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Students in a public school in Minnesota.
Minnesota state legislator Roger Chamberlain, a Republican from suburban Lino Lakes, drives home his point about public education in Minnesota with a sledgehammer: “Government schools are not written on a tablet as the best educational option ever in the history of the world.”
Chamberlain is chair of the Senate’s Education Finance and Policy Committee, and he recently helped usher an E-12 funding bill (the E is for Early Childhood) through the Senate while arguing successfully for the inclusion of a school voucher provision.
The dearth of affordable, available early childhood education is also leading to limited opportunities for women who might like to advance in their careers.
This provision would cost around $250 million over the next four years and would allow families to receive the state per pupil dollar amount (currently around $13,000) in lieu of sending their children to a local public school.
The student’s district would then be docked the same per pupil amount, in the interest of, you know, better serving kids through competition and school choice. (Disclaimer: kids are typically not better served by privatization schemes fueled by school choice.)
To uphold the bootstrap myth of U.S. life, Minnesota families could then apply their portion of the state’s education budget to the private school of their choice, no matter what kind of programming or outcomes that school might offer.
This effort, led by Chamberlain, reflects a decades-long attempt by Republicans to undermine public education for political and sometimes religious reasons. But let’s get back to a point he made recently.
When questioned by reporters about the school voucher line item he helped push through, Chamberlain turned the tables on those who would scold him for supporting such a measure.
After decrying “government schools,” he pointed out that Minnesotans are already used to having a menu of choices for preschool and later for college, but not when it comes to the K-12 system.
While he is wrong that school choice doesn’t exist at the K-12 level in Minnesota (he might want to read up on the history of both charter schools and open enrollment policies here), Chamberlain is right that we have grown accustomed to the privatization of education in preschool and college.
In Minnesota, as in the rest of the country, high-quality preschool or childcare is mostly a private luxury, not a publicly funded right.
We have Head Start and a smattering of other school-based early childhood programs, but nothing as comprehensive as universal preschool for all kids—despite long-standing legislative efforts to make this happen.
Instead, in Minnesota we have a voucher program known as Early Learning Scholarships, which allows parents with young children to shop around for a childcare or preschool program, with partial tuition help from the state. But this option is not equivalent to a fully funded, universal public preschool program, and it currently has a long waiting list.
While Chamberlain may equate this with choice and freedom from government control, many parents, locally and nationally, are facing a severe lack of early childhood care and education options, leading to the proliferation of “child care deserts,” as The Washington Post put it.
Economists and those steeped in common sense will tell you this is a problem both socially and financially, as evidenced by the large number of women who have dropped out of the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to care for their children.
This stands in sharp contrast to what writer David Treuer found when he traveled to the Tulalip Indian Reservation in Washington State.
There, he said recently, the Indigenous population has used earnings from their casino to create a “vibrant, expanding middle class,” most notably by funding “first-rate, free childcare” from birth all the way through afterschool programming.
Rather than invest in families and publicly funded education, however, Minnesota and most other states have largely backed away from a commitment to do so, thereby making both college and preschool an expensive, exclusive proposition.
This is especially true for families of color, and particularly for those who are struggling financially.
A 2019 report by Leila Schochet of the Center for American Progress discussed the situation in depth, noting that programs such as Head Start are “chronically underfunded,” depriving children of color in particular of access to a high-quality, affordable preschool option.
Schochet’s report deemed the lack of child care and preschool programs a crisis, especially for women of color and their families, and linked it to the high rate of child poverty in the United States. The dearth of affordable, available early childhood education is also leading to limited opportunities for women who might like to advance in their careers.
Still, Chamberlain has framed the Minnesota Senate’s education funding bill as liberating because it is “light on mandates” and designed to tackle racial disparities in the state’s education outcomes by encouraging the further privatization of public education.
It is easy, and politically expedient, to give at least a nod to racial disparities. They are real, in Minnesota and the rest of the country, and they have been baked into every facet of our society.
But we have tried the choice-based approach favored by Chamberlain and other Republicans for at least two decades now, with little to show for it except more racial inequality and more childhood poverty.
With Joe Biden in the White House, however, we have another way to look at these problems.
Rather than continue to let the pro-market, anti-“government schools” contingent dominate the public narrative around education, childcare, and equal opportunity for all, it seems worth it to rally behind the comprehensive policies contained in Biden’s American Families Plan.
For one thing, the plan’s proposal to fund four additional years of public education for all students, from universal preschool for young children through two years of free community college, could indeed have the kind of liberating effect Chamberlain wrongly claims his school voucher plan would provide.