Education Must Serve All, Lest It Serve None

In her 60 Minutes interview Sunday night, Secretary of Education Betsy Devos stated she has not visited failing schools because she wants to study what is working at successful schools. I understand the logic behind visiting such high-performing schools and championing their innovative endeavors. However, this is where a purely free-market approach to education raises its greatest threat. That's because every successful free market endeavor must segment the general public and seek to serve a specific subset of that market. Our public schools cannot - and must not - do the same. They must serve all students, regardless of geography or demography.

Thus, it is imperative that we study not only what works in successful schools, but what is behind the failure in less successful schools. The programs that work in good schools may be successful not so much because of the program itself, but because of the audience it serves. What works in Brentwood may not work in the Bronx or in an opioid-afflicted rural community. There may be factors beyond the lack of the proper program that stunts achievement.

I understand the logic and potential merits of school choice, but we must be careful that we do not do to our students what we have done to our young athletes, which is to create a system of "select" programs that do a wonderful job of serving those with the means and motivation to participate and the parental support to enable such participation, but leave behind a larger group of children with poorer instruction, fewer peers to serve as outstanding role models and measuring sticks and the stigma of being disposable.

Our nation is already well down a troubling road of creating an insurmountable chasm between haves and have-nots. The single best way to close that gap and ensure not only a healthy generation of children, but a healthy society is through universal, quality education. Studying only what works without identifying what is wrong is akin to studying disease by ignoring the sick and studying only the healthy. We can't ignore half the population. Public education must work for all students, or it will wind up working for none of us.