Vouchers, School Choice and the Publics Interest Essay -- Persuasive

School Choice and the Publics Interest   Recent trends toward privatizing schools and relieving them of state requirements wrongly imply that schools should mirror the desires of parents and ignore the publics interest in having citizens educated for democracy.   purloin Reich, who recently earned his doctorate in philosophy of education at Stanford, is writing a book on school vouchers, charter schools and home schooling. Reich utter his view that the nation is slipping too far into deregulated schooling. The guiding idea behind privatization, whether it is vouchers, charter schools or home schooling, is that parents should be the sole decision-making agents about the mixture of education their children receive. But this eviscerates the public or civic purposes of schooling.   Public schooling itself is not the goal, he said, and public schools dont necessarily do better than private schools in educating children to meet the states interests, which he defined as pr eparing children for both workforce and democratic participation. Those who joined in the discussion pushed Reich to specify the content of an education for democratic participation. just about would say reading and writing is enough, he responded. Personally, I would go a few steps further to say that students should learn to come into dialogue with others on a public stage. Voluntary national standards for civic education suggest a combination of making sure students know the history and shape of the grammatical construction of government, and how to influence public deliberation and policy, he said. Others suggest experience-oriented programs, often called service learning. My model has been the Socratic dialogue, where the teacher is a leader and p... ...ploded among white, middle-class, religious families who want to a greater extent control over the values their children are exposed to or who fear for their childrens safety, Reich said. Im convinced that further privatizati on is inevitable, he added. Supporters have framed the argument for it as a civil rights issue or a matter of social justice. he said. People say President Clinton sent his daughter to private school. If we are austere about social justice, we should give all parents the same choice that wealthy parents have. How would he change the situation? Reich was asked. I can imagine a flesh of institutional arrangements only if where private schools are still subject to state oversight, he said. Perhaps public dollars could flow to them if the curriculum met the states interests. A democracy has needs, but that doesnt mean public schools have to meet them.