With conversations about furries and litter boxes in school bathrooms making their rounds again, it is clear that education can be a hotbed for political disagreement. Conversations like this one and a desire to control the worldviews that children come into contact with often drive a desire to support school choice. For some supporters, they hope for a more conservative perspective, for others they are looking for a more progressive one.
Previously, we have highlighted different political discussions where both more conservative and more progressive viewpoints were satisfied by an opportunity for school choice. One recent example was during the COVID pandemic when some schools were masking and others were not. At this time, suddenly both sides of the aisle could see the value of a school choice argument! Some said, “Let my child transfer to a place with a mask mandate!” While others argued, “We want to attend a school with no mask mandate.”
In this moment, the most valuable part of the school choice argument for parents was not how one felt about masks but whether, as a parent, he or she had the opportunity to decide what was best for their child. Thinking beyond masks and litter boxes in bathrooms, what our country needs is an education system that can meet the needs of individual students rather than a generalized “average” student that doesn’t exist.
As school choice advocate and enthusiast, Kerry McDonald, recently wrote,
“We should celebrate recent school choice wins and the new opportunities they provide for families to leave a government-assigned school, while being wary that our own biases could ultimately doom these policies. Tolerating educational diversity and welcoming a panoply of new options—including ones we don’t like—will avoid this fate.”
In other words, if you believe in having the opportunity to send your child to the school that fits his or her needs, then you must link arms with others who want the same thing for reasons you possibly disagree with. Having freedom to choose requires that you also allow your neighbor the freedom of choice without objection. If we only believe in freedom for ourselves or freedom for those that “think like us,” I would argue we don’t really believe in freedom at all.