Preschool and School Choice Movement Leaders Combine Forces to Form New Pornographers-style Education Advocacy Supergroup

(No, not really, but keep reading)

Cato's Adam Schaeffer highlights a debate within the school choice community: On one side are activists pushing targeted voucher programs to help kids with specific needs--kids with disabilities (as in Florida), foster kids (Arizona), and poor kids in urban districts with crappy schools (in Wisconsin, Ohio, D.C.). On the other are those, like Schaeffer and Howard Rich (to whose WSJ column Schaeffer's piece is pegged), who actually think the whole public education system is the problem and want to replace it with a tax credit and/or voucher regime for all families. Curiously, this debate actually has a lot of similarities the debate among early childhood advocates on the merits of targeted versus universal preschool programs. And it's not the only thing these two issues have in common.

I believe that the school choice movement (in which I include the charter school movement) and the preschool movement are the two most vital movements in education today. For starters, they're both actual movements, with grassroots advocacy bases committed to moving the ball on the issues. While federal policymakers are hemmed in by the policy cage of NCLB and difficulties of its implementation, these state and local level advocates are driving real, on-the-ground change on choice and early learning.

Both are also terribly ambitious. They're questioning long-accepted relationships, roles, and responsibilities--In the case of school choice, breaking district educational monopolies and giving parents more control over their children's education; in the case of preschool broadening the understanding of public and communal responsibility to small children and their families. They're redefining the boundaries of publicly-supported education--In preschool, to include younger children; in school choice to include private, charter, and other non-traditional schools. And they're both building new institutions and infrastructure to deliver new types of education in new ways.

Both movements also rely on similar authority to make the case for their preferred reforms: A combination of arguments based on economic theory (each even has its own Nobel Prize winning economist in Milton Friedman and James Heckman!), program evaluation and effectiveness research aimed at showing their programs deliver positive results for kids and the public, and social justice arguments focused on the needs of historically underserved children. Both augment these arguments and research with savvy PR campaigns and grassroots advocacy to move the ball on their goals. And both movements have been driven by the strategic investments of committed patrons in the philanthropic world (both individuals and foundations).
And both, as their agendas advance and states start implementing their policy prescriptions, are having to deal with quality problems in the preschool programs and schools of choice that emerge.

In my experience, there's not a lot of love lost or perceived shared ground between the leading lights of the preschool and school choice movements. Conservative and libertarian choice advocates tend to hate the idea of public preschool funding, and preschool supporters have good reason to be wary of the market based on their experience with poor quality in unregulated private preschool and daycare programs. That's unfortunate, because they could learn a lot from one another and there are some natural synergies between their goals.

So, how do we get the preschool and choice movements talking? I don't think there's really much chance that they'll combine forces and form a New Pornographers-style education advocacy supergroup, but if folks were willing to lay down their biases, I think we might see some interesting conversations and collaborations emerge.