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Ashley Rogers Berner doesn’t like the term “school choice.”

The director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, she thinks that language presumes too much about how education should be delivered in a free country. Sure, it seems to suggest, there are options out there — Catholic schools, charter schools, Montessori schools, take your pick — but the default is the local public school into which families are zoned. Anything else is just an anomaly.

Many other nations, including some that have been operating schools for much longer than the United States, don’t see it that way.

Just 30 percent of Dutch children attend their equivalent of district schools, with the rest enrolled in a variety of secular and parochial academies that all receive support from the state. Australia’s federal government is the most significant funder of private education, helping to subsidize the tuition of a huge number of economically disadvantaged students. Singapore, perhaps the most famous academic powerhouse in the world, directly funds private and religious schools attended by a diverse mix of pupils.

The overarching concept is one Berner calls “educational pluralism”: Governments don’t favor one system or model, but all are held to common academic standards. Parents can send their kids to an Islamic school, but they must learn the tenets of Christianity and Judaism as well; similarly, students at creationist-minded institutions have to demonstrate knowledge of the processes of evolution in their biology classes.

The idea is unfamiliar to most Americans, who grew up in school communities that all straddled a central divide of private versus public. Those favoring secular instruction have recoiled at the thought of public aid flowing to religious institutions since the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.

The last few years have seen an explosion in school choice systems, including the streak of red states establishing education savings accounts, which grant families money to spend on schooling costs, including private tuition. This spring, in the ultimate clash of public authority and private conscience, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency seems likely to escalate the tension between warring camps. But in her 2024 book, Educational Pluralism and Democracy, Berner argues that a considered embrace of diverse worldviews can actually be a salve to cultural conflict by separating two key functions of schooling. No matter where they attend class, all children receive academic instruction in core subjects like math, literacy, science, geography, and languages. But the work of imparting ideals and moral values can differ according to the preferences of families. At the heart of pluralism, she says, is the acknowledgment that schools are character-forming institutions by necessity.

“Education cannot be neutral,” Berner said. “It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin.

In an extended conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, the author and academic spoke about the possibilities for more pluralism in the wake of the national ESA wave, the unexpected consequences of the end of school prayer, and why she feels schools get it wrong by trying to build students’ skills instead of knowledge.

You’ve been writing about the idea of educational pluralism for some time now. What led you to it?

Ashley Rogers Berner: I came to educational pluralism because of the shock of living in another country and realizing that their framework for education was entirely different from ours.

I went to Oxford to get my doctorate when my children were in elementary school. When it came time to enroll them in schools, I was confronted with a panoply of state-funded options. And it didn’t take long to realize that this division we’re so familiar with in the States, public versus private, just didn’t apply. The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.

At the same time, my doctoral research allowed me to learn a lot about how schools were funded in the 19th century. That’s how I discovered that the U.K. has funded educational pluralism since 1833, and they were taking their cues from Prussia, and the Netherlands has been on a similar journey since the time of the American Revolution.

I realized, “This could change our whole conversation.” This zero-sum game of pitting sectors against each other is not only dysfunctional, it’s actually rare. We’re the outliers.

You say something similar in one of the book’s early chapters, describing pluralism as “countercultural” to what we do in the United States. Why is that?

It’s countercultural in two respects.

First, a plural system assumes a certain level of diversity by design. It assumes that the government should not dictate students’ beliefs and values, so you need to support a variety of institutions. The fact that that is taken for granted is totally countercultural to what we expect of education, including the binary of public versus private. Even the language of “school choice” derives from an expectation that the district school is the only carrier of public education, and any departure is basically asking for an exception from that. I don’t tend to use the word “choice,” even though it’s the American terminology, because it just reinforces those assumptions.

And just as important, it’s countercultural because of the importance of shared content taught in schools. At its very best, a plural system is one in which the ethos of each school should be distinctive — but there is also some kind of shared academic material across all kinds of schools. That’s how you fulfill the civic mission of public funding for education, by having some basic content in common in order to teach kids to exercise effective citizenship. Some examples would be historical documents, the geography of the country and the world, the markers of history, comparative religion and ethics, basic literary references, etc.

That second aspect goes against the grain of what we do in the United States because our teaching profession has opted in favor of skills and process over content for 100 years. Many of our teachers have come up in a system that says that learning something specific is less important than learning how to learn and that setting goals for knowledge-building is somehow oppressive. It’s countercultural to say that building knowledge really, really matters for closing achievement gaps.

