School choice is no silver bullet — content and character matter, too
Originally published at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com on December 26, 2020.
The other day, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote a column titled “ School Choice: Better Than Prozac.” While they are correct in this assessment, what they and those on the political Right really need to talk about is how content and character are more important than school choice, for mental health and for students overall.
I am a public school teacher who loves and supports school choice. I have benefited personally from attending my urban Catholic high school. Charter schools and voucher programs have been incredible tools for upward mobility in providing educational opportunities for low-income students.
But if the Right wants to keep winning and improving education in the future, it must need to shift its focus from school choice exclusively to other areas — primarily content and character.
Many education reformers on the Right have raised these concerns in prioritizing school choice. Robert Pondiscio has acknowledged how almost 90% of students in the United States attend schools other than private or charter schools and that conservatives should pay attention to what is being taught in them. Frederick Hess and Jay P. Greene have researched the education reform movement’s “deep blue” ties, which largely produce the type of charter and private schools whose ideologies conservatives would oppose. In How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, a group of prominent conservatives came to this similar reasoning with a concluding essay from former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, who admits to the limitations of school choice and emphasizes the importance of content and character. Yet, many conservatives erroneously see school choice as the silver bullet for conservative education woes.
A major problem with school choice is that the majority of the education ecosystem leans to a political party that has almost completely disavowed school choice. The vociferous support for school choice from Secretary of Education Betsy Devos and President Trump, progressive educators archnemeses, has certainly not helped in this regard. Sooner or later, if conservatives wish to make any real progress on education in general, part of this will involve working in cooperation with these Democrats, who will never bend on their fierce opposition to school choice.
This doesn’t mean that Republicans should stop rightfully fighting for school choice, especially in states like Ohio and Florida, where they have seen wins. But it does mean that they need to redirect some of their energy toward educational reforms on which they can find common ground with Democrats.
The first priority should be the content taught in our school’s curricula. No, I’m not talking about a controversial “ 1776 commission” meant to teach “patriotic education” led by Trump and Charlie Kirk. Rather, I’m talking about the importance of schools developing high-quality, content-rich curricula that will provide students with strong background knowledge, which has proven to be one of the most effective ways of improving educational outcomes and decreasing achievement gaps. Focusing on content and curriculum can be a real winner for conservatives, whether it is in red state Louisiana or my own school district in heavy blue Baltimore, both of whose knowledge-based curricula have produced improved results for students.
The second priority should be on character education. Many of our societal problems and conflicts could be solved by reexamining not only how we teach our children math and reading but also how we teach them to be good people and responsible citizens. This would involve explicitly teaching students character traits as the Positivity Project does or by emphasizing school cultures that are character- and values-driven, as Catholic schools have had success doing for years. This is a reform effort that both the Right and Left (who tend to call it social-emotional learning or holistic learning) can agree upon and should prioritize in schools.
Our students need a conservative voice in the content and character discussion in all schools. If the Right continues to neglect this, then the flawed 1619 Project or something like it will come to be the mandated curriculum in schools nationwide, and character education will comprise teaching children how to be woke and anti-racist. School choice won’t alone fix this, but a renewed conservative education effort focused on content and character will.
Originally published at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com on December 26, 2020.
