Advocates of education reform are rightly celebrating the expansion of school choice programs across the country and from the Trump administration. But especially as educational freedom becomes more and more of a reality, we should start to reckon with the fact that educational freedom is ultimately in the hands of the people who exercise it.
In recognizing this fact, we can take a lesson from public schools: while they have been a cause of public dysfunction, from promoting gender madness, to shutting down during COVID, they are also a symptom of public dysfunction, at least insofar as public schools are built by the public and reflect the public’s values. No less than J.D. Vance says as much in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which he wrote prior to entering politics and becoming Vice President.
Throughout the book, he emphasizes the importance of education, both in the academic literature about upward mobility and in his own life, going from a rundown town in the Rust Belt to Yale Law. But Vance also reminds readers that even the best educational reforms can only go so far in a bad culture. Reflecting on his freshman year of high school—which he nearly failed due to the dysfunction in his own family—he writes:
I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers … or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.’
Vance reminds us that just as we rely on schools to produce healthy students, schools also reflect the health of the communities they are in—and the sad fact of the matter is that much of contemporary American culture is profoundly unhealthy.
On the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in particular, fatherless homes (like young Vance’s) are rampant—25% of American children live without a father in the home—and even the greatest schools can’t replace a good, involved father, even if they might be able to mitigate the effects of fatherlessness somewhat; even the greatest schools don’t change the fact that a young man who grew up with his biological father is more likely to be employed or in school, more likely to go to college, and less likely to go to jail.
That doesn’t mean we should tolerate bad schools in poor districts, or assume that children in fatherless homes are categorically doomed, but we should remember that schools can only do so much in a culture that has devalued the importance of family. Teachers cannot and should not be replacement parents, and schools cannot and should not be replacement families.
We should also remember that many of the problems in schools, as we see them, are not seen as problems by everyone. For instance, many of us who support vouchers do so at least in part because we want parents to be able to remove their children from the ideological extremism in public schools, from gender ideology to critical race theory. But even private schools have been guilty of independently pushing ideology on children.
Phillips Academy Andover, one of the premier private boarding high schools in the world, has a whole center dedicated to “gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity.” While public schools often have their hands tied by government directives (e.g., mandates to teach social-emotional learning), private schools don’t even have that excuse—the sad truth is that even as we chip away against woke policies, woke culture still has an organic hold on many people who impose it because they truly believe in it. Vouchers are great, in part because they allow us to build sound private educational options, but we should remember that vouchers are only effective so long as sound private educational options exist.
What we need more of is what we see in the classical education movement, for instance. Its advocates are building schools that are deeply rooted in classical Western thought and are designed to be independent bastions of healthy values and vitality amid the decay of mass culture. We need to build—inside and outside of schools—a healthier moral fabric, one in which families, especially fathers, are not sneered at as “old fashioned” but elevated, one in which we not only tear down woke ideology but replace it with something more timeless.
Indeed, school choice is necessary for improving our education system, but not sufficient. Advocates of school choice are often the first to say that throwing more money at public schools isn’t going to make public schools any better, but we should remember that a similar lesson applies to us: throwing money at alternative educational options on the same cultural and moral assumptions that public schools are built on isn’t going to produce significantly better results.