First, rigorous, knowledge-building contentworks. Across the K–12 continuum, mastery of rigorous content exercises an independent, positive impact on young people’s opportunities. When American schools fail to provide this, they are leaving one of the most powerful levers off the table.
In practice, this means that while a wide variety of public and private schools should be eligible for public funding and free to operate as they see fit, all should be held accountable for covering a basic corpus of knowledge. Mastery of this content should be assessed in all schools through rigorous exams, the results of which provide clear signals to parents and teachers about each student’s strengths and weaknesses, and to the public about each school’s.
Second, parents need help. A hands-off approach leaves too many parents behind. Many well-resourced families can navigate the choices and identify high-powered options. But almost 40% of parents in urban contexts are functionally illiterate, with limited social networks. Surveys of parents in high-choice systems, and research on individual voucher programs like Washington, D.C.’s, show that parents newly empowered to exert agency on behalf of their children’s education face a steep learning curve. As one of the country’s foremost scholars of educational opportunity Patrick Wolf put it, parents don’t need information—“they need a person.” Nonprofits are springing up in the United States to fill this person-to-person need, but some pluralistic countries build “parent navigators” in from the beginning.
Furthermore, as conservatives increasingly acknowledge, the market logic that works so well for commodities can falter when applied to more complex contexts. We humans can get attached to people, places, and things that do not serve us well—including schools. Conversely, markets eagerly dispose of things to which we might rightly be attached. Closing a school may be the right thing for any number of reasons, but it inevitably leads to collective grief, anxiety, and sometimes outright resistance from community leaders or lobbyists. Kevin Huffman, commissioner of education for Tennessee from 2011–2015, tells a harrowing story of what he called his “abject failure” to shut down “the worst performing [charter] school in Tennessee,” in the face of such pressures.