Review: Educational Freedom and Accountability

Second Quarter 2003

by Stanley W. Carlson-Thies

An odd feature of the heated battles in the United States over educational freedom is that so little attention is paid to ... well, educational freedom! Our battles over school choice and the desirability of vouchers focus instead on the utility of such innovations for promoting educational competition and improvements in public schooling or on their value for allowing students (predominantly poor and minority) to escape from failing public schools.

Of course, all schooling should be excellent and no student should be condemned to remain in an institution that, year after year, can only plead for more time to improve. But that doesn't mean that market-like competition is the most important aspect of educational freedom.

Two new volumes that compare education policies in many countries, start from the other end: the freedom for groups to organize schools that are religiously or pedagogically distinctive and for parents to select from among such diverse schools the one most appropriate for their own children. The books are Finding the Right Balance: Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in Education, 2 vols (Utrecht: Lemma, 2002), by Charles L. Glenn and Jan de Groof. Glenn is a professor of education at Boston University and a Fellow of the Center for Public Justice. De Groof is a Belgian education specialist active in education reform efforts across Europe.

Why do these two authors start with the freedom of schools and families rather than with the idea of market competition? The reason is that democracy ought to acknowledge the prior right of parents to determine the perspective within which their children will be educated. And because education always has to do with perspectives and virtues and not just with facts and logical connections, good schools embody one or another specific set of commitments.

But won't emphasizing freedom in this way lead to a balkanized society, the proliferation of low-quality schools, and racial and class segregation? In the second volume, Glenn and de Groof offer a series of thematic chapters on the interrelations among parental choice, school autonomy, pedagogical diversity, public accountability, and racial and economic equality. These analyses, in turn, are grounded in the data of the first volume, a set of detailed overviews of how "freedom, autonomy and accountability" have been brought into balance in 28 different countries and subnational regions, including the Anglo-Saxon and major European countries, Scandinavia, Russia, and South Africa (the overview of Italy, where educational freedom is currently a central political dispute, is included in the second volume).

Three conclusions stand out in these pages. In most democracies, although only after considerable dispute, school choice is now accepted as a basic right of parents. In almost all of these nations, the government facilitates parents' exercise of school choice by providing some or much funding for nongovernment schools. And, in a variety of ways, despite—or rather, in conjunction with—educational freedom, most democracies have devised effective ways to meet legitimate concerns for accountability, national cohesion, school quality, and racial and social justice.

Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Does Berger's pithy observation help us understand why our country has been so reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of diverse schools and of government funding of independent schools? Curiously, in Sweden these days, nongovernment schools negotiate with municipalities for full funding. And in the United States it is not just the elites but most of our fellow citizens who find government support for educational diversity to be such a strange idea. The fact is that despite our pride in our democratic heritage and our conviction that we are a beacon of light to an unfree world, we Americans remain deeply wedded to the age-old idea that the government should control schooling so that it can rightly form the minds of citizens.

To learn how odd this commitment to a single model of schooling has become among democracies, and how unnecessary it is as a means to our professed goals of equality, quality, and freedom, read these two superb volumes. They are a rich collection, factually detailed and analytically sophisticated. Anyone interested in pluralism as a dimension of policy making and a feature of democratic politics—and, of course, education policy specialists, too—should read these books.

Dr. Carlson-Thies is Director of the Civitas Program in Faith and Public Affairs and a Fellow of the Center for Public Justice.