I’ve sometimes considered it strange that kids learn very different material depending on where they live. But it sounds like you’re saying that’s only half the picture: Teaching differs a lot across state lines, but our system is also very rigid about only wanting to fund local public schools, plus the occasional charter.

That’s right, and I think it’s a losing proposition to offer children a really uniform structure and really eclectic content. Wealthy kids are going to be better off in any system because their families take them to museums and talk to them about the world all the time. But this is really the worst of all possible worlds for first-generation, low-income families: There’s a rigid structure in which parents do not have agency about where they enroll their children, but also really patchy content where kids miss whole areas in the English curriculum.

The uniform structure was built by design after the Civil War, and it was the product of an unholy alliance between nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Republican Party. Up to that point, we had funded all different kinds of schools, but there was suddenly concern that all these Catholic immigrants just couldn’t become competent citizens, and all the variation between schools was going to undermine democratic formation. So lawmakers at the state level decided to defund “sectarian” schools — which meant Catholic schools — and only fund district schools. But those same state legislatures then turned around and required that district schools be, in effect, Protestant institutions with Protestant prayers and Protestant Bibles.

To me, this history makes the core point of pluralism: Education cannot be neutral. It’s going to inculcate some values in children, however thin. And interestingly, one of the big Progressive complaints about district schools is that — because they can’t answer some of the deeper questions with explicit moral frameworks — they unintentionally reinforce the baseline culture of the United States of individualism and utilitarianism. It’s just going to default to whatever the cultural majority is.

Whatever schools do to build character, or civic virtue, or whatever, doesn’t seem to be producing great results. There was a really startling survey in 2023 showing huge declines, among younger adults especially, in the importance attached to patriotism, family formation, hard work, and community involvement. Meanwhile, well over half of Generation Z has said they would choose to be a social media influencer over any other career.

I’d make two points. One is that the civic outcomes we care about, whether it’s volunteering or civic participation or affirming others’ right to disagree with your views, are learned behaviors that have to be explicitly taught. And we’re not doing that; classrooms aren’t really places marked by a lot of deliberation and debate.

But it’s also true that those outcomes are the byproducts of deeper sets of belief and moral frameworks about what it means to be human. For a long time, Catholic high schools have been great at producing graduates who give back to their communities. It’s very difficult to analyze what about that is coming from the direct influence of schools, but eminent researchers like James Coleman and Tony Bryk have looked at the data and said, “There’s something about this organic community that forms a certain kind of person.”

You can’t control people’s beliefs, and you can’t control outcomes. But in the aggregate, you can make it more likely that your students have a sense of duty to something outside themselves.

You list a lot of places — England, Australia, the Netherlands, Israel, Hong Kong, Belgium — in which the government directly funds private schools, including parochial schools. But do those countries deal with the same constitutional issues we face in the United States? Things may be changing at the Supreme Court, but my guess is that until very recently, the Establishment Clause would have been a massive obstacle.

That’s a fair question. Obviously, England has a state church. But the Netherlands has had a secular constitution since the end of the 18th century, and they’re the most pluralistic system in the world. They fund 36 different kinds of schools!

The argument for pluralism is not a religious argument. It’s a principled argument about political philosophy and the role of civil society, but not one that gives special pleading to religion. The Anglican Church is a huge provider of elementary education in England, yes. But in another pluralistic country, Sweden, only 3 percent of non-state schools are religious because the population is mostly secular and doesn’t want those schools. It varies quite a bit.

But in a country like the U.S., there would presumably be a huge appetite for direct government funding of Christian schools. And the political opposition to that kind of shift would also be huge, right?

There’s the reality of our separation of church and state, and there’s the mythology of it. When you look at the Supreme Court decisions over the last century, there have consistently been mechanisms that allow state funds to flow to civil society organizations that include religious institutions.

The landmark ruling with respect to schools was Zelman v. Simons-Harris [the 2002 case in which a conservative majority ruled that Ohio’s school voucher program did not violate the Establishment Clause], where the Supreme Court said very clearly that these programs are constitutional as long as the state laws authorizing them are neutral. In other words, if the state law sets out to give low-income kids either state funding or tax credit funds to go to a private school, it’s constitutionally viable even if every school that families choose is religious. It’s robust because it’s the result of private decisions.

