School Choice and Human Good: Why All Parents Must Be Empowered to Choose

By John E. Coons

John Coons is a progressive Berkeley law professor emeritus who in 1978 published a seminal book on the need for private school choice in the United States for children of lesser means. His motivation was and is straightforward. Families of greater means have always chosen their children’s schools, whether by moving to preferred neighborhoods or paying private tuitions. Coons says we can’t with good conscience continue to rob poor children of similar opportunities, children who often have the greatest educational needs. This book represents the ongoing observations of Coons, now 92 years of age, as he has written in brief essays published on an education blog in Florida – a state with an extraordinary degree of K-12 learning options. In a political arena that has been polarized on the issue of educational choice, Coons is a reminder that Democratic progressives were among the earliest to see value in expanding the educational universe of disadvantaged schoolchildren.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982274535

John E. Coons

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-7452-8 (sc)

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Balboa Press rev. date:    10/20/2021

CONTENTS

This book is a collection of essays that were published over the past decade on a national education blog, reimaginED (www.reimaginEDonline.org). The blog is operated by a Florida-based nonprofit called Step Up For Students, which currently administers scholarship programs for more than 170,000 schoolchildren with financial or special needs.

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

Takes a village? No, when it comes to schooling, it takes parents

Zelman was a step forward; now empower all parents to choose

Time for broader debate on school choice

The too-modest Milton

Milton and I and the evolution of school choice

Public schools and the bingo curriculum

Regulating school vouchers

Helping parents decide which school is best

Determining a school voucher’s worth

The silence of the Shepherd

Admissions rules for voucher schools

Teaching values in schools of choice – and maybe, regulating them

A modest musing about parental school choice

Father Andrew Greeley, choiceniks’ ally

School choice restores parental responsibility

Is school choice a means or an end?

Beyond the market argument for school choice

MLK and God’s schools

Faith, school choice & moral foundations

School choice will revive parental responsibility

Of civics and ‘sects’: debunking another school choice myth

The cost of choice

Pre-K must come with school choice

Vagaries of Vergara

Equality, ‘created equal’ and the case for school choice

Nothing more impersonal than an education system without school choice

A little context for Al Shanker’s ‘original charter school vision’

Soldiers and school choice

School choice in a nutshell

The uncritical Core

Our school deportation problem

A tale of two Turkeys

On choosing and not choosing

School choice and sheer bad luck

The state of the unions of the state

Home, sweet school

On teaching human equality

The complex simplicity of choice

Left of what?

Testing Choice

The compulsory government union

The ode to ‘government schools’

Testing, testing

Taking the initiative on school choice in California

The Union of the State

Does parental authority ‘work’?

School choice bookshelf: Intellectual help is on the way

Child, Seek the Good!

A school choice classic, revisited

‘Public education’ is anything but public

Consider downside of denying choice

Separated and secular

On school choice and the teaching of equality

A charter with God?

More than money

Teachers unions: Must they be preserved?

Of rights and powers: state and parent

A voice – and a song – for choice

Of school choice and human dignity

The true unbeliever

‘Public’ schools?

Time for faith-based charter schools

The needy need charters

A digression on the test obsession

A third-grade conversation

The conscripted child as agent

Images of ‘equality’

Good luck, Ms. Jones

A no-loser solution?

‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’

The child’s right to the parent’s choice

The state of the (teachers) union

Trusting John Dewey?

The uncommon common school

Give them our tired and our poor

Choose your weapon prudently

Let them eat cake

Devos pathos

Whose truth shall set us free?

In Espinoza’s wake, is the Blaine bane at risk?

Transcendence in P.S. 42?

Of clustering, cloistering and class during the pandemic

Why bully the low-income parent?

Is this the way the money goes?

A win-win for Darwin

The silence of my clan

Comes the moment to decide

Truth, freedom, choice

Against choice for the poor

The pod: problem or opportunity?

Test scores plus responsibility

Democracy in action

Would Milton mind?

This is liberal ‘equality’?

E pluribus bonum

Equality, equity and reality

Choice and the civic soul

From where will common sense emerge?

In a word

A campus of choices

The powers that be

Playing the prophet for choice

Give us your poor

A letter to President Biden

FOREWORD

There’s nobody like Jack Coons

My favorite story about the school choice movement is a wild what if involving Berkeley law professor John E. Jack Coons. What if the first state to implement a statewide private school choice program in the modern era had been big, blue California in the 1970s rather than trending-red Florida in the 1990s? What if the Left Coast had been the first to plant the flag for universal school choice? It almost happened.

