We fight a lot about education in the United States. That’s always been true, particularly for cultural and racial minorities. Think of Catholics in the 19th century, Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 20th, or African-Americans throughout U.S. history.

But since COVID-19 shuttered public schools across the country, conflict about schools has reached a higher, and more public, pitch. The polarization of education policy reflects familiar patterns: on the Left are public-sector unions who insist that only the public school (or “district school”) counts as “public education.” On the Right are libertarians who believe fervently in giving parents a bucket of money for their children’s education and calling it a day, sans public guardrails around academic quality. Education research is often weaponized, either to show the superiority of charter and private schools or, alternatively, to impugn their benefits.

Meanwhile, our students’ academic performance is well below that of our democratic peers, even when controlling for family background. Who can be satisfied that only 31% of U.S. 4th graders and 35% of 12th graders can read “proficiently” – “proficiency” itself being a low bar? More than 60% of U.S. students are unprepared for college, career, or the U.S. military. The systematic under-challenging of U.S. students should be a five-alarm fire.

Can we get through this morass and out the other side, transcending zero-sum partisan politics and instead preparing the next generation to work, live, and thrive in a plural democracy – no matter where they’ve gone to school?

We can. In fact, most countries already do. That’s because most countries already support a school choice system that also monitors and demands high-quality academic content. This is what I have called “educational pluralism:” it means that these governments fund a wide variety of schools (religious, secular, pedagogical) but also expect all of them to impart shared knowledge in the major subjects. Nor are pluralistic systems rare; quite the opposite. A full 171 out of the 204 countries UNESCO recently surveyed partner with non-state actors to deliver public education. This is news to most Americans, as is the fact that several key human rights instruments endorse the rights of cultural minorities to educate their children according to their families’ values.

What does this look like on the ground? The Netherlands funds 36 kinds of schools (e.g., Montessori, Jewish, secular) on equal footing. Australia’s federal government is the top funder of tuition to private schools, many of whose students come from the lowest economic quartile of the country. Sweden and Poland let funding follow students to their school of choice. Nations as different as Colombia and Nigeria include both state and non-state providers in their education systems. The list goes on and on because most countries have plural school systems.

Furthermore, the most academically successful plural systems also require critical common content to be shared across all these different types of schools. Students take subject-specific exams every few years that, unlike the skills-based assessments our states administer, actually require mastery of core knowledge.

The English government, for instance, has funded religious schools since 1834 and secular schools since 1870.  But all students, in all schools, have to learn about diverse religions and philosophies across their K-12 experience. The Netherlands even funds creationist schools, but kids in creationist schools have to demonstrate competent knowledge of evolutionary theory. Indonesia funds Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, and secular schools, yet requires them to teach 80% of the national curriculum. Inuit, Catholic, and secular schools in Alberta use the same instructional framework but deliver it through their distinctive community lenses. Plural systems distinguish between the ethos of schools, which they expect to be different from one another in meaningful ways, and the instructional content these schools provide, much of which is common to all.

As the data show, the combination of choice and academic rigor contributes to positive academic and civic outcomes. By providing many different types of schools, this combination also mediates political polarization.

Enabling school choice matters, first, because education simply cannot be neutral. It is impossible to design a disciplinary code, hire teachers, or even conduct classroom instruction without relying on some kind of normative claims about what matters and why. Even the questions that are not allowed to be discussed are tacitly instructive. Because democracies cannot endorse moral orthodoxy without trespassing on minority views, most fund a wide variety of schools.

Second, many reasons exist for why a particular school might not “work” for a particular child. The measure of a school system’s justice is not whether wealthy families benefit (they always will; think about buying one’s way into a “good” school district), but, rather, how readily non-wealthy families can access an outstanding education that works for their kids.

Third, offering a mosaic of school models engages the power of civil society institutions. Schools provided by the voluntary sector answer to both the state and the individual but are owned exclusively by neither.

But school choice has to be accompanied by rigorous requirements that focus on transmitting academic knowledge. This is very different from the emphasis on skills or process (the “skill of learning how to learn”) that has characterized American education since John Dewey.  In contrast, providing background knowledge has been proven to be key to closing achievement gaps. Focusing on “learning how to learn” fails to give first-generation students what well-off families take for granted: substantial background knowledge about the world’s history, geography, art, music, and so on. Shared knowledge is also vital to social cohesion in heterogeneous countries. Common reference points enable what E.D. Hirsch called “common speech communities,” or the “often unspoken background knowledge and values that ultimately enable citizens to understand one another and function effectively.” Indeed, the research documenting that specific, subject-specific knowledge trumps “skills learning” is so compelling that continuing emphasis on the latter is irresponsible at best.

Academic knowledge is also the foundation for successful adult citizenship. Given that only 12% of high school seniors are “proficient” in U.S. history, you realize how little we can take for granted.

The “choice plus accountability” of educational pluralism offers both a challenge and an opportunity. It challenges the district-school-only default of the teacher unions and resists the libertarian cry for unfettered markets. It challenges all of us to support schools we wouldn’t send our own children to. 

But the opportunity educational pluralism offers is remarkable: the possibility of creating space for shared knowledge while honoring, in institutional form, philosophical and religious differences.

More states are moving in this direction. Despite the inevitable lawsuits from teacher unions, most states are expanding access to non-public schools; despite objections from libertarians, most of them also require measures of participants’ academic achievement. Furthermore, left-of-center advocates like Democrats for Education Reform are joining centrist and center-right organizations to bring both sides to the table. Maybe in another thirty years, we won’t be fighting about whether “school choice” is good or bad but, rather, the best way to help all students, in every school, succeed.