Choose or Lose

The economic argument in favor of school choice rests on the simple principle that parents who are paying tax dollars for education should be able to choose the kind of education they want to purchase for their children.

If certain public schools will then lose tax money because of school choice, too bad. The basic rule of the market economy is that it is counterproductive to waste money salvaging and protecting a flawed product no one wants. Any resulting demand for schools will eventually cause a new school--a new private school--to enter the market and try to do a better job than the defunct public school did at providing these educational services.

Yet this logic alone will not appease the consciences of the staff, who are determined to wage war on the elitism they perceive in school choice and in the idea of private school itself. To this I have two responses: First, that the staff's arguments are far more patronizing than any private-school elitism; and second, that education necessarily requires a positive view of hierarchy and the acceptance of a certain kind of elite. If the staff disagrees, they should be attending state colleges, not the most selective private college in the country.

To begin with, the staff privileges programs, theories and systems over actual poor children by suggesting that these children remain in lousy public schools since the schools need the money. Frightened at the specter of ghetto kids deserting their class to move up to the snobby culture of Andover, the staff wants to insure they never leave.

Yet shielding public schools from market forces like consumer choice keeps these bad schools from improving. The staff also patronizes the poor by saying that the state is better equipped than poor parents to know what's best for these children.

The staff's second and larger error is their confusion of class elitism with educational elitism. A parent's or student's choice of private over public school is not, as they cynically assume, motivated solely or mainly by snobbery. Leaving aside the most extreme case--kids wanting to leave ghetto schools because of violence--there are many valid reasons why a public school would be wrong for a certain child.

Some children may have parents who oppose the Supreme Court-mandated total silence on religion in public schools, a mandate that forbids not only school prayer but even inviting rabbis as graduation speakers. Some children, being smarter or more creative, need more individual attention and a faster-paced class than they could get even in a small public school class because public schools are geared for the average student. All children are different, and one educational option will not be equally satisfying for all of them.

We at Harvard have no reason or right to resist the fact that just as there are better and worse schools, there are smarter and dumber kids, and the smarter ones belong in the better schools. Rather than a lottery system, President Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton should advocate a merit criterion to determine which students would make the best use of private-school educational opportunities.

Making individual children's welfare subservient to social engineering is a false egalitarianism that is fundamentally patronizing (and, for Harvard students, hypocritical). Sure, one-size-fits-all mediocre education is a great "social equalizer." So is death.