School choice a civil right?

A Wall Street Journal item (I’m not sure whether it’s an OpEd or a short feature) calls “education reform” “the civil rights issue of this century.”

Since the item may require subscription, I’ll excerpt enough to discuss.

The author describes parents descending on Sacramento to lobby the California legislature for school choice. It features activists from Compton, California, a notoriously bad school system, who beat the odds and went to prestigious colleges. The first snippet I noted was this:

Parents should have more say in the fate of their neighborhood schools … because they are the one group in the education debate without a conflict of interest—their interests are entirely aligned with their children’s.

I think supporters of the public education status quo would say that many of these parents have a religious agenda to “impose on” their children, thus implying that the public schools serve an important role in preventing such parental impositions. And that may strike them as a very persuasive come-back.

But I utterly reject it. I don’t much care for the formulation that parents interests are entirely aligned with their children’s, but that’s because I think it is a clumsy way of saying that parents have a natural, God-given right to direct the education of their children. That I do believe, and have believed for decades.

I don’t think educational neutrality is possible. All education is value-laden and in that sense “religious,” including public schools. That public schools might prevent parental imposition is but another way of saying that they’ll make their own imposition — in my childhood, a squishy mainstream Protestantism accompanied by an instrumental view of education’s value (“you must learn in order to make money later”).

I think public schools must exist as a safety net for parents who patently neglect education, but only in the same “this makes me queasy” sense that I think courts must be able to terminate parental rights in extreme cases.

Then there’s this:

The support of many people of faith in Compton reflects a larger awakening among believers nationwide who see the disparity in educational options as one that can no longer be overlooked in light of the biblical mandate to fight for fairness and justice for all of God’s children. Tony Campolo, a leading evangelical author, has said that, “If Saint Francis were alive today, he would say each child in the public school system is sacramental. . . . To neglect them is to neglect Jesus Himself.”

Well, maybe. But I’ve heard “fairness and justice” cited on so many causes, and by guys like Tony Campolo (toward whom I’m perhaps unjustifably cool), that I’m pretty jaded.

It seems to me that Campolo’s justification is just another version of “let’s do it for the children,” which has become a high-valence political mantra that serves as a rationalization with no substantive content. Again, I prefer the more concrete formulation that nature has given this child to this man and woman, who therefore have a prior right to determine the child’s education. (I’m ignoring adoption and “new reproductive technologies” for the moment.)

Vouchers and other educational reforms are fraught with dangers, and it seems to me that, having neglected that sort of reform in gradualist experiments for so long, we may now be catapulting into it rather thoughtlessly, with a haste that makes congenital conservatives queasy. It increases my queasiness that we may be doing the generally right thing for reasons that are not quite right. That’s why I took time to blog on what I think are defective formulations of the salient principles.