Public Policy Toward Private Schools: A Focus on Parental Choice

Abstract

Not since the 1920s has our society faced so much controversy about public policy toward private elementary and secondary schools. Then, the major issue was whether private schools should be allowed to exist as alternatives to public schools. That issue was resolved in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of parents to choose private schooling, and thus foreclosed a public monopoly. Today, our mixed system of private and public elementary and secondary education confronts increasing pressures for both fiscal and regulatory change. Most prominent in public debate are proposals for tuition tax credits and voucher systems and challenges to government regulation of private school teacher qualifications, curriculum, and admission practices (especially as the latter affect racial segregation). Two major public policy issues have replaced the issue of whether private schooling should exist at all: (1) To what extent should government encourage or discourage the choice of private schooling, that is, what balance between public and private schooling should government try to achieve? (2) What differences between private and public schooling should government promote or prohibit? Despite this change in emphasis, todays debates echo those of the 1920s in many respects. Just as the proponents of the 1920s laws restricting private schools feared that those schools would harm efforts to Americanize the children of immigrants, some argue today that private schools exacerbate social, economic, racial, religious, and ethnic divisions within the society and that aiding private schools will increase such undesirable effects. Now, as then, advocates of private schooling rest their arguments on the rights of parents to direct their children's education and on the benefits to society of diversity in schooling. Most dispute claims that private schools increase social stratification to any greater degree than do the public schools or that they are less effective in creating good citizens. One of the major factors that distinguishes today's debates from those of the 1920s is the greater attention paid to the impact of private schools on the quality of education.