WILL VOUCHERS BALKANIZE AMERICA?: First in a brief series of replies to anti-school-voucher arguments.

The basic claim here is that public schools transform atomized individuals, or alienated minorities/immigrants, into civic-minded American citizens. Public schooling means that Americans come to hold basic values in common, and so public schooling holds our country together, forging unity from our diversity.

Problems with this claim: 1) Uh, this isn’t what actually happens in lots and lots of public schools. My public elementary school was pretty awesome despite its Afrocentrism–Afrocentrism was mostly used as a pathway into American history and common values, not an alternative to those values. The key American heroes were Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Charles Drew. But it’s not hard to find public schools which focus on emphasizing and maintaining divergent cultures. Multiculturalism may well be at its strongest in the inner-city public schools whose students’ parents are most likely to receive and use vouchers. Even my basically solid elementary school also emphasized the “Seven Kwanzaa Principles,” which ranged from the near-contentless (creativity, faith, purpose) to the vaguely socialistic (collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics). And certainly a school that can’t teach reading or math is unlikely to teach a robust and helpful civic education.

2) “Balkanization” has already occurred, for the rich and for anyone who can move to a new area. We have segregation by school district. We have private schools. If it’s OK for the rich to “Balkanize” their children, why is it wrong for the poor to do the same? (I can see the claim that poor children are more likely to need institutions that integrate them into American life–but I don’t think that claim overcomes the patronizing and anti-parents aspect of this argument.) Are poor parents who scrimp and save to send their kids to Catholic school selling out? Are they abandoning the American dream–or fulfilling it, through their acceptance of responsibility, self-government, and religious pluralism?

3) Public schools, a.k.a. government schools, can’t teach the religious beliefs that many Americans consider to be the bedrock of all other values. In the absence of religious faith, public schools teach–at best!–a “civic religion” in which the claims of state and community trump the claims of God, since state and community are the only objects of loyalty that a public school can acknowledge. It is difficult to forge a civic order out of people who adhere to different faiths and believe that their God is more important than their country–on that point, the anti-voucher claim is correct. But this difficulty is intrinsic to a society that is a) mostly religious, b) diverse, and c) most importantly, free. You can’t get around the difficulty by shunting poor kids into schools that extol loyalty to Caesar while being forbidden to mention loyalty to God. (As I said above, I don’t think public schools actually do extol loyalty to Caesar all that often, but my point here is that civic loyalty is not the ultimate value, and I don’t see why we should act as if it trumps religious loyalty or parents’ responsibility to direct their children’s moral education.)

If parents believe that their public school is, in fact, educating their children in civic values that are not antithetical to the parents’ own beliefs, and if the school is doing a good job of that, vouchers in no way force parents to move the kids out of public school. Polls have shown time and again that suburban parents, for example, are quite satisfied with their local public schools. Vouchers are pretty much irrelevant for them. But if parents do believe that public schools are inculcating false values in their children, again, why do voucher opponents accept that rich people can avoid public schools while poor people can’t?