School (False) Choice Sunday
Have you ever been unhappy with your “choices”? For example, you go to a Redbox and there are 60 movies in the machine, but not one film seems interesting. Even though there are many “choices”, you are not happy with any of them. Or how about when someone else defines the choice for you. For example, you are choosing a restaurant on a Saturday night and your companion says that they are open to eating anywhere but then they proceed to reject the next ten suggestions. Then they proceed to give you a list of three restaurants they would prefer for that evening— they have defined the choice for you. Or how about if you are a teenager and your parents tell you that you can see any movie you want as long as its Spiderman at 10 a.m. These are all examples of false choice.
The choice argument is very powerful in the current education policy discourse. The core of the argument goes like this, “parents should be able to choose a high quality school.” What I want to focus on first is the “top concerns” for public schools.
In the Public Interest conducted a poll of voters to gauge what communities find as problematic in their schools. I think a fair translation is that these are the most desired choices for their schools. Here is a little Sunday “Family School (False) Choice Sunday | Cloaking Inequity:
