Education democracy v. education freedom in Montana

People will offer a variety of responses when asked why the state should offer education to all youngsters. Some want to cultivate informed citizens, or virtuous citizens, or want to engineer society (integration or assimilation), or level out society (equity), etc. Most taxpayers agree that paying for young citizens’ education constitutes a common good worthy of public funding. Where we tend to disagree as a society is when we ask: who should provide the publicly funded education?

Neal McCluskey aptly points out in “The Fractured Schoolhouse” that because of a dependency on district lines, compulsory education laws and democratically elected local school boards, “The American school system is one in which the government determines where, how and what children will learn. Essentially, how their very minds will be formed.” 

Clearly, this does not seem very American. McCluskey points out that America was primarily founded on the principles of freedom and independence from the government, not democracy, and that our founding fathers were careful to balance democracy within our three branches of government so that it did not turn into “tyranny of the majority,” as Alexis de Tocqueville warned. And yet, our school board elections have no such balancing mechanisms in place. 

Vladimir Kogan of Ohio State University, participating in a debate sponsored by Harvard Kennedy School of Education Policy, argues that our local school board elections are not even particularly democratic. He points to low voter participation in off-cycle elections leading to, generally, only about 10% voter turnout, not enough to truly represent the population’s preferences. 

Kogan also references that typically 40% of the school board elections statewide are uncontested or require appointments due to low interest to serve. Additionally, Kogan highlights that incumbents are not held accountable because voters generally do not know who is on the school board or for which policies each member supported or opposed. 

Lastly, he asserts that because policy position records are not widely publicized to the voting public, voters cannot easily determine whether their preferences were promoted by any incumbent. 

Experts, spanning decades, have identified the failure of American schools as being in the design of the system itself, and the locally elected school boards are significant players in this flawed system. 

In 2004, Ted Kolderie pointed a finger at the design of the system, concluding that a single provider within a rigid, top-down system cannot meet the diverse educational needs of a community. John Chubb and Terry Moe in their influential work “Politics, Markets and America’s Schools” wrote in 1990 that democratic control of public education inevitably leads to interest groups’ power over decision-making and leads to school boards focusing on innumerable, often meaningless inputs rather than on student outcomes. 

Going back even further, in 1955 Milton Friedman famously stated that to meet diverse preferences in education, we need to separate the funding of education from the education provider. The common thread in these declarations is the importance of liberty and choice over democracy. 

The call for education choice in many ways is a cry to exit the rigid district system run by local school boards that generally fail to coalesce around or even articulate a clear mission, and therefore, fall short of focusing on the one thing that is essential to their purpose: to responsibly use the resources they have to improve student outcomes. 

McCluskey states it perfectly, “[we have a] paradox of public schooling in America—schooling controlled by government to serve a free people.” 

A solution is to allow for education pluralism to flourish in Montana, so families can choose between an array of all education providers: public, independent, faith-based or even a combination of a few. 

Trish Schreiber is a Senior Education fellow at the Montana-based Frontier Institute.