coons_c_weber_m_eds_paternalism_theory_and_practice
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endorse an approach to social policy that recognizes this reality of human abilities and limitations, and design institutions and policies that enable society and the individuals within it to reach their goals and improve their overall well-being. This form of paternalism when properly construed need not be infantilizing or demeaning. It can reflect recognition of the moral realities of human diversity of aims and preferences, and of humans’ bounded rationality in advancing these aims, and an endorsement of an approach to social policy which responds to this reality. It recognizes that informed-desire accounts of personal welfare (or the identification of an agent’s welfare with her [rational] preferences) fail to acknowledge the complexity of desires, wishes, firstand second-order preferences, and external influences on the makeup of individual preferences. Informeddesire accounts do not consider the intricate ways in which those varied preferences are communicated to others, and even to the agent herself. Therefore it would be misguided to use these accounts of personal preference as the basis for political and economic theories or as guidelines for social policies. Another basis is needed upon which to establish social policies, and structured paternalism is an attempt to o er such an alternative.
To reiterate, justified forms of structured paternalism as understood here in the context of democratic social policy replace or supplement individuals’ judgment in an e ort to improve their circumstances or well-being while keeping in mind their inferred needs, including their civic equality and the expansion of opportunities to achieve their goals. These policies organize the sets of options from which individuals can make choices and can intervene in the process of decision-making to the extent that it is done to promote individuals’ well-being and equal civic standing.
One key area that generates debates on paternalism, choice, and opportunities is the many policies lumped together under the heading “school choice.” I turn now to considering some of the arguments in this area, and some of the related policies, in light of the discussion on paternalism.
choice and school choice
School choice is a rapidly growing domain of policy activity in the United States and elsewhere, accompanied with a wealth of studies on its design, e ects, and normative dimensions. A vast array of schoolchoice options is available to many parents, from the traditionally available residential choice and private school options, through magnet schools and voucher programs, to the more recent proliferation of charter schools. Some advocates of choice famously proclaimed it to
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be a panacea,10 and it remains a symbol for respecting parental preferences, providing opportunities for children and avoiding unnecessary government intervention and bureaucracy. Principled support for school choice is based on a variety of arguments, some advocating market strategies such as competition to improve the quality of all schools, some calling for smaller government and thus less investment in public education and more reliance on the innovation of the private sector, and others maintaining that since a uent parents enjoy school choice through residential choices and private school enrollment, all other families should benefit from similar opportunities in the name of equal opportunity.11
In recent years more reservations about school choice are heard in public and scholarly debates, including from former choice proponents. The outcomes of the two main forms of choice policies currently available to American parents, namely, vouchers and charter schools, remain contested. On vouchers, while one highly regarded researcher finds vouchers to provide clear positive e ects to their users, another study finds insignificant gains to voucher recipients.12 On charters, a consensus is emerging that questions the overall ability of charters to provide better educational outcomes. In 2009, a study of charter-school performance in fifteen states and the District of Columbia by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) found that 17 percent of charter schools outperformed local district schools, 46 percent performed similarly, and 37 percent performed worse than their local district schools.13 Similarly, an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) study found that charter schools are no more or less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement.14 On the other hand, recent studies suggest that market competition, including that introduced by vouchers and charters, creates pressure on public schools to improve, and some of them see gains in student test scores.15 Hence, little agreement exists among researchers regarding the merits and e ects of school-choice programs on the overall opportunity structure of the American school system. It seems that the specifics of the program
10Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.
11I discuss the host of arguments in support of school choice in Ben-Porath, “Race, Choice and Opportunity.” For support of school choice as a free-market tool to increase quality, see Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools; Viteritti, Choosing Equality. Among those who see school choice as potentially reflecting liberal democratic values are Gutmann, Democratic Education; Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education. On school choice as potentially contributing to social justice see Brighouse, School Choice and Social Justice; Swift, How Not to Be a Hypocrite.
12Greene, Education Myths; Barrow and Rouse, “School Vouchers.”
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CREDO, “Multiple Choice.” |
14 Gleason et al., The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts. |
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Figlio and Hart, Competitive E ects of Means-Tested School Vouchers. |
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design matter to producing favorable outcomes, and as a result there is a need to think in more detail about the goals of choice programs and how di erent program designs can better serve these goals.
In the normative literature, some of the debate on school choice has focused on parental authority versus the state’s mandate over children’s schooling, with much attention given to issues of parental and child autonomy and freedom.16 Advocates of choice, including school-choice policies, sometimes suggest that choosing increases the level of control which individuals have over the outcomes. The act of choice, or fulfillment of one’s aims, is assumed to be reflective of personal preferences, and to provide a public expression of those preferences – an expression that enriches the public sphere. However, for this to be true two other assumptions are necessary, both of which are not valid. First, the process of choosing should be equitable, so that the democratic aim of expressing one’s preferences in the public sphere is available to all citizens regardless of morally arbitrary traits (such as race or class). In the discussion of the two-choice programs that follows I present the many ways in which this assumption does not hold in current school-choice policies. Second, for school-choice programs to correspond with the vision of citizens having more control over outcomes and voicing their preferences e ectively, another assumption is required, namely, that the process of choosing is reasonable and informed, allowing individuals to weigh a variety of options and pick the one most suitable to their goals. This idealized description, which lies at the heart of a significant part of the normative liberal-democratic literature on choice, may not be well-founded, or as Kahneman stated in the speech he delivered when receiving the Nobel Prize, “rational models are psychologically unrealistic.”17 The expressed-preferences argument is generally problematic, as discussed in the first section of this chapter. It is clearly problematic in the school-choice context. For example, in one study of the famous voucher program in Milwaukee, Dodenho reports that parent-driven reform in education is limited by the scarcity of parents who are “ideal consumers”:
This consumer would maximize the marketplace pressures on schools, thereby creating the greatest prospects for school reform and student achievement. Such a consumer would:
exercise choice, rather than simply enrolling his or her child in the local neighborhood school;
16 Gutmann, Democratic Education; Gilles, “On Educating Children”; Dwyer, “Changing the Conversation About Children’s Education”; Levinson, The Demands of Liberal Education.
17 Kahneman, “Maps of Bounded Rationality,” 1449.
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consider at least two schools in the choice process, rather than simply choosing a school without assessing the potential costs and benefits of alternatives; and
bring performance-based/academic criteria to bear in the choice process.
The estimate of MPS [Milwaukee Public School] parents meeting all three criteria is just 10 percent.18
This view of an ideal consumer of schools does not materialize in other studies of school-choice programs. Thus focus groups in the first year of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (discussed below) found that “parents listed a variety of reasons for their school choices, the most common being smaller class sizes, school safety, and a religious or values-based environment.”19 If the goal of school-choice programs is to increase academic performance for underserved populations, these considerations can seem less than fully rational – or at least not in line with this stated goal. However, if the goal is allowing parents to choose according to whatever aims they endorse, then all of these reasons are equally valid. Whether the policy can endorse any ends or preferences parents express – whether it can be neutral or should be committed to promoting equal access to quality education – is an open question, but it is worth noting that there is a potential gap between school-choice policies’ stated goals and the interpretation preferred by some parents.
However, if the goal is decreased paternalism, then the program should presumably be neutral among aims, and thus may need to relinquish the aim of equal access to quality instruction in favor of providing more freedom and choice to parents. I turn now to consider how these arguments would materialize in the context of the most widely available forms of school choice in the United States today, namely, vouchers and universal choice that includes charters. By taking a closer look at two instances of school choice – the DC Opportunity Scholarships (a voucher program), and the open enrollment policy and charter school movement in Philadelphia – I identify some of the complexities of realizing arguments in favor of school choice as a non-paternalist, anti-regulation, and proequality policy. The discussion of the Philadelphia school-choice system focuses on the promise that choice would improve equality, and the discussion of the DC program focuses on the promise that school choice would allow families to freely express their preferences. Subsequently, I suggest that for school choice to help families to pursue their goals,
18Dodenho , “Fixing the Milwaukee Public Schools,” 1.
19Stewart et al., Family Reflections on the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, 7.
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and to provide children with the education they need, choice policies need to be designed in ways that can hardly be described as non-paternalist.
choice for all families: high school choice
in philadelphia
Universal high-school-choice systems are available in many cities in the United States, and promise that choice would support more equality through providing equitable access to quality education. The School District of Philadelphia serves roughly 150,000 students. It o ers a universal choice system, whereby all eighth graders are eligible to apply to high schools in a citywide process of admissions.20 Choice has been available to Philadelphia families through a host of private schools, home schools, and cyber schools for a long time, and intradistrict school choice has been universalized since 1978 to rectify the unlawful segregation of black and white students. Through complex choice procedures, public schools in the city developed a tiered system of highly selective, selective, and neighborhood schools. The latter must admit all applicants; the former two require that students meet specific criteria, and can select among their applicants. The choice system was expanded in 1997 when the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Charter School Law (Act 22). As of 2011 the School District of Philadelphia’s O ce of Charter Schools lists 75 schools serving close to 40,000 students. Many of these schools focus on a theme that is meant to attract students with relevant interests or skills. These schools generally cannot exclude students, and if they face over-enrollment they select among the applicants by lottery.21 The admission process for all public schools is handled centrally, but the charter schools admission process is separate and requires direct contact with each school in order to apply.
20I use Philadelphia as an example that is easy to follow, but it is by no means unique. New York City has a similar, though even more complicated, system. As the New York Times described it, “Eighth graders are asked to apply to up to 12 schools in order of preference; high schools then rank applicants without seeing where the students ranked them. (This does not include the nine specialized high schools that require separate entrance exams or auditions.) In some cases, the borough or the district where a student lives gives residents priority. Thirty percent of the city’s schools – usually the most coveted and, therefore, the most competitive to get in – use a screening process with their own criteria . . . In 2011, of the 78,747 students who applied, the computer matched 83 percent to one of their top five choices. An additional 7 percent were matched to schools lower on their lists. The rest . . . were unmatched. Over the past three years, o cials said, there has been a slight but steady increase in the number of unmatched students.” (Robbins, “Lost in the School Choice Maze.”)
21Many Philadelphia charters nonetheless find ways to select students through interviews or other admissions procedures.
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At first glance, there are various advantages to this approach as a nonpaternalist choice system: There are multiple options to choose from; many options are themed or otherwise o er unique opportunities, rather than merely being rank ordered on one scale (meaning, the schools are not only “better” or “worse” in the academic achievements of their students, which is often the case in choice contexts. Rather they o er what seems to amount to substantially di erent experiences to choose from); the city o ers a universal choice process, which promises that all families can participate and choose an institution according to their values and preferences, thus being non-discriminatory and equitable; and finally, much of the selection is at the hands of the choosers.
A closer look reveals, however, that there are some significant limitations to this structure, limitations that render the choice system indeed less paternalist than residentially based (or “catchment-area”) school-assignment policies, but that nonetheless undermine the capacity of the policy to ensure that individuals can freely and equitably advance their goals. In addition some of the choice procedures significantly reduce the choice system’s ability to promote quality education and equal access to this quality education. Consider the following.
In peak years, 80 percent of Philadelphia’s eighth grade students apply to high schools. The others opt for their non-selective neighborhood schools. However, only 45 percent of the cohort ends up getting into any one of the schools on their application list. The rest join nonapplicants in neighborhood schools. Thus, neighborhood schools end up serving youth who do not apply to other schools, either because they know they cannot be admitted or because they lack counselors, and parental and other support in the process. In addition neighborhood schools serve those who are not admitted to the schools of their choice, because of low grades, behavior, or truancy problems, or because they did not come up in the lottery. The latter group – of those who were unlucky in the lottery – is the only one that seems not to present neighborhood schools with any particular educational challenges.
