The school choice movement has failed. 54 years after Milton Friedman launched the modern school choice movement with his publication of “The Role of Government in Education,” the benefits of school choice continue to elude most Americans. Only a tiny fraction of American parents have direct control over which schools their children attend, and as a result, millions of American schoolchildren remain trapped in embarrassingly sub-standard public school system.
Yet, as polls consistently show, public support for educational choice in general is strong. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans favor charter schools and 74 percent believe that allowing parents of low-performing students to choose which public schools their children attend would help close the achievement gap between low- and high-achieving students. And though school choice has hit a brick wall of intractable and well-organized political opposition, other avenues for increasing educational choice remain largely unexplored. Teacher choice might offer a politically viable alternative to school choice. Like school choice, teacher choice aims to improve school quality by introducing greater efficiency into the public school system, while at the same time expanding the scope of educational freedom.
Here’s how a system of teacher choice would work in practice. In primary schools that have more one teacher per grade level, parents would be asked to rank teachers in order of preference. School administrators would then try to assign students to teachers based on their parents’ choices. Of course, this would not always be possible, since parents would naturally gravitate towards the highest-quality teachers. School administrators would have to even out the number of students in each class, which means that some parents would have to settle for getting their second or third choice teachers.
Teacher choice boasts several advantages over both the status quo system of randomly matching students with teachers and the school choice system of matching students with schools.
Most obviously, the system will do a better job of matching students with teachers than the current system, for the simple reason that parents will be able to take into account their child’s individual needs, and then find the teacher whose strengths best complement those needs. It also gives parents an incentive to research teachers and get involved in their children’s education.
Second, teacher choice will help expose which teachers are more effective than others. Generally speaking, the good teachers will earn more votes than bad teachers. This will give school administrators a metric other than standardized testing by which to evaluate teacher performance. In the long run, this will allow schools to implement merit-based pay and identify which teachers they should retain or fire.
This, in turn, will push underperforming teachers to perform at a higher level. Teachers will have an incentive to perform better — for the sake of their reputations and their jobs. This will drive teachers to become more effective educators.
Third, teacher choice is extremely straightforward, and would be easy and inexpensive to implement. Unlike school choice, teacher choice wouldn’t amount to a revolution in American public education.
This means that it would sidestep many of the political pitfalls that have paralyzed school choice in the past. Opponents of school choice have long argued that implementing school choice programs would hurt public school teachers, divert badly-needed funds away from struggling schools, and benefit middle and upper-middle class students at the expense of poor, minority and special-needs children. These funding-related criticisms have been used to great effect to attack school choice programs, but they would be impotent in the fight against teacher choice, since teacher choice wouldn’t shift money between or out of public schools.
Even more importantly, teacher choice would be harder for the teachers’ unions to oppose than school choice, because it would put them in the uncomfortable position of defending bad teachers instead of defending bad schools. Teachers’ unions have long led the opposition to school choice; most recently, they poured millions of dollars into campaigns to defeat voucher programs in the District of Columbia and Utah. Though weakening the teachers’ unions’ opposition to school reform may be impossible, weakening the effectiveness of that opposition may be achievable.
This is not to say that school choice hasn’t achieved anything. Ever since the publication of Friedman’s article, proponents of school choice have fought tooth and nail to give parents greater control over which schools their children attend, and in some respects, they have succeeded. According to a recent Heritage Foundation study, more than 624,000 American families now benefit from school vouchers, tax deductions and tax credits — none of which existed in 1955, when Friedman published “The Role of Government in Education.”
Considering the enormous size of the American public school system, however, these gains are negligible. That’s why proponents of educational choice should switch tactics. That’s why it’s time to push teacher choice to the forefront of the educational choice agenda.
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