Freddie deBoer

Consider another public good: public transportation. Here you’ve got a service provided at low cost to all people that is paid for in part by tax dollars. Think about applying the school voucher model to public transportation. If people could take “their share” of the tax dollars that go towards the bus and subway and similar and apply it instead to buying their own car, would that entail choice? Sure. Would it make some people happy? Sure. And it would be a disaster in terms of good governance. It would drastically degrade the service for those who continue to use it, if the service could continue to exist at all. That individuals would have choices and be happy that they have choices is irrelevant if providing those choices hurts a public service that has been enacted through democratic process.

No one would entertain the idea of public transport vouchers. Just like no one would entertain the idea of me being able to take “my share” of defense spending and say that I’ll take care of defending myself, thanks. Government expenditure, in schools as well as in transportation and defense, is based on pooled cost and shared spending. Part of the basic logic of vouchers is founded on a phony premise: that if you subtract one student and the portion of a school’s budget that would be devoted to that student, you’re having a net zero effect on the school. That simply isn’t in keeping with the reality of how school budgets operate.

As is typical in American political discourse, voucher proponents love to focus on rights. They often talk about parent’s right to send their kids to whatever school. But of course, parents do have the right to send their children to whatever schools will have them. They just don’t have the right to use public money to do so, any more than I have the right to take public money to buy a new car. (Not that my 1998 Nissan Sentra is anything less than I dreamed it would be.) We apply voucher logic to literally no other service provided by government, and for good reason. Public services are dependent on shared access, shared costs, and shared accountability. If the public pays for a service, it has the right to run the service and the responsibility to provide oversight for it. If you don’t like that dynamic, you are essentially objecting to the very idea of taxation and democratic government.

You’ve got to understand all of this as a part of the larger conservative project: undermining all governmental and public ventures, and doing so in large part by degrading the potential for pluralism. Public education is a straightforwardly redistributive program; it’s a massive government venture; and it has been, recent concern trolling to the contrary, one of the most successful human endeavors of the last several hundred years. The rise of universal public education for all, though still not fully realized, represents one of the greatest improvements in human welfare in history. It’s no wonder that  this is threatening to conservatives, particularly because teachers are heavily unionized and reliably Democratic.

Why is Michelle Rhee a rising star for conservatives? Because she’s working to undermine what has been on balance a very successful and righteous public program. I recognize that there are a lot of principle people on the left who badly want to reform schools and improve educational outcomes. But I am consistently mystified by how credulous they are about claims made by people who hate a)government programs like public education b)unions and c)Democratic constituencies. Whenever I debate a libertarian about public school reform, I always ask: in your ideal world, would public education exists at all? If they say that they would prefer a pure voucher system where public money finances nothing but private schools, I stop listening. I don’t take opinions about reforming institutions seriously when the person expressing the opinion actually wants to destroy the institution. I’m crazy like that.

I said before that I think part of the point is not merely to hurt public education in order to move towards a privatized system, but also to erode the foundations of pluralistic society. I think that’s a big part of this. Public education is, at its heart, a radical and beautiful idea. It’s not merely that everyone should have access to education, and that we should all pay for it. It’s the idea that children from across class, racial, ethnic, and other boundaries can come together and work and learn together. They don’t merely learn the knowledge and skills that school teaches them, but how to operate in a democracy where everyone is not alike. Seeing that a multicultural, pluralistic society can work– not perfectly, not without angst, not without effort– is an essential part of a civic education. And that knowledge contributes to the understanding that society is a supporter of individual flourishing, not a threat to it, and that what ultimately benefits the individual is what benefits all of us. Urban people tend to be more liberal in part because they see every day the necessity of people working together to provide for the common welfare, which often means effective government. That in part is what vouchers threaten, as they contribute to the division of children into smaller and smaller subsections where they lack the ability to meaningfully interact with others from across the broad American range of difference, and to see the necessity of shared sacrifice.