There are now lots of state mechanisms that support private schools. Florida has had a tax credit program for 20 years, the outcomes of which have been studied by the Urban Institute. Low-income kids who attended private schools on tax credit support scholarships had higher college-going and college graduation rates than their peers. Indiana has had something similar for a long time. And this isn’t just in conservative states. Illinois had a bipartisan tax credit for a brief episode. D.C. has one. A state as blue as Maryland has one, with a built-in requirement that money can’t go to a school that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

So there are a lot of levers that states can use. What you want is for high-quality private schools to participate, but you can’t impose so many regulations that the best schools opt out.

How long have American kids mostly attended public schools that are, as you put it, “uniform” in their outlook? You draw attention to an event that I haven’t thought much about in the context of education policy: the Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned school prayer. What was the importance of that decision?

Public education had a particular kind of uniformity from the end of the 19th century. After that, public schools were basically Protestant institutions all the way through 1962, when the Supreme Court effectively secularized them.

Up to that point, they were uniform, vaguely Protestant schools, and if you were Protestant, you probably didn’t notice it. But if you were Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or Jehovah’s Witness, you knew that the schools your children attended were values-laden institutions that reflected the majority culture. Following Engel v. Vitale, schools were still uniform, but now they were secular.

That was when you started to see the evangelical grievance about taking God out of public schools. That cultural animus came from a decision that I think was completely correct, but evangelicals experienced a sense of loss.

It seems like that moment unsettled a lot of families who had unconsciously believed that public schools were meant to embody their own worldview and values. And throughout the 1960s and ’70s, you start seeing the origins of what will become the movement for both school choice and homeschooling.

You’re right that those decisions in the 1960s spawned a whole host of church-based schools to spring up, including evangelical schools. There was some religious homeschooling as well.

But there was also a concurrent movement on the progressive side that was called “deschooling.” When you look at the history of the homeschooling wave, it included evangelical pietists as well as people in the hippie culture, who thought school bureaucracies were oppressive and conformist. I wrote a report last spring that looked at the criticisms of district schools that grew out of the Left during those years, and it was interesting to note the parallels.

The school choice movement has gotten a lot thicker. There’s a whole strain that emerged among progressives who were concerned that district schools weren’t serving African Americans well, and that helped build the charter movement. Even long before that, there were Freedom Schools in the South in the ’60s. Some of the biggest champions of educational pluralism were radicals in that period. Look at Howard Fuller, who eventually launched Milwaukee’s voucher program. He was a civil rights activist, and he’ll still say, “Let this community regulate its own schools.”

You write that the case for educational pluralism is connected to a need for more emphasis on knowledge and content-rich teaching in schools. You’re arguing that knowledge has been crowded out, to an extent, by things that have variously been called “social adjustment” or “21st century skills” or “social-emotional learning.”

In the book, I call it, “anything but the academic curriculum.”

The consequence of that long-term trajectory toward teaching skills, which has been written about by people like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch and Natalie Wexler, is that we have generations of teachers who haven’t worked in knowledge-building classrooms. When my colleagues at the Institute for Education Policy work with states to help them adopt high-quality curricular materials, we also try to push them to allocate resources toward professional development so that classroom leaders know how to teach it well.

The great thing about a historically pluralistic system like the U.K. is that they have both a large variety of schools and a knowledge-rich curriculum. The people leading classrooms had to pass serious exit exams to graduate and demonstrate that they actually knew the content they were going to teach, whether it’s history or philosophy or English. So there’s a virtuous cycle where young people learn a certain amount of shared content; they have to pass content-specific exams to graduate; then they get more of the same while preparing to be teachers in university. And by the time they’re in a classroom talking to an eight-year-old about the Greeks and Romans, they’re confident in that knowledge.

In the United States, we haven’t had the same virtuous cycle. So there’s a lot of work to do, including in professional development.

Do you think the way we approach instruction has something to do with the way the teaching profession is thought of in the States? A lot of teacher training seems to prepare them in disciplines like child development and theories of pedagogy, rather than just pushing lots of academic content that they can later teach to kids.

I spent a lot of time studying the history of teacher training institutions in the U.K. Going back many years, they were seen as both cultural and academic institutions that tried to impart cultural experience to teachers — many of whom came from the lower-middle classes in England — as well as knowledge. In the United States, these programs also had these two functions of building up knowledge and expanding access to cultural experiences such as theater or live debate.

But there was a shift within the profession that eventually led to the emphasis of skills over knowledge. In the early 20th century, there were voices within the field of teacher preparation that wanted programs to be based in universities as opposed to local communities. The key lens was essentially meant to be child psychology, so by the ’20s and ’30s, everything became very influenