How and Why to Support Common Schooling and Educational Choice at the Same Time

School Choice and the Common School

Terence Mclaughlin’s essay addresses the conceptual and practical complexities involved in identifying and evaluating the nature, status, and institutional context of common (public) education in pluralist societies. He explores some of the neglected burdens and dilemmas faced by common schools in pluralist, multicultural, and liberal–democratic societies. The potential weight and complexity of these burdens and dilemmas is reflected in Stephen Macedo’s observation that common schools give rise to questions relating to some of the ‘deepest divisions’ and ‘most intractable conflicts’ characterizing the public lives of modern states. The chapter has five sections: Section 5.1 outlines some general considerations relating to common schooling and a conception of common education, pointing out that the relationship between the two is a contingent one – the adequacy of a particular institutional arrangement, such as the common school, depends critically on the extent to which it embodies an adequate conception of common education; Section 5.2 offers a sketch of some general features of such conceptions; in Sections 5.3 and 5.4, respectively, some of the burdens and dilemmas of common schooling are explored; Section 5.5 addresses neglected questions relating to the pre-eminently practical burdens and dilemmas highlighted in the previous two sections. McLaughlin’s chapter is especially helpful in identifying a number of the most important considerations in the presumption in favour of common schools as the most suitable arrangement for advancing common education, and his essay maps the conceptual, curricular, pedagogical, and policy issues that must be addressed in clarifying and defending the role of common schools and common education in liberal–democratic societies.

This article explores from a broadly philosophical perspective a range of complexities of normative judgment relating to “school choice” in a liberal democratic society. It is argued that “heavy” conceptions of public education in such societies play an important role in philosophical discussions of school choice by indicating constraints and limits to school choice arising from the specification of an educational entitlement that should be secured for all students. The article also argues that forms of practical judgment by teachers and educational leaders at the classroom and school level are central to the interpretation and implementation of such “heavier” forms of educational influence. Attention to this neglected point is argued to be of significance for the deployment of arguments regarding heavier conceptions of public education in debates relating to school choice.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Fact of Pluralism Common Schools and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Educational Choice and the Normative Significance of Pluralism Reconciling Common Schooling with Educational Choice Acknowledgments References

Soulevant le paradoxe de l'obligation de l'education civique des enfants et de l'apprentissage des valeurs fondamentales du liberalisme telle que l'autonomie de l'individu, l'A. montre que la permissibilite de l'education civique pose probleme, tant du point de vue de l'autorite de l'ecole en matiere d'enseignement et de l'autorite des parents en matiere d'education, que du point de vue de la legitimite de l'etat liberal au regard du consentement hypothetique des citoyens. Examinant les arguments en faveur de l'education civique developpes par W. Galston et A. Gutmann, ainsi que l'argument instrumental en faveur de l'education falicitant l'autonomie, l'A. montre que le debat souleve la question de la place de la famille religieuse de l'enfant et la question des programmes scolaires dans le cadre limite de la doctrine liberale

While attending the Klingenstein Center’s Heads of Schools Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, fellows studied Horace Mann’s nineteenth‐century vision for a “common school” that would unite all citizens; they considered whether this model is still best suited to serve a democratic society and questioned how current “school choice” between competing school models—including their own—might better serve the increasingly complex needs of students in the twenty‐first century.

Horace Mann’s vision of a common school to educate American children has not been realized. Instead, our country is experimenting with many different kinds of schools: charters, independents, parochials, and magnets, to name a few. These schools fill a particular niche for families, with the potential to focus education to the needs of each child. A tour of different schools in New York City, part of a symposium on school choice, opened the eyes of the current head of an independent school to the diverse and often successful alternatives to Horace's Mann's common school created over the past decade.

In this article I explore the debate about common schooling in an increasingly diverse and less deferential Canada. In a case study, I describe how one school board reacted when dissatisfied parents tried to establish a traditional school. The board rejected two such proposals, consistent with its policy of inclusion. The parents made it clear that there was no agreement about the meaning of inclusion and the nature of schooling in the district. This politics of difference poses questions about teachers' work, democratic decision-making, and school policy that are not addressed when school choice is treated as a market phenomenon.

ABSTRACTAdoption of policies supporting school choice, in most Western democracies, has served to settle social and political conflicts related to religion. Conflicts related to racial integration played a similar role more recently in the United States where, contrary to other countries, religion has served to retard rather than to advance public support for school choice. Schools with a religious character established by groups immigrating to the United States functioned as alternatives alongside the common public school; only with the post-war adoption of choice as a remedy to racial segregation, and the diverse challenge to public schools by religious conservatives and secular progressives, has public support for school choice become widespread.

Across OECD countries, education choice is proliferating as parents seek and governments permit choice both inside and outside public education systems. The movement of students out of the common public school, however, varies significantly across jurisdictions and sociodemographic characteristics such as race and class. This variation in individual decision making and macro policy outcomes directs us to theorise about the relationship between parental preferences, government responses, and policy outcomes. We map the interplay between the demand for choice, institutional responses, and policy feedback effects that lead to four major policy outcomes: partially attenuated governance, hyper choice, partial accommodation within the public system, and non-accommodation that leads parents to withdraw from the public education system. We apply this framework to understanding variation in patterns of school choice in Canadian provinces and conclude by outlining some ways in which our framework can be used to understand school choice outcomes cross-nationally.

