For much of the 1990s and 2000s, discussions around school choice focused narrowly on a bipartisan push to improve academic performance in inner-city schools. It was an era of charter schools, test scores, and “accountability.”
But that movement stalled out, in no small part because the ultimate question about the purpose of education can only be avoided for so long. A school system cannot paper over profound disagreements over how society should teach about race, gender, and sex by pursuing an unattainable neutrality. And in recent years, people with advanced degrees from Schools of Education and professional administrators have increasingly seen neutrality as part of a system of oppression.
Recent battles over “critical race theory,” gender theory, and eliminating academic tracking over concerns around “equity” lay bare what scholars like Charles Glenn and Ashley Rogers Berner have long argued—that a school system cannot be neutral when it comes to values.
As J. Grant Addison recently wrote for the Washington Examiner, following other writers including Robert Pondiscio, Jay P. Greene, and myself, the next generation of school choice advocacy is recognizing anew that there can be no such thing as value-neutral education. That realization should spur a new push for approaches to education that give parents and communities more choices.
Some legislative efforts focus on setting guardrails on public schools, such as the recently-signed Florida law ensuring young children don’t receive classroom instruction on topics their parents might not want them exposed to. Some of these efforts will be more effective than others; would-be bans on so-called “critical race theory” are easily circumvented by avoiding that phrase while still teaching divisive concepts in the name of anti-racism.