Of class and classes: Glenn Reynolds

The long knives have come out for Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. But her critics aren’t attacking her because they think she’ll do a bad job. They’re attacking her because they’re afraid she’ll do a good job. But I think that her success will be important, if you care about addressing inequality in America.

What DeVos’s critics hate most is that she’s an advocate of school choice. DeVos supports charter schools, education vouchers, and other ways of letting parents control where their kids go to school. The people who hate this idea are mostly, in one way or another, people who instead want a captive market of taxpayer-funded pupils. But what’s good for politicians, administrators, and teachers’ unions isn’t necessarily good for kids.

The other day I noticed a series of tweets from photographer Chris Arnade, who specializes in portraits of the parts of America that aren’t doing well. Arnade stressed that the big source of inequality in America is cultural, rather than economic. The values that are extolled by what he calls the “front row kids” who run things (Joel Kotkin calls them the “gentry liberals”) are those associated with fancy education, and it’s hard to get ahead without knowing them.

Even as we’ve had more talk about economic inequality, the lines of social inequality have hardened:

You are made invalid, and so are your views, if you cannot speak as we speak. Eat as we eat. Dress as we dress. Properly pronounce. The tools to remind you of your place — that you are uneducated — are satire. Mocking. Condescending. Smug. Disdain. Or just dismissal.

You’re not going to acquire that polish in the public schools if you’re poor. Public schools are sold as promoting equality, but in practice they’re more likely to reinforce inequality. People with money move to “good” neighborhoods, and they do it “for the schools.” People without money generally live in “bad” neighborhoods, where the schools aren’t very good and probably won’t teach their kids what they need to know to get ahead.

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Of course, as Lucinda Rosenfeld wrote recently in The New York Times, “the most privileged segment of society does not use the public schools at all.” Rich parents send their kids to private school.

Poor parents can’t afford to do that, but school choice, of the sort that DeVos has championed, would give them the chance to do so. The problem is, giving parents choice in where to send their kids is very bad for the existing public schools, because given a choice, so many parents choose to send their kids elsewhere.

Even without vouchers, many public school systems are in trouble because parents see that they are inferior, and scrimp, save, and maneuver to get their kids into better places. Since the kids whose parents care that much about their education tend to be the better students, their departure makes the public schools noticeably worse, leading to further departures. As I noted in my book, The New School, in a number of cities this has led to school closings and teacher layoffs, as failing public schools can’t retain enough students to stay in business. As black Atlanta educator Nikita Bush says, “people are starting to realize that public education in America was designed for the masses of poor, and its intent has been to trap poor people into being workers and servants. If you don’t want that for your children, then you look for something else.”

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If leaving lousy public schools gets easier, still more people will leave and these problems will grow. This won’t be bad for the kids, who’ll be going to better schools. It’ll be bad for the teachers, administrators and union officials who depend on the existing schools to maintain their jobs.

Remember this when you hear people arguing that school choice is a tool for destroying public schools. The truth is that when public schools are good, most parents won’t bother with vouchers or charters. But when public schools are bad — and they often are — school choice will allow people to escape, and do better.

As Arnade notes, education has become our big class signifier. If you want to help poor kids get ahead, then you need to support school choice. If you want to keep poor and minority kids in their place, then by all means trap them in failing public schools.

We know what DeVos wants to do. And we know what her critics want, too. So when these issues come up during her confirmation, keep that in mind.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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