In 1978, Jack Coons and fellow Berkeley law professor Steve Sugarman laid out a case for school choice in their book Education by Choice. Their pitch wasn’t markets and competition. It did not echo the conservative economist Milton Friedman. Assigning students to schools by zip code, they argued, was de-humanizing and devastating to low-income parents and children. Their call for universal choice included private school vouchers; independent public schools that we now call charter schools; and nascent visions of education savings accounts – those vehicles for customization, now sparking to life on the education frontier, that give parents the power to create educational programs a la carte.

Coons and Sugarman weren’t thinking instant revolution. But then, serendipity: U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, a popular Democrat from San Francisco and a former public-school teacher, was inspired by Education by Choice. He and Coons decided they’d try to get this new definition of public education on the statewide ballot. Ryan agreed to be the face of the California Initiative for Family Choice. Polling showed strong support. But then, as fate would have it, Ryans had to make a quick trip to South America. In this volume, Coons, a deft writer as well as legal scholar, tells the rest of the story.

There is nobody like Jack Coons. Not in the choice movement now, or ever.

It says a lot about his remarkable life that the ballot adventure is but one of 100 amazing footnotes. In the 1960s, Coons debated Friedman on radio shows and once advised Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the legal liabilities of boycotts. In the 1970s, he litigated a series of cases in California that led to more equalized funding between poor and affluent school districts and reverberated nationwide.

Today, Jack Coons, 92, stands as the most thoughtful and prolific school choice advocate in American history. Over the past half century, he has articulated a rationale for choice that is grounded in human dignity and parental authority. Allowing the state to consign low-income families to its whims through assigned schools, he argues, drives a wedge through that most sacred space between parent and child. The family, he writes in one of the posts in this compilation, needs the chance to regain the muscle that atrophied when the state plucked its authority.

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is parent power. No message, I think, can better transcend the tribal divides that still stifle the movement’s full flowering.

Of course, the messenger matters, too. Coons, a lifelong Democrat, considers himself a centrist. But he is also the brightest star in a constellation of choice advocates that some have dubbed The Voucher Left. This wing of the movement can trace its ancestry to the epic (and ongoing) Black struggles for education opportunity; to the libertarian-left strains in the alt-schools movements; to an impressive list of liberal academics who, in the 1960s and ‘70s, saw vouchers as tools for social justice. It is troubling that today’s narratives about choice so often overlook these roots. But they’re there, they’re compelling, and history, when it catches up, will venerate them.

I was unaware of Coons’ work until my own evolving views on education spurred me to leave a quarter-century in journalism and join the choice movement. I knew from years of reporting on charter schools and vouchers that the choice coalition was incredibly diverse. I knew it belied the widespread perception that choice was a conservative crusade. But until awakened by Jack’s work, I did not realize how much history wasn’t being told. The choice movement is that much richer when it includes the likes of Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez, and the Mississippi Freedom schools, and Jack Coons. Along with the indomitable Howard Fuller, I can think of no one better than Coons to persuade holdouts on the left to pause, listen, and – I still have hope for such a thing – reconsider.

Here would be a good place to start. For the past decade, Jack Coons has been a soul force at redefinED, an education blog originally co-sponsored by a Florida-based nonprofit scholarship provider, Step Up For Students, and the Berkeley-based American Center for School Choice, which Coons co-founded. Coons has written more than 100 posts for redefinED – which Step Up For Students recently rechristened as reimaginED – with nearly all of them assembled in this volume. Jack could have had his work published anywhere. But he chose us. We are humbled and grateful.

On a personal note, being Jack’s editor for a few years had its perks. Every couple of weeks, I’d get mail from California, or a fax. Inside: A gem – an essay in cursive, on legal-sized notebook paper, streamed from brain to pad in a single sitting. Every gift came with a warm note. Keep on truckin’! some would say. Signed, Geezer.

Jack is as kind and modest as his writings suggest. In 2015, I got to spend a couple days with him at his home in Berkeley, recording his recollections of the ballot initiative. Even better than the stories was the grilled cheese he insisted on making for me on thick-sliced sourdough.

There’s nobody like Jack Coons. Enjoy him.

– Ron Matus, Director of Policy and Public Affairs, Step Up For Students

INTRODUCTION

TheCoonsfamilyEDITED.jpg

(The Coons family)

Once upon a time, my late beloved, wife, Marylyn, and I decided to count the semesters that our five kids had spent in public and private schools beginning in Illinois in 1963 and continuing from 1968 in Berkeley, Calif.

Why would such a proportion have mattered to us? I suspect that Marylyn’s years as a public schoolteacher plus her strong sense of parental and civic responsibility had, for that moment, made yesterday’s decisions seem a matter for self-examination. I’m not clear that our answer (precisely, a 50-50 split between public and private schools) was directly relevant to the ongoing quarrels over school choice, but it can serve as a specimen of the control so cherished by parents like ourselves of middle or higher incomes, over where their child shall spend his or her 2,340 days experiencing the formal schooling required of all kids.

Parents like ourselves have not merely the abstract legal authority to choose the school but the means to do so, either by moving to the neighborhood of our preferred public school or paying private school tuition, as we did for one-half of our children’s school years. But the children of the poor also have to be schooled; in truth, their need is often greater. And their parents’ authority to choose could be realized, just as our own, without increasing the total cost to the taxpayer – if that be an object of reform. The dignity of the poor could be realized as was ours; their domestic roles could be validated and celebrated.

The loser, obviously, would be the officers of the teacher unions for whose welfare the poor have been kept in bondage. I can’t shake the memory of my friend Albert Shanker, president of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, and his oft-repeated slogan: I’ll represent children when they start paying union dues.

Of course, each child does exactly that when forced by family poverty into a school the parent loathes.

ONE

Getting Acquainted

October 12, 2011

Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good – for the child, the parent, the family, and society.

We begin with the delicate subject of authority – that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.

Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.

The debate on authority dates from Plato’s vision in The Republic of an ideal state that would completely disempower parents for a utopian common good and continues up to modern times. But in the U.S., the question of who has authority over the child has been universally resolved in all 50 states in favor of parents. In every state the custodial parent, whether natural or adoptive, holds a very wide-ranging legal authority over his, her, or their own child. This sovereignty includes every experience of the child that the parent can physically and intellectually control short of neglect and abuse. It encompasses diet, hours, church, pets, exercise, and television as well as the power to decide who else shall have access to the child. This power to control access and environment includes, again — within broadest limits — the satisfaction of the parents’ obligation to school the child and the child’s own right to be schooled.

This authority has been tested in a steady line of Supreme Court cases since 1925. The parent who is legally fit to govern – 99 percent of our parents – in truth has the right to govern. And the point of the law is not that parents make particularly good decisions for the children; individual mothers and fathers may or may not act in what you or I consider the best interest of the child or society. They are not necessarily good deciders; they are merely the best our culture, law, and history have discovered. They also have accountability in ways that are impossible to the world of American professionals, of doctors, lawyers, educators, and so forth. These people see clients for a time, do their best, wish them well, and head on home. The custodial parent is stuck – for better or worse and maybe for life – with what emerges out of whatever effort is made.

This wide acceptance throughout American society and its legal system of deference to and accountability for parental authority forms the foundation for broadening the support for choice in education. Our current system is an aberration of the way the rest of American life functions.

Since my childhood, the demography and the very meaning of schooling have become, more and more, a tale of two cities. People like me now school our boys and girls in the one city; people less lucky do so in the other. The long tempest about race has no doubt played its part in this epic drift, but whether the law and politics of race was a necessary condition of what we have today no one can really say. My own guess is that, given the balkanized organization of government schools, our differences in economic class would have been sufficient to separate us by our wealth. Few of the actors in this play that was begun in mid-19th century foresaw or intended this outcome, nor did the people who skipped to suburbia; they merely acted in prudent response to what seemed social and economic opportunity, or they lived with the lack of it. Parents who could do so took their kids to what seemed a better place. They looked at the schools and paid the necessary tuition that was represented in the price of the housing in this school district or attendance area.

To this day we call these schools public, and, of course, in one sense they are; they exist, for the most part, on tax money. But I urge you to reflect on your own understanding of the term public. The word is, of course, ambiguous, but I can’t shake the feeling that its use in ordinary conversation implies a sort of place that is accessible to everyone. So it is that Central Park is public, or the mall is public. For the man in the street the sidewalks that he paid for welcome him during his good behavior. What else could we have meant but open access when we gave government schools this magic label, this democratic halo? And if a parent can only buy his or her way into a tax-supported school, what makes us so afraid to recognize that our retreats in Beverly Hills (or the Berkeley Hills) are in fact more private, more exclusive, than any inner-city church school? We talk public, but we act private – and, of course, I include myself.

We should ask seriously how it is that any person of goodwill could justify this crude disenfranchising of working parents and the poor. Could it be in limiting choice to those who can afford it that we have taken the course most likely to increase and cement class segregation? I should have thought that the egalitarians among us would long since have invoked the 14th Amendment. Nor can the defense of such a system be a simple resort to the Establishment Clause. In America, if the state prefers, parents can by law, and could in practice, be empowered in fact to make choices that include religious or any other authentic school. Those who can afford it do so, and no one objects. It is regarded as their business and indeed is generally admired. By the way, the outcomes seem no worse for the fact of parental choice.

