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This review has been accessed times since June 25, 2009

Feinberg, Walter and Lubienski, Christopher (Eds).  School Choice Policies and Outcomes: Empirical and Philosophical Perspectives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press Pp. vii + 242          ISBN 978-0-7914-7571-3

Reviewed by Quentin Wheeler-Bell
University of Wisconsin

June 25, 2009

School Choice: Polices and Outcomes by Walter Feinberg and Christopher Lubienski could be read as individually standing essays put into one work; however, doing so would mean the reader overlooks the importance of this book. Even though each article can stand on its own, it’s best to read the entire book because it is a well sustained dialogue between scholars expanding across disciplines. The book is well arranged, with each essay building upon the philosophical and empirical complexities of school choice polices. The organization and dialogue occurring across disciplines is why this book is an important contribution to the school choice debate. Even though the book is not organized as follows, for my review I will separate the book into three sections: The philosophical section is comprised of chapters 1-4 , and the empirical section is comprised of Chapters 5-9, while chapter 10 is the concluding essay.

The four essays in this section address the normative claims behind school choice policies. Drawing upon liberal democratic theory, each essay analyzes the role parental choice ought to have in a liberal democratic society. Rob Reich, in his insightful opening essay entitled “Common Schooling and Educational Choice as a Response to Pluralism,” claims that parents should have “some” choice in their child’s education because parental liberty is a necessary derivative from a liberal democracy’s respect for pluralism. Reich goes on to claim that parental liberty must be balanced with a liberal democracy’s common educational goals, so that parental liberty aligns with a democratic education.  

Harry Brighouse and Ken Howe, in two separate essays respectively titled “Educational Equality and Varieties of School Choice” and “Evidence, the Conservative Paradigm, and School Choice,” complicate the moral foundations of school choice policies by considering the context in which choice polices are enacted. Harry Brighouse argues that parental choice must be enacted only if it advances, or at least does not compromise, equality. Brighouse goes on to analyze two school choice policies—one in Milwaukee, WI and the other in United Kingdom—in light of equality and concludes both policies advance certain aspects of justice while leaving others behind. This essay does not offer much for those already familiar with Brighouse’s (2000) book School Choice and Social Justice. Ken Howe challenges Brighouse, not so much on his philosophical principles but rather on his interpretation of empirical evidence around school choice.

Walter Feinberg

Howe illustrates how choice polices are dictated by the conservative paradigm, which is not entirely concerned with equality based reforms. Howe analyzes the empirical evidence on school choice policies and explains how these policies are primarily promoted by the conservative paradigm, which is steeped in a neo-liberal agenda. As Howe explains, the conservative paradigm wants to “marketize” education through choice-led reforms which deem choice valuable for choice sake, undermining equality-led reform.

Kathleen Knight Abowitz’s article entitled “Intergenerational Justice and School Choice” provides new insight and is well worth reading because she encourages philosophers to open the “black box” of education and to consider the content of the curriculum as well as the form of the policy. Rather than looking at school choice solely from the perspective of distributive justice, she adds a twist to the debate by encouraging philosophers to consider school choice polices in light of the multiple facets of justice (distributive, recognition, and intergenerational). Therefore, according to Abowitz, when determining if school choice polices advance justice philosophers must consider distributive as well as intergenerational issues.   

For those unfamiliar with the philosophical debate around school choice, the four essays are well worth reading. For those familiar with the debate, Knight’s essay is particular worth reading for the above reasons.

Christopher Lubienski

The five empirical essays address the historical, social and cultural circumstances affecting a parent’s ability to access the benefits of school choice polices. Unlike the philosophical section each empirical essay focuses on a different empirical question of school choice, therefore I will address each essay individually. Generally speaking, each essay takes a critical perspective towards school choice policies by analyzing how choice polices (re)produce forms of inequality. Christopher Lubienski begins the empirical analyses by considering the extent to which quality information is widely available to parents and how this information affects parent’s decisions. Parents need, as Lubienski explains, three dimensions of information to make informed choices: insight into the productive process, understanding of the nature of the good or service and finally, information that encourages horizontal and vertical differentiation. Lubienski looked at forty websites that provide information to parents and found that only a small percentage of websites offered parents with the three dimensions of information needed to make informed choices. Lubienski found that most websites provided information primarily based upon outputs, such as graduation rates, drop-out rates, etc., rather than inputs, such as the school ethos or the curriculum’s mission.

