In K-12 education reform, we have a bad habit of using jargon that creates more confusion than clarity. Perhaps the worst offender is “school choice” — with “accountability” and “autonomy” not far behind.

It’s not always clear what people mean when they refer to school choice. Schools as organizations make thousands of choices on a daily basis, from the most existential (the purpose of education) to the most granular (what day to serve fish sticks in the cafeteria). What interests me is whether and how communities (including parents and students, particularly those furthest from opportunity) get to make choices about their schools. Making a choice is an act of power, one so often denied to people from systemically marginalized communities. But is the competition to define school choice only an act of power? Is there a moral framework to serve as guardrails on how that power is exercised? 

Over the years, I’ve observed four distinct ways that stakeholders define the meaning of school choice — all of which are rooted in how each group considers the question of power. 

Definition #1: School Choice = School Contract  

Stakeholders focused on the idea of school choice as a school contract are preoccupied with who has the power to operate a school — including public district and charter schools, parochial schools, private schools, microschools, and home-schools. This includes funding mechanisms like vouchers and education savings accounts as an enabler of various types of school contracts.   

Different contract models are attractive to different stakeholders, and competition is a necessity to create pressure for change in failing school systems that are not successful at transforming on their own initiative.   

However, a contract that confers power must also include accountability requirements; stakeholders with power must be held responsible for a school’s results. Unfortunately, some school contracts — even those in traditional districts — fail to enforce accountability with actual consequences for poor performance. It’s even harder to enforce accountability when there is no unanimous interpretation of what makes a school “good.”  

Definition #2: School Choice = Better School Chance  

Under this definition of school choice, additional school choices are created, but not enough to provide space for all students in failing schools, and there is not a guarantee that even these new options are always better.  

This interpretation refers to a pragmatic, and laudable, short-term goal of increasing the number of good schools (we’ll come back to this concept of good in a moment) but doesn’t in the short-term eliminate all bad or failing schools. It focuses on improving the odds of getting into a “good” versus “bad” school — but not the certainty. Not surprisingly, this definition isn’t satisfying for anyone over the long term. 

Definition #3: School Choice = A Good School  

A third group of stakeholders focus on exercising their power to ensure every student gets to attend a good school. However, there is no national consensus on what makes a good school. Even members within a single community may struggle to agree on what a good school provides and produces.   

Why is this? People have different learning strengths and struggles, aptitudes and appetites, values and beliefs. A student who is wildly successful at School A, which emphasizes classroom work and testing, may not be successful at School B, which focuses on experiential learning and independent pathways development — and vice-versa. Both schools may be good in delivering against their academic model, but they may not be good for the same students, families, and even whole communities. This multitude of different needs cannot be contained in a single definition of a good school. 

Definition #4: School Choice = Diverse Selection of Good Schools  

My preferred way to think about school choice is to consider a range of good school options but it’s the hardest to implement. This definition of school choice requires that: 

• Schools invest the time to understand the full, complex range of (sometimes conflicting) definitions of a good school choice within a community.   

• Communities have the resources to create a broad range of good schools that can actually deliver on these diverse definitions of good school choices.  

• Schools precisely diagnose the needs of each student and how they (and their family) define a good school and then match students to the right schools. They must also then periodically reexamine if a given school continues to be a good match with a student’s changing educational needs.  

• School systems maintain excess capacity in each of its good schools to make sure there are open slots for any students whose educational needs change.  

Without this combination of requirements, we risk students getting stuck in a poor school choice for their learning needs, which reverts to “school choice = better school chance,” although hopefully with a higher minimum floor of overall performance.  

All of these conditions must also be present in small communities, especially where there is only a single school. Even in large urban districts it can be challenging to add new schools (politically, operationally, financially) — though there are innovation zones looking to reinvent district schools, and of course this is one of the crucial roles of public charter schools.

In smaller communities across the country, and in particular rural communities, a diverse array of good schools is logistically and financially impossible. Rural communities educate 10 million children — nearly one-fifth of the country’s public K-12 students. These communities simply don’t have the resources to open a completely new school to add to a range of good school choices, so school choice requires exploring ideas like schools-within-schools, microschools, and returning to the potential of personalized learning.  

Ideally, every community has a school system (even if that system is a single school) that embraces the diverse definitions of good that exist within its borders. 

We know this definition of school choice can exist in practice because we see it in affluent communities, where wealthy people can buy their choice of schools, either through tuition to private or parochial schools or through their mortgages in quality public school districts, along with all the supplemental choices they can purchase if their school doesn’t meet their child’s specific needs and wants, from tutoring to extracurricular activities.  

Even within this fourth definition, there is still the question about who gets to exercise their power to define what makes a school good.  

What happens when we don’t agree with another family’s or community’s definition of “a good school choice?” Is there a moral framework (e.g., a set of rules that can be equally applied to all) that would help us navigate this? Or is it really just a power struggle? 

A moral framework for school choice requires that every family can define and pursue their definition of a good school. The power that allows a family to choose a school organized around the content of Reconstruction, which provides an unapologetically Black-centric and Black-celebratory education, is the same power that enables a different family to select a school grounded in a world religion that teaches creationism. While I may agree with one of these and not the other, in this moral framework my views are immaterial, no matter my level of comfort or discomfort.  

However, we do need some guardrails on how people exercise the power to define a good school. Some things are outside my personal guardrails, like teaching that there were two sides to the Holocaust or promoting a pro-Nazi home-schooling system in Ohio.   

Yet imposing guardrails gives others license to do the same. If I impose my own guardrails, we have reduced this from a moral framework on school choice back to a struggle for power over who makes the choices (which, to be fair, I would hope to win — but so would everybody else).  

We need a moral framework that allows for an expansive definition of school choice that both enables and provides limits on how stakeholders exercise their power of choice.  

The first rule of this kind of moral framework should be recognizing that the power to choose a definition of a good school for your child does not give you power to make choices for other people’s children. Some recent school choice movements aren’t really about gaining the freedom to choose, but rather about groups imposing their definition of “good” on others and removing the freedom of choice. This can range from banning books to dictating curriculum to making schools non-accepting and unsafe for some students. These are manifestations of the power to hypocritically impose one person’s definition of a good school on another person.   

The second rule of this kind of moral framework should be recognizing everyone’s right to exist, regardless of their choices. People of good conscience can disagree and often do — there is no avoiding that. But I think there is a way to put a moral limit on disagreements, which Robert Jones Jr. (though often attributed to James Baldwin) adroitly articulated: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”   

It shouldn’t be hard for everyone — no matter their position — to abide by these two rules.  

And those who can’t might want to be careful. If they reduce defining a good school choice to the raw exercise of power, they might not like what happens when the winds of power shift.