DeTocqueville's Daughter

Choice and the Greater Good

By DeTocqueville's Daughter on May 5th, 2010

Chad Aldeman, writing at The Quick and the Ed, argues that school choice is not a good in itself. Specifically, he takes issue with what Charles Murray has to say in the NYT today in an op-ed entitled “Why Charter Schools Fail the Test.”

Murray’s wrong, but Aldeman is even more wrong.

Aldeman says that supporters of vouchers and charters– people like Murray– are trying to change the definition of success because schools of choice don’t always have test scores worth bragging about. But Aldeman misrepresents both the op-ed and the issue. Murray never says that vouchers are a failure; he says quite the opposite. Voucher programs and charter schools are successful, he says, but not necessarily in ways that are measured on standardized tests.

And Aldeman’s plain wrong when he says that parents choosing the schools they deem best for their own children are somehow putting their own interests above the “greater good.”

The capitalist in me says Milton Friedman had it right in 1966 when he argued that choice was a good in itself. Education is a public good, he said, because it’s necessary for a stable democracy. But he advocated vouchers and choice for everybody– not just for poor kids in failing schools– instead of government-provided education.

The Catholic in me insists on subsidiarity, the idea that government should help parents provide the education that they think is best for their own kids. This is not in opposition to the common good— it contributes to it.

And that’s where Murray is wrong. He puts parental choice in opposition to the greater good when instead it promotes it.

Murray cites the 1966 Coleman Report to support his case for the importance of the family when it comes to learning. A better use of Coleman– in support of Murray’s own argument that test scores are not the best measure of success — would have been Coleman’s findings on social capital. Parents want their kids in a school that has a sense of community, the social capital that exists when parents and teachers have a shared clear mission.