Courtney A. Bell, in her essay “Social Class Differences in School Choice”, explains how rational choice theory is inadequate for explaining parental school choice. Bell “examines the assumptions of exogeneity by investigating the relationships between parents’ preferences and the social context of the local school market” (Bell, 2008, p. 121). Furthermore, Bell explains how social, cultural, and historical contexts shape parental preferences, which in turn make difficult for choice models to predict parental preferences. As a result, rational choice theory must be amended to consider how parental choices are shaped by, and change because of, social processes such as educational opportunities.

In “Managers of Choice,” Janelle Scott explains how “new school managers,” or school leaders who come from outside the traditional educational establishment, are influencing educational polices and are using choice polices to restructure school systems. However, most of the new school managers are white men from the private corporate sector going into inner city schools of color. By operating outside of the educational establishment, new school managers are displacing many of the teachers and administrators of color. Historically, people of color have struggled to be represented in educational positions, especially within inner city schools; however, because managers of choice are able to circumvent the traditional educational established they can replace inner city teachers with white-male corporate élites. As a result, the managers of choice are undermining the struggles made by people of color.

Liz Gordon, in her essay entitled “Where the Power Lies,” uses Foucault’s conception of power to explain how school choice polices are part of a multinational movement and that one effect of this movement is the reproduction of inequalities by reinforcing the notion of ‘top end schools.’ She explains how school choice polices are framed within a discourse that associates school productivity with the private sector and school failure with the public sector. This discourse reinforces competition between schools, especially between public and private schools, by differentiating schools based upon prestige. As a result, “top end schools increasingly respond to top-end parents, to ensure their market dominance is maintained” (Gordon, 2008, p. 190). 

Bekisizwe Ndimande in “Parental Choice: The Liberty Principle in Education Finance in Postapartheid South Africa” analyses school choice policies within context of South Africa. Ndimande explains how the marketization of education has increased racial segregation by shifting educational responsibility from the state to the individual. By shifting educational responsibility to the individual, the state sheds itself of the responsibility to remedy the atrocities caused by apartheid. This, in turn, allows private elite schools to maintain structural barriers such as high tuition, preventing poor black South Africans from accessing elite schools. Therefore, even though South Africa is considered to be in a post apartheid era, educational segregation is maintained because educational responsibility has been shifted to the individual.

Overall, the empirical section is insightful and worth reading, especially to those unfamiliar to the school choice debate. One interesting philosophical question, among many raised within this section, is: “Does the public sphere expand or contract the expansion of school choice polices?” However, one downside to the empirical section—which is only properly noticed by a philosopher—is that many of the easy questions begin with larger normative claims but then fail to address these normative claims in light of their finds. This slight downside, however, reinforces Rob Reich’s intentional assertion that school choice is inherently tied to normative issues.

Walter Feinberg concludes the book with a wonderful essay entitled “The Dialectic of Parent Rights and Societal Obligation: Constraining Educational Choice” where he provides a philosophical (re)examination of the school choice debate in light of the different issues raised by each contributor. Feinberg explains how school choice is caught in “the dialectic of parental rights and social responsibility” (Feinberg, 2008, p. 220), in which parent’s rights matter; however, they must be considered alongside larger egalitarian reforms. Feinberg rightfully explains how choice can best address this dialectical problem when “it operates within a background of taxation that takes into account differences in the ability of parents to educationally advantage their children.”(Feinberg, 2008, p. 220)  School choice, according to Feinberg, should not be altogether rejected; rather it must be crafted carefully to consider issues of justice.

For those unfamiliar, but concerned about the school choice debate, Choice: Policies and Outcomes is a definite read. If you are more familiar with the debate, then this book is definitely worth perusing. On the whole, this book does an exceptional job of addressing the complexities of school choice policies, especially considering how the conservative paradigm has framed these policies. The importance of this book is two-fold: first, it is thoughtful, well-organized, and draws on diverse scholarly traditions. Second, it attempts to challenge the ideological aspect of the conservative paradigm. Those of us who envision an egalitarian society must struggle over the legitimacy of concepts, because political struggles must take place ideologically as well as politically, socially, and culturally (Gramsci, 1992). By engaging in an honest and thoughtful philosophical and empirical investigation into school choice, this book attempts to wrestle the notion of ‘school choice’ away from the conservative paradigm and properly place it into the framework of equality-led reforms, which value parental liberty. 

References

Brighouse, H. (2000). School choice and social justice. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Feinberg, W., & Lubienski, C. (Eds.). (2008). School Choice Policies and Outcomes. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press.

About the Reviewer

Quentin Wheeler-Bell
University of Wisconsin
Doctoral student, Educational Policy Studies--Educational Philosophy
Interests: Critical Theory, Normative Philosophy, and Critical Pedagogy

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