The empowerment and transformation of parents into active agents is the
foundation of educational choice theory. As a review of any literature on the subject of
choice will indicate, parents are the primary advocates for school choice. A strong
correlation has long been noted between parental involvement and children’s success
in school. Parents who advocate choice have asserted consistently that they consider their
children’s education a significant responsibility. The concept of choice takes full
advantage of parents’ valuable knowledge about their children and their respective
talents, abilities, and learning styles. This information equips parents to make optimal
choices about where their children should attend school and what kind of school might best
suit their children’s temperaments. Parents thus have the opportunity to become
active agents in their children’s education. Rather than be intimidated by this
responsibility, parents who are able to make choices about schools generally feel
empowered, which allows them to continue to play a full, active role in their
children’s education. 8
A second reason parental choice works is that it allows educational programs to be
tailored to the needs of individual students, not simply provided as a one-size-fits-all
package. In what has become one of the seminal works on the educational choice movement, Politics,
Markets, and America’s Schools, John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe explain that the
system of public education created in the early twentieth century "was bureaucratic
and professional, designed to ensure, so the story goes, that education would be taken out
of politics and placed in the hands of impartial experts devoted to the public interest.
It was the ‘one best system.’"9 As they argue against the
one-system concept, Chubb and Moe emphasize the role that a market system could play in
education:
A market system is not built to enable the imposition of higher order values on the
schools, nor is it driven by a democratic struggle to exercise public authority. Instead,
the authority to make educational choices is radically decentralized to those most
immediately involved. Schools compete for the support of parents and students, and parents
and students are free to choose among schools. The system is built around
decentralization, competition, and choice.10
The work of Chubb and Moe underscores a basic tenet of choice—the idea that
competition will enhance the diversity and the quality of the entire educational system.
As parents choose schools for their children, the schools they leave behind are forced to
improve in order to compete; engaged in competition, these schools provide the energy for
their own regeneration, thus improving the entire educational system.
The market approach that provides the philosophical underpinnings for the concept of
school choice acknowledges the truth about children as students: that they have different
educational needs and learning styles, and that they have a right to seek out a school
that will best match their needs and aptitudes. The market system can offer diversity in
the type of education offered to students as well as improved quality of the schools.
