobs, folks like our author, who gets to while away his days thinking about “how marginalized people seek to overcome exclusions to represent their needs, interests, and identities in the public sphere.” Hey-o, Robert: if it’s helpful, I can probably spare you a considerable amount of research time by advising you that one thing “marginalized people” seek is a decent frickin’ school for their kids.

Ahem.

Believe it or not, when I sat down to write this piece, I had no intention of having it be as strident as it’s turning out to be. But I watched my friends get fed into Roosevelt, and I get a little wrapped around the axle thinking about how folks like Mr. Asen continually go to the mat to keep feeding other people’s kids into schools like Roosevelt. And by the way, when I said “generationally failing public schools,” let’s revisit Roosevelt high school. I gave you the picture around 1986; here’s what the picture looked like 25 years later, in 2011:

“Roosevelt has a significant dropout rate; for the 2010–2011 school year, more than 50 percent of students dropped out compared to the Missouri state dropout rate of 3.4 percent. … Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, Roosevelt has not met the requirements for adequate yearly progress in either communication arts or mathematics. In addition, Roosevelt graduates average lower first and second semester grades during their first year in college than the average Missouri graduate, and as of 2010, more than 80 percent of Roosevelt graduates enrolled in a public university in Missouri required remedial coursework in either English or mathematics.”

25 years later, the dropout rate was still over 50%. This is a school that is “75% black, 17% white, 6% Asian, and 2% Hispanic.” That’s an entire generation of low-income, mostly Black kids fed year after year into a failing school. 

Anyway, let’s talk about the book.

I chose to read this book because I believe that if you want to pressure-test your own thinking, you have to read the arguments against your thinking. There’s little value in reading stuff that you agree with, however easier and more pleasant that may be. This book, as you can surely tell from the title, is a pretty militant case against any kind of school choice, and my own point of view is that some form of school choice is an essential component of any strategy to produce a meaningful improvement in the performance of our school system.

Before I get into the content, let’s first do the grades:

Readability: B-

Ideas: C+

Conciseness: B-

Overall grade: B-

Our author comes from the same general philosophical bent as the author of “The Gatekeepers,” but the quality of his writing is considerably higher. Nevertheless, progressivism has its own language, and from a readability perspective.. Well, I’ll just leave it to you to decide what you think reading 175 pages of sentences such as these is like:

Pg10: “These discourses articulate a convergence of economic, political, and social developments that have propagated interrelated formations of ideology, policy, and subjectivity.”

Or

Pg11: “This contradiction between a normative vision and common practices of advocacy intimates how market publics form through people’s use of varied activities and assets- plans and goals for public engagement, symbolic and material resources to support public engagement, and potential collaborators and antagonists to engage publicly.”

From a readability perspective, wading through a book written in the progressive language is, in my experience, the literary equivalent of wearing a cilice.

Structurally, the book has 5 basic chunks to it. I will summarize them for you as follows:

1. John Dewey is awesome!

2. Milton Friedman sucks.

3. Betsy DeVos sucks.

4. Free markets suck.

5. Progressivespeak about “community”.

Part 1: John Dewey is awesome!

John Dewey is the patron saint of progressive education, and there are a lot of pages singing his praises. But there are some things I think conservatives should agree with him on, for instance (as summarized by our author on pg 18):

“By themselves, institutions cannot sustain democracy; neither can laws, nor founding texts, nor enumerated rights. The perpetuation of democracy requires regular human engagement.”

Amen to that. How many times have you seen politicians change institutions or laws to get what they want? Only the voters can address that kind of behavior, and that requires participation, even if you’re not in love with your options. When people get frustrated with politics, it’s their instinct to withdraw from it, but that’s the exact opposite action that is required to improve the situation.

But the best bit from the Dewey section comes on page 39:

“And Dewey insisted that democracy requires faith- a historically grounded, practically oriented faith. Faith underscores that democracy does not operate according to a formula; it requires people’s active engagement.”

Yes! That is why my very first campaign slogan was “Faith in people, faith in America.” That’s why I spent 2020-2024 telling people on my side of the aisle that they should continue to have faith in our American system of government, and it’s why I will evidently spend 2024-2028 telling my many liberal friends the exact same thing.

Surprisingly, given that the focus of this book is theoretically education, the many pages about John Dewey and democracy include only a couple pages about John Dewey’s views of education. The one point from that tiny section that I wholeheartedly agree with is the distinction Dewey draws between “learning” and “training”. Learning implies at least some level of understanding. Training is a set of behaviors, and if you’re not careful, those behaviors can be completely divorced from any understanding of why the behaviors are prescribed. 

Unfortunately, the way math is taught in this country often falls more under the umbrella of training than learning. I have always referred to it as “stimulus-response” teaching. Students learn that given a certain stimulus, there is a certain response they are supposed to make, but they don’t really understand why they’re making that response. But they dutifully learn the response behaviors, and they get their A’s in their math classes. Then they go to take a standardized test, which tests the same concepts as their math classes, but where the stimulus can be quite different from any stimulus they’ve seen in class, and the kids are suddenly completely lost at sea. Then I get calls from parents saying “My kid has always gotten A’s in math, and I don’t understand why their test scores are so low.”

Solving that problem is more or less how I’ve kept food on my table for the last 21 years. And there’s no indication that I’m likely to starve anytime soon.

Part 2: Milton Friedman sucks.

Let me start by saying that I think the world is more complex and nuanced than Milton Friedman seems to have conceptualized it. That said, I think Milton Friedman is more complex and nuanced than our author seems to have conceptualized him. Our author begins part 2 by damning economists as a class:

“Economists, explains James Aune, adopt as their default rhetoric a realist style that ‘works by radically separating power and textuality, constructing the political realm as a state of nature, and by depicting its opponents as prisoners of verbal illusions.’”

