Reflection: Part IV

A new era in education was evolving starting in the 1980s; and still to the present there have been a lot of improvements within the education system worth celebrating. As students were asked to adapt and compete in a business-drive world, communities started to notice that schools lacked the power to teach students to such a requirement. Further reforms were initiated during this time as the report “a nation at risk” was published which recommended stronger high school graduation requirements, higher standards for academic performance and student conduct, and more time devoted to instruction and homework. From the report an interesting debate arose as to whether school choice should be a concept that may be implemented to aid in the school reforms. 

School choice improves public education in various ways. One way school choice improves public schools is that they enable parents to find the right school for each child’s unique educational needs. The bottom-up approach of a market-based education system means that parents are education providers’ immediate stakeholders, therefore they want the best for their child. Most parents who exercise school choice report that they are highly satisfied with their child’s chosen school (Cheng & Peterson, 2022). As expected, children have different needs and preferences, and with this bottom-up approach everyone’s schooling experience can greatly improve if children are allowed greater freedom to find the right niche. Along the same line, school choice can give students an education tailored to their needs. In that way both the student and parent benefit. That’s the type of customization that the traditional “one-size-fits-all” public school system simply cannot provide. 

Additionally, school choice also provides positive incentives for responsiveness and improvement that are lacking in the traditional public school system. For example, when public schools know that students have a choice and can leave, those schools have a much more powerful incentive to improve their performance and keep those students from walking out the door. With this approach there is direct accountability to parents for their child’s educational success since they have the option to choose a school that best accommodates the individual needs of the child. They can no longer blame the government or the federal school systems for their child’s failures since they have the option of changing their child from school if they are not satisfied. Through this it is additionally possible to create higher academic and behavioral outcomes among traditional public-school students as their schools are trying to improve as pressure from competition school choices increases. 

On the topic of school choice further debates arise as to whether school choice structures perpetuate or eradicate inequality. Studies reveal that based on various attributes, parents place different values on school attributes, therefore it is inevitable that parents with similar values will choose the same schools and vice versa (Ukanwa et al., 2022). Some parents might place a higher emphasis on choosing a school that offers the highest student success rate, others might simply look for a shorter commute, or others may look that the resources used in education might lead to a higher social status. Therefore because of differences in values school choice would indirectly increase segregation, even if parents do not take racial demographics into consideration. Similarly, if parents have similar preferences school choice would therefore reduce segregation.  

 

In communities throughout the United States, most parents continue to entrust their children to the public schools while many others are advocating for school choice throughout the United States. Whether the concept of a free-market school choice mechanism will be adopted in the United States is still up in the air, but who knows what the future holds. 

 

References 

Cheng, A., & Peterson, P. E. (2022, February 10). How satisfied are parents with their children's schools? Education Next. Retrieved November 2, 2022, from https://www.educationnext.org/how-satisfied-are-parents-with-childrens-schools-us-dept-ed-survey/ 

Ukanwa, K., Jones, A. C., & Turner Jr., B. L. (2022, August 22). School choice increases racial segregation even when parents do not care about race. Retrieved from https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2117979119