As a recent study of Philadelphia’s school-choice system22 indicates, there are a few reasons for the low percentage of students attending choice schools despite the universal choice system. First, there is a relatively small number of visible high schools in the city, some of them charters and some highly selective public schools. Those see high numbers of applicants, and reject most of them either by lottery or through an admissions process.
22 Research for Action, “Freshman Year Policy Brief.”
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In addition, in many of the city’s elementary (K-8) schools there are not enough counselors to support an informed choice process, and thus many students and parents are overwhelmed by the requirements of the choice process. As a result they either withdraw and opt for neighborhood schools, or apply in ways that reduce their chances of admission (for example, applying only to highly selective schools despite less-than-stellar grades).
Moreover, the o cial information provided to parents is insu cient, and often fails to indicate certain relevant aspects of either the schools or the choice process. Thus for example the materials make no mention of the possibility of late admissions. As a result, only those “in the know” can access this process and try to get their children into a school from which they were previously rejected. More broadly, the availability of seventy-five charter schools – each with their own admissions procedures, interview requirements, open school nights, forms – as well as themed, magnet, and regular public schools, presents options and expectations that need to be deciphered and compared in a process that demands time, resources, and dedication, presenting parents with a daunting amount of choice work. With roughly 22 percent of the households in the city headed by a single parent, roughly 22 percent of the population living below the poverty line, and a rapidly growing foreign-born population,23 the challenges that many families face in taking on this work on behalf of their children, in terms of available time, familiarity with the system, English language skills (or available information in their home language), and more, may be hard to overcome.
As a result, many students in e ect use their default, or neighborhood, school. Their ability to participate in the choice program remains formal, and does not come into e ect. These di erent aspects render the choice process flawed, resulting in unequal opportunities for children and families to benefit from its outcomes.
How does this process a ect the availability of quality education for all, which school choice aims to achieve? As a result of the process, neighborhood schools learn their final enrollment numbers and the makeup of their freshman class late in the summer. They thus cannot plan ahead in hiring teachers, getting to know the incoming cohort, or preparing required services. These schools face many challenges, and the quality of education they can o er further deteriorates as a result of these choice processes. They thus become gradually less attractive to teachers, and due to teacherallocation practices in Philadelphia they become a last option not only for
23 US Census Bureau, “State & County QuickFacts.”
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students but for many teachers as well. As a result experienced and otherwise successful teachers opt to leave these schools, further undermining the quality of instruction.
Recent research recognizes ninth grade as a key year to being on track for graduating from high school and for entering post-secondary educational institutions, or conversely starting the process of dropping out of school.24 The skimming of stronger students and families, and the di culty of organizing to welcome the new ninth grade cohort, creates grim conditions and outlook for the freshmen class in Philadelphia’s neighborhood schools. The student body in selective and neighborhood schools is starkly di erent, with the latter educating many more poor students, English-language learners, and students with special needs25 – all much more expensive to educate, with diminished resources as a result of various factors, including the introduction of school choice.
Still, school choice garners support from a wide range of groups in the Philadelphia area. In January 2011, a screening of the documentary film “The Cartel,” which focuses on criticizing the public education system, was introduced by Alberta Wilson, who heads the Faith First Educational Assistance Corp., an organization that distributes business-funded scholarships for Pennsylvania students to attend private schools. Wilson declared that her mission was to give “every parent the God-given right to exercise their God-given choice to put their child in the school of their choosing.”26 Along with the governor of Pennsylvania and many business leaders who promote school choice and privatization, support for choice increases among urban families and their representatives, who face the results of the continued failure of neighborhood schools to provide many urban children with a safe and successful academic environment. Of course, the choice system itself contributes significantly to the continued failure of the neighborhood public schools and the reduced opportunities of the majority of Philadelphia’s children. The call for increasing the control parents can have over their children’s education through selecting schools is not commensurate, in this environment, with providing all children with quality education. Nor does it satisfy anti-paternalist demands: While families are presented with a vast array of options to choose from, the complexity of the process renders it inaccessible to some, and many cannot in e ect express their preferences through the process. In addition, because
24National High School Center, “The First Year of High School.”
