Despite Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ narrow confirmation vote, Democrats scored a victory in the court of public opinion. Republican lawmakers in purple states faced protests and angry constituent calls. An online poll conducted by the Baltimore Sun found that 55 percent of respondents felt that DeVos was a threat to public education. Social media was ablaze with criticism of DeVos and her support for school choice, including a popular conspiracy that Republicans plan to make the country dumber and more intolerant to benefit themselves in future elections.
Lost in the fray was any evidence for an educational apocalypse. That omission is unsurprising: the best evidence suggests that DeVos’ unapologetic support for school choice poses no threat to American civil society.
A peer-reviewed Journal of School Choice article I coauthored with Jay Greene, “The Effect of Public and Private Schooling on Anti-Semitism,” employed a national random sample of 1,500 adults to test if childhood schooling is related to anti-Semitism. We found that, controlling for a variety of background characteristics, adults educated in Catholic schools were significantly less likely to report anti-Semitic views.
Our methodology does not allow us to conclude that those adults were less anti-Semitic specifically because of the time they spent in Catholic schools (that would require an experiment in which individuals are randomly assigned to private schools), but it does square with other evidence that choice schools are adept at promoting unity compared to public schools.
Indeed, previous research by Greene, David Campbell, Patrick Wolf, and other scholars indicates that private schools in voucher programs are more integrated than traditional public schools at the school and classroom level.
This raises the question: Why might private schools hold an advantage over traditional public schools in promoting tolerance?
One sensible explanation is that Catholic schools, which account for the greatest share of private school enrollment, promote social justice and mutual understanding as tenets of pedagogy. Moreover, while public school attendance is determined by residence and highly segregated on socio-economic lines, Catholic schools are diverse in terms of race, social class, and even religion. They are bulwarks against the Balkanization that critics of school choice fear.
Some evidence suggests that the benefits of private schools in combatting anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance are not limited to Catholic schools. Private schools generally are afforded greater freedom of expression and curriculum than public schools, which are constrained by institutional neutrality. Work by Charles Glenn, Anthony Bryk, and other scholars indicates that private schools have the advantage of allowing students to freely discuss uncomfortable topics that public school teachers avoid for fear of sanction.
While public schools are trying to teach tolerance through platitudes and pro-diversity preaching, private schools have opened the floor to meaningful discussion.
A simpler explanation is that more tolerance reflects more learning, since most research indicates that private schools deliver somewhat better academic outcomes, even when controlling for student characteristics. Private schools might simply be better than teaching tolerance of Jews just as they are better at imparting knowledge.
The benefits of private schools vis-à-vis civic values are not confined to integration and prejudicial attitudes. Other studies suggest that they may also hold an advantage in promoting voluntarism, civics knowledge and political participation. A report that I will soon deliver at an Association for Education Finance and Policy conference provides evidence that Catholic schools increase voting turnout, an important measure of civic health.
This is not to conclude that vouchers and charter schools are a panacea, as it is impossible to conclude that scaling up vouchers or charter schools will produce the same results. What the evidence does suggest, however, is that doom and gloom prognostications are premature: properly constructed choice schools have the potential and perhaps an advantage to promote a more tolerant, progressive, and unified union.
Ian Kingsbury is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
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