Plainly, parental empowerment can’t exist unless the parent has the power to enforce his or her own rules or decisions. I want to extend the point in an obvious way. You can’t be a responsible person unless you have authority. The popular talk about parental responsibility needs to include this premise. Bill Cosby picked on parents who disengage from school. He’s right, but this stick of his has two ends. Passivity and despair are the response of powerless parents to the predicament we’ve arranged for them. It is the classic recipe for impotence and withdrawal by the adult and bewilderment by the child who learns that the role of parent carries little social or moral weight.

Whatever family may mean, if you value it, you’d better see to it that the not-so-rich American parent has real authority over who has access to the child’s mind for the prime hours of 13 years of his or her life.

Oddly enough, there is no research testing the effects of having and not having choice upon the self-perceptions of either the child or parent, or upon their perception of authority as an interrelation. The American Center would like to see this oversight in the empirical world corrected. Both James Coleman and Anthony Bryk told us of the communitarian impact of parental choice on the school, but empirically we have only the common belief and practice of the middle class from which to infer the actual effects on parents and children as they choose or get chosen for – as they exercise or experience authority. And we know even less about the minds of the other half as parent and child realize that strangers now define and control the main event in the daily life of the boy or girl.

The consequence of allowing strangers to make educational choices for children is damage to the family and the broader society. The American Center for School Choice wants to bring this school choice debate to the center of our political spectrum around what is broadly recognized as a centrist and established American value – parents have authority for their children.

April 16, 2012

Takes a village? No, when it comes to schooling, it takes parents

It takes a village to raise a child – or so they say, and perhaps it’s true. Humans are interdependent, and every particular village – whatever that word means – has influence, for good or ill.

But the phrase is murky and subject to many interpretations. It can be read as the quirky proposition that the village is what logicians call a sufficient condition of some outcome; alone, by itself, it determines the bundle of effects that will be the person called Andrew or Susie.

An equally strange interpretation converts the term into a moral proposition: The thing called village actually ought to raise the child, displacing all competing influence; whatever its peculiar norms and culture the village itself is the official moral standard for child-raising. If there is strong variety among villages, this proposition would be hard to swallow. At some point one begins to grasp that – in minds that love the metaphor – the word village has come to imply more than the old neighborhood.

As we watch these enthusiasts we gradually understand that this transcendence of the village is a two-fold concept: First, the all-good village has morphed into an idealized version of the nation itself; but, second, the corporate mind of this perfected nation mirrors the preferences of whichever speaker is using the expression. Village means what he wants it to mean.

I remain thoroughly puzzled by this modern mystique so often introduced to justify our coercive assignment of children from have-not families to schools of the state. The claim seems to be that, for such a kid, it takes a village and therefore … Therefore, what? One awaits today’s favorite battle cry inviting us all to go out and occupy something – in this case the mind of the child. Let us occupy Jimmy!

In all these village slogans it seems forgotten that, in the first place, it took families to create the village. While the village may be important, it is not the concept of village, but that of parent (as part of family) that will allow us to disentangle the intellectual mess we have made of the various relations of the child to village, to state, to parent and to family.

This state of our culture and its favorite metaphors bears upon educational choice.

We can and should celebrate family, but in thinking about the ways in which America disposes of her children we must distinguish family not only from village, but from parent. Family is a word useful in social science, politics and religion with diverse meanings among cultures. Only one of these meanings expresses the specific legal relation that holds between the child and one particular adult (or, at most, two) who holds the power to decide where and how the child is to be schooled. Parental authority is precisely that legal attribute lodged in the adult person who, together with the child – and generally others – constitutes the family in this society.

Here, then, is my quick take on the parent-child relation as the unique system of law that they are. By law here I will adopt the meaning of the most up-to-date positivist; law is a rule of external human action enforced by a sovereign authority. The parent is exactly that sovereign authority for 18 years in respect of her own child. This is true whether this custodial parent is single, a drop-out, homosexual, or adoptive. She alone decides that little John shall rise at 6:30, and then determines what he shall wear to the school she has chosen. She makes countless rules, and then enforces them with physical duress – including spanking. Yes, there are limits; John is born with rights. But these are few indeed, and exist only at the extreme.

And her authority is more than a delegation from that Great Village we call the State. The state does not, and did not, delegate this authority that it never held in the first place. Simply put, in 1787 sovereign parental authority existed as a relation recognized by the Common Law to pre-exist the state. The federal constitution and its powers reserved to the people explicitly recognize and respect such primordial authority. Recall the 10th Amendment.

As we have seen in the history of the 1925 Pierce v. Society of Sisters U.S. Supreme Court decision, the parent was and remains the practical sovereign over what will be taught the child apart from basic skills. She may choose any school or none, as the success of home and virtual schooling make plain today. As De Tocqueville put it, in America the parent-child relationship is a domestic dictatorship.

The real question