School choice is bad for us
It encourages segregation and promotes the individual at the expense of the larger society
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"Choice" is a common mantra in school reform today. Some reformers talk as if just letting families choose schools will somehow improve education.
Because school reform is a hard and urgent problem, we look for quick fixes. Some — especially non-educators, who do not know what curriculum, teaching methods or classroom organization would work — ignore the substance of education and focus, instead, on the process of assigning children to schools: replace school system control with parental choice. Parents should be involved in their children's education, but simply letting them choose schools will not produce good schools. And yet we Americans attribute almost magical power to the idea of choice. We talk a lot about "individual rights" and the "right" of "free choice." We imagine that, if only everyone could choose what he or she wanted, then everything would work out all right for all of us.
We talk about individual freedom to choose schools and much else despite the fact that our society and the world are places where we have to cooperate with others to solve problems we face together. The idea of
