With the Star Tribune series "Students in flight" (Sept. 17 and thereafter) showing students exercising school choice, and an editorial concluding that the competition can cause school districts to improve their schools, it feels as if the policy discussion about public education has crossed a watershed.
The series was picked up nationally, its authors interviewed by the radio service of the Education Writers Association.
This transition in thinking is leaving behind the notion cherished by districts that students are "our students" and education funding is "our money." It's a notion still evident, though, in the description of the students exercising choice as "fleeing." (Did people "flee" from landline phones to cellphones?)
Yet the new thinking is leaving behind the public-utility model of public education that Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, called "a system that could take its customers for granted." Also left behind is the inequitable arrangement in which choice was available only to those financially able to buy into the district they wanted.
We're probably also leaving behind the traditional model of standardized school. (Not without reason were teacher-training institutions long called "normal" schools.)
It's clear now that public education is a multisector system. Choice is free, and here to stay. Districts have to persuade their students to come.
A member of the St. Paul school board told me they knew a third of resident students were not choosing the district schools. "It's an open system," he said. "We have to make our schools attractive."
For a time choice will produce, in the charter sector, a few single-race schools. These are not "segregated" schools. Segregation was about people in power telling people of color they were assigned to separate schools. We can tolerate some first-generation Americans — Asian and African — making this choice for themselves.