Dodging Democracy: The Educator’s Flight from the Specter of Choice
| Autor: | John E. Coons |
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| Rok vydání: | 2005 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Journal of Education. 111:596-608 |
| ISSN: | 1549-6511 0195-6744 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/431185 |
| Popis: | Jerry Paquette, in his article “Public Funding for ‘Private’ Education: The Equity Challenge of Enhanced Choice” (in this issue, 568), properly urges us to ponder, then to reject, various hypothetical schemes for school choice whose design might worsen the plight of the poor. Among these devices, his chief bugbear is a largely unregulated form of school vouchers that democratic reformers have consistently damned since choice first surfaced as a hope for have-nots in the War on Poverty; specifically, he imagines participating private schools being left free to price the poor out with add-on tuition—or simply to exclude them in the first place. Advocates of the poor agree that the point of school choice reform is not to exclude but, at last, to include such families as responsible decision makers; Paquette’s inventions are, as he would have it, “morally opprobrious.” They are notions that deserve oblivion, which in real life has been their political fate in the United States. No proposal resembling these chimeras has been adopted, and no ballot proposition so conceived has gained approval from more than 30 percent of voters in any state. The American consensus obviously includes the determination not further to burden but, rather, to aid the ordinary family. No doubt it is this that explains the evident popularity of the Milwaukee voucher program. Most people do value fair access for ordinary families; when they see it in the flesh, they embrace it, and they are wary of devices from left or right that would undermine the few existing examples of democratic choice. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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