Individualism: The Answer to Our Ailing Public Schools?

William Schambra, of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center, believes that parent choice contributes to positive variety in the school system. “It trusts parents to select the schools best for their children, even though they choose a bewilderingly diverse array of educational settings, in defiance of one-size-fits-all experts,” he says.

It is believed by a large number of conservative foundations that the current public education system is broken. In NCRP’s Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement, several of these foundations state that the greatest victims of today’s struggling system are children of lower income families.

Former board member of the Bradley Foundation, Pete DuPont, says of low-income people, “If you give them the opportunity to go to a school of their choice and opened the market up to creating those schools, there’s a practical thing you could do that would help the lower-income and disadvantaged people in this country, and it would be individualism as opposed to the collectivism of the education system.”

Do you agree with Mr. DuPont’s individualism vs collectivism analysis? Is a market-based education system the answer to our ailing public schools? Are there others ways that foundations can help strengthen our school system without privatization?

Click here to view NCRP’s new report, Strategic Grantmaking: Foundations and the School Privatization Movement.