25The Notebook, “Choosing a High School.”
26Giordano and Hardy, “School Choice Gains Widespread Momentum.”
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the schools have the power to choose among applicants, the hope that the opportunity to choose would provide individuals and families with the power to express their preferences and pursue their goals is not significantly fulfilled. Universal choice systems such as the one in Philadelphia thus still have a long way to go before they can fulfill the promise of choice as supporting freedom as well as equality.
Some advocates, realizing the problems of sorting and inequality that arise within a universal choice system, call for targeted choice programs that would be o ered specifically to the families that fail to benefit from the universal choice system. The next section considers this approach.
targeted choice: washington dc opportunity
scholarships program (osp)
The District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003, passed by Congress in January 2004, established the first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States. The DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) was open to a predetermined subset of families of public school students in the DC area, about 3 percent of the public (including charter) school population, who applied and were given the option to move from a public school to one of fifty-two participating private schools. Students enrolled in public schools that were identified as in need of improvement were targeted as a priority group for this voucher program. The program enrolled between 1,027 and 1,930 students each year until it was concluded in 2009.27
At the ceremony celebrating the introduction of the DC OSP, Secretary of Education Paige stated:
Educational choice is important for two reasons. First, it extends civil rights and social justice. Second, it enhances school e ectiveness. The introduction of opportunity scholarships in the District [of Columbia] comes 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision . . . Opportunity scholarships help remove the chains of bureaucracy. They free low-income students to obtain a better education in a school of their choosing.28
As indicated above, research findings on the contribution of choice to increased school e ectiveness vary widely and as suggested in the discussion on choice in Philadelphia, choice and quality education do not always go
27The state of the program is unclear at the time of writing, and it is possible that it will be extended again.
28Paige, “A Time for Choice.”
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hand in hand. Instead this section focuses on the promise that choice allows individuals to express their preferences, and thus it focuses on the e ects of the DC OSP on the choosing families, on their stated and expressed preferences, and on the process of choice from the families’ perspective.
As in other choice programs, parental satisfaction is evident in surveys of OSP participants: “[F]irst and foremost, the parents appreciated the fact that they made the choice.”29 There is benefit in the very participation in a choice program, especially in the context of families who are assigned to dysfunctional and failing schools without having other options. The sense of control and e cacy is important, and that is part of what choice programs cater to. However, other measures of success are less clearly achieved. An early assessment of OSP found that program applicants are more likely to be African American than non-applicants, and are relatively disadvantaged in terms of their educational characteristics and family income.30 The program is means-tested and therefore reaches a more disadvantaged population of students. However, within the population of more disadvantaged students there are still significant di erences in income, grades, parental involvement, and other characteristics that are central to educational achievement. Among students that received a voucher (or “opportunity scholarship”) and those eligible who declined a voucher, this early study found significant di erences. Scholarship users are educationally advantaged in important ways relative to scholarship decliners. They are much less likely to have learning or physical disabilities, and younger scholarship users evidence somewhat higher test scores than non-users in similar grades. These di erences correlate with the findings in the concluding study of OSP which indicated that “the most common reasons given by parents for never using an OSP scholarship that was awarded to their child was a lack of space at their preferred private school (30.7 percent), the absence of special needs services (21.6 percent), and that their child was admitted to a preferred public charter school (16.3 percent).”31 Hence, sorting or “skimming” mechanisms are evident not only in universal choice systems, like Philadelphia’s school-choice process, but also when choice is limited to a targeted, disadvantaged population. In the latter case, as in the OSP program, the targeted choice option di erentiates the disadvantaged from the severely disadvantaged, leaving the latter behind.
29Stewart et al., Family Reflections on the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, 32.
30Wolf, Eissa, and Babette, “Who Chooses, Who Uses?”.
31Gleason et al., The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, xxiv.