Translation: economists suck.

Having categorically dismissed economists, our author then proceeds to go after Milton and Rose Friedman specifically (Rose was also a famous free-market economist), and he spends a considerable number of pages passive-aggressively sneering at the notion of freedom as a function of choice, which is the core of how the Friedmans defined it. Take this bit, from page 72:

“.. policies promoting parental choice rest ‘on the proposition that no authority or majority has sufficient knowledge to coordinate educational provision on a society-wide basis.’ This theory denies the wisdom that rhetorical scholars have associated with group deliberation and collective judgment.”

Here’s the thing: if you are going to exalt collective judgment, I would like to point out that when 50+% of a high school population elects to drop out, that student population is, in effect, collectively judging that the school is failing. Then you, dear author, are part of a group that is collectively judging that the kids in that neighborhood should have to go to that school anyway. What makes your collective judgment better than the collective judgment of the kids who are forced to attend a failing school? 

Anyway, that’s part 2: an extended complaint about individual choice as a definition of freedom, with the implication that collective choice is somehow more free/morally superior.

Part 3: Betsy DeVos sucks

Let me begin by saying that if you’re someone who opposes any form of school choice on principle, then Betsy DeVos was like a gift from God. There are many forms of school choice, and I think vouchers nowhere near the most compelling. But vouchers are what she pushed hard, and her ability to be an effective and approachable public-facing advocate for school choice in any capacity was… well, let’s just call it “severely limited”. As our author points out on pgs 84-85, “She appeared flustered by tough questions, or, conversely, too determined to stick mechanically to her talking points.”

After ragging on Betsy DeVos for many pages, we finally get to one of the key moments in the book: on page 88, our author returns to John Dewey: “Democratic means and the attainment of democratic ends are one and inseparable.” Our author synthesizes this statement as follows:

“So, too, with a democratic education. As with democracy, Dewey emphasized processes, not outcomes. … Democratic education foregrounds process; learning is the means and the end.”

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the fundamental weakness in the progressive view of education: processes are what’s important, not outcomes. In fact, in this view, process IS the outcome. And that, in my opinion, is part of why the outcomes are so bad: if you only focus on process, and you think outcomes aren’t that important, it should not surprise anyone when the outcomes turn out to be lackluster. I’m not saying process doesn’t matter, but outcomes should have equal importance. Hostility to anything that measures outcomes is a core aspect of the progressive view of education, at least in my experience.

Part 4: Free markets suck

In this section, our author takes some time to discuss statewide voucher programs, noting that they exist in Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana, but that in all cases, these programs were driven by the governor in partnership with the legislature. He then goes on to note with some satisfaction that “However, at the ballot box, voucher referenda have failed consistently. Since 2000, voters have rejected vouchers in such politically diverse states as Arizona, California, Michigan, and Utah by wide margins.”

Again, with the caveat that I don’t actually think vouchers are actually the best way to go about school choice, I’d like to note that according to the most recent NAEP scores (the NAEP scores are test scores that are considered “the nation’s report card”), Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana are all above the national average in 4th grade math, while California, where the progressive approach to education reigns supreme, is well below the national average. In 4th grade reading, again Florida, Ohio, and Indiana are again above average, while California and Louisiana are below. For all the vituperation about vouchers, an examination of the actual outcomes suggests that the states using vouchers are doing just as well, if not better than, the states that aren’t. 

“Markets totally suck” is the vibe underlying the entire discussion in this section, but our author doesn’t actually come out and say that directly until his conclusion. On page 173 he notes:

“By critically engaging democracy, we may also invoke it as a normative framework and check against the unequal, dehumanizing, and destructive operations of markets”.

Wow, okay then. Knowing that this is how the author views markets helps process the analysis he does in the rest of the book.

Part 5: progressivespeak about community

As I mentioned before, progressive writing has its own language. In a discussion on page 157 about people who advocate for public education (sans any school choice), our author says:

“... voice connotes a relational dynamic among interlocutors through which participants in a discussion actively listen to one another. Elsewhere, I refer to this dynamic as “heedfulness,” which entails a mutual practice of signaling to dialogue partners that present interactions will inform relevant future activities.”

Eyeroll.

The free market, which our author seems to have a very dim view of, has created a society so fabulously wealthy that it can support a 6-figure job for someone like our author to sit around thinking up Big Important Thoughts, the culmination of which is the redefinition, in the most tedious possible way, of “taking someone seriously” as “heedfulness”. 

God bless this country.

But Robert isn’t done delivering us definitions that will literally knock you down with the full, crushing force of their insight. Just two pages later, Robert tells us that:

“Dewey championed community, but he did not explicate this concept like other key terms, such as public and education. I have developed a fluid and dynamic conception of community as a network of relationships.”

Ladies and gentlemen, slow clap for Robert Asen, who, after just 159 pages of text, has concluded that a “community” is a “network of relationships”. This reminds me of that scene in Lord of the Rings where Merry and Pippin are waiting all night for the Ents to decide if they will go to war against Saruman, and they wait all night while the Ents deliberate, and after an entire night of discussion, the main Ent comes to them and says, “After much discussion, we have finally agreed… … that you are not orcs.”

And that, folks, is the book. The most surprising thing about it is that, for a book whose subtitle is “How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities”, it’s pretty thin on any evidence that market-based education reform actually is failing our communities, at least any more than the traditional system is. The book is so thin on any actual insight that I would describe it as 175 pages of virtue-signaling. But hey- we tried, right?

Anyway, I’m 3 book reviews behind, and the next few books were a lot better. Stay tuned!