“We’re all in this together” is a fundamental liberal insight. It’s everyone’s right to send their children off to private school for whatever reason they see fit, and many do so for exclusively enlightened motives. But to say that the public is obligated to pay for it, without real accountability and absent any meaningful evidence of superior outcomes, is nuts.

Here’s the thing in particular: I find that they love to be regarded as ethical beings. All I mean by that is that many students are genuinely charmed to be asked “what do you feel about this?” in a way that assures them that their moral choices matter. I mean, look, I’m a dork for this stuff. But I really sense a hunger there, for them to consider what they think is right and wrong with the world and for that consideration to be taken seriously. There’s just so little in the way of an outlet for that in their lives.

I tell you all of this just to point out a central problem with the constant conservative complaints about liberal bias in the university: it reflects such an insulting and wrong vision of students, that they are this amoral jelly upon which anyone with authority can project their political positions. Trust me: these kids will tell you what they think, if you just prompt them a little and show them that they are in a safe space. Whenever I read someone like David Horowitz talking about this generation of innocent youth being indoctrinated into radical politics, all I can think is “you’ve never tried to sneak a line of bullshit by a college class.” Because they will call you on that. Forcefully.

I recognize the danger that could come from instructors or professors who allow their political convictions to color their grading. But it’s worth pointing out that, for all of the millions of students in hundreds of thousands of classes, conservative critics of the academy have demonstrated almost no examples of this sort of thing whatsoever. (Michael Berube has written about this well in the past.) Of course, coercion and influence can be more subtle than that. I can only say that my own ethic is not merely to do everything I can to avoid bias against students based on their political convictions but to make my classroom, to whatever degree I can, a radically non-normative space. I can quote you chapter and verse from the theory that underlies that, but at the end of the day, it’s for them.

You never get to perfect neutrality, of course. Personally, I believe in being open about my political beliefs to the degree that the are relevant to the issues of the class, under the theory that pretending to be a man from nowhere would never really work, and that hiding my politics would be a sure signal to the students that political discussion is dangerous and that they should watch what they say. I never wedge my politics into a discussion where they don’t come up naturally, but neither do I run from that kind of discussion. It’s a fine line to walk, I know, and I’m sure I don’t walk it perfectly. But what I come back to is the simple belief that the first part of respecting their political convictions is recognizing the strength with which they hold them. I may not teach them perfectly, but I will not insult them by treating them as ciphers or simps, in the vulgar attempt to use them for partisan politics. In my short experience, I’ve had no reason to regret that stance.

Now, here, I’m on thin ice, and probably should know better than to try to voice this. You’ll have to forgive me my pretensions. But there’s another thing: they’re always leaving you behind.

I mean this in the obvious sense that semesters end and students go off on their college careers and their lives. But I also mean it in the sense that you are constantly being reminded of the temporary nature of your instruction. They come to you, looking for skills, and hopefully you teach them, and then they’ve assimilated those skills, and they’ve left your instruction behind. The better you are at your job, the less they need you. To chart the growth in a particular student’s work over the course of a semester can often be frustrating, but it can also be encouraging, and to project that growth out over the course of the next few years, inspiring. They take what they need and they leave, and by the time you get around to thinking you understand them, they’ve grown away again. And this too is my point: even if I felt sure that I had, in whatever subtle way, projected my politics onto the mind of a student, they would take that and turn it into something truly their own. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to try and deliberately manipulate a student. The target never stops moving, and that’s the beauty of it.

I’ll tell you, I worry too much about grading. It’s not that they don’t care about their work– very often they do– but that in evaluating the finished page, I’m evaluating what they no longer are. At the end of the semester, while I fret over their final portfolios, still worrying about being non-normative, they’re out living their lives and deciding the way they think the world should be. Like a child holding a cicada shell, I am delicate and tentative with what’s been left behind by a living creature that couldn’t care less about my worry.