Reviewed by: An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North by Zöe Burkholder Campbell F. Scribner (bio) Education, Education history, African Americans, Civil rights, Integration An African American Dilemma: A History of School Integration and Civil Rights in the North. By Zöe Burkholder. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 297. Cloth, $34.95.) An African American Dilemma is Zöe Burkholder's third book about the history of racial inequality in American education, and like her previous offerings it provides a rigorous, insightful, and unsparingly clear treatment of its subject. The book's title refers to Gunnar Myrdal's classic, An American Dilemma, which examined the cycle of hatred and dispossession that sustained American racism during the early twentieth century. 1 Confronting the issue from the perspective of Black students, parents, and community leaders, Burkholder introduces a second dilemma: namely, whether to pursue civic equality through racially integrated schools or to build sustaining communities in racially separate schools. Both approaches came with tradeoffs and shortcomings, and the persistence of anti-Black racism meant that neither could be implemented entirely on its own terms. Indeed, as Burkholder observes, "neither has been entirely successful," but it is for that very reason that "both ideals—integration and separation—reappear with each new generation" (4). Burkholder's task, and the real strength of the book, is to forgo simplified endorsements of either integration or separation—to accept the conflict over Black schooling as a genuine dilemma—and to demonstrate how intelligent and good-faith actors made difficult (and different) decisions based on the particularities of their own times and places. The book's historical analysis extends into the 1970s, but readers of this journal will probably take greatest interest in the opening chapter, which describes Black education in the North from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Burkholder synthesizes a number of recent studies with her own archival research to present one of the best overviews of Black education in the early nineteenth century to date. There are a few touchstones with which any historian of the period will be familiar: Judge Lemuel Shaw's rejection of Sarah Roberts's plea to integrate the Boston public schools (28–29), for instance, or the attack on Prudence Crandall's female academy (17), both of which speak to the era's institutional racism and vigilante violence. To these, Burkholder adds a [End Page 193] cast of lesser-known activists and settings, from cities like Cincinnati and Detroit and a number of small towns across the North. None of these communities followed a prescribed path for Black public education. Neighboring towns took sharply different approaches to challenging or working within implicitly segregated school systems (36). Some parents found that exclusion from common schools or abuse by white teachers made separate schools the most desirable option for their children. Others valued the proximity and academic quality of the common schools and fled segregated institutions at the first opportunity. Some insisted on common schooling as the path to equal citizenship, while others saw it as the most practical means to good education. It is precisely this sort of variety, complexity, and unpredictability that sustains the vitality of Burkholder's dilemma, and which offers a richly nuanced narrative. Unsurprisingly, the same contingency led to bitter political struggles between and within Black communities. For integrationists, hard-won access to common schools could not be jeopardized by internal dissent. Thus, Frederick Douglass wrote in 1847, "We should feel the most intense mortification if, while many of the most respectable white people of this city should be in favor of admitting our children to equal privileges in the use of our common schools, a single colored man should be found opposed to the measure" (29). Integrationists also accused their opponents of selfishness, arguing that they were merely trying to protect Black teachers, whose livelihoods depended on separate schools. "Should thousands [of children] be losers that a few be gainers?" they demanded (38). For their part, separatists pointed out that white teachers, whether in common or "colored" schools, "are nearly always mentally, morally, or financially bankrupt, and...

Islam generally, and Muslim immigrant communities in particular, have recently been targeted for criticism by Western academics and in popular Western media. This article explores the substance of these criticisms and weighs them against the beliefs and practices of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal democracies. The article addresses three distinct questions. First, what sorts of cultural adaptations is it reasonable for liberal democratic states and societies to expect immigrants to make, and what kinds of adaptation is it unreasonable to demand? Second, how vulnerable are Islamic beliefs and practices to the criticisms commonly leveled against them in the name of liberal democracy and gender equality? Finally, how strong are the parallels between the claims for political recognition and accommodation that issue from immigrant cultural communities and the claims for recognition and inclusion that issue from groups that have historically been marginalized within liberal democratic societies? Although the authors do not dismiss the notion that there may be tensions between the core commitments of liberal democratic societies and some Islamic practices, they conclude that these tensions are exaggerated by Western writers. Muslim communities generally pose no greater challenge to liberal societies than do other religious and immigrant communities. Western writers should be chary of rejecting their claims to toleration and accommodation too swiftly.

This reflective essay recounts a period of time when school finance and law research emphasized the central core of statewide funding for common schools. A brief survey of articles appearing in the flagship Journal of Education Finance demonstrates that less than seven percent of research capacity brings to light the status and need for centralized government common school funding. This observation is a source of concern for the sustainability of common schools for the common good. For if there is no scholarly press for statewide school funding, what will fuel economic, political, and legal thrusts to fund common schools? The observation and question are particularly important in this era of defunding traditional public school systems. Collateral damage caused by school choice options is noted as well as the extension of micro market theory to local schooling communities. A conceptualization of the commodification of residential real estate is also introduced. Understanding micro markets and the commodification of residential real estate are important because when pullbacks in central government funding occur, financial burdens increase locally where residential property valuation and ownership are proxies for common school economic and political support.

The institutionalization of political education requires thought about the kind of schooling that will realize its ends with due regard for whatever moral constraints limit what the state may do for the sake of those ends. It is argued that the liberal state can permissibly show systematic partiality for ‘common schools’ that children from diverse social groups attend on terms of mutual respect over ‘separate schools’ that cater to students on the basis of selective ethnic or religious criteria or the like. On the other hand, there may be a cogent case for state sponsorship of separate schools during the early years of schooling if these accept the ends of liberal political education.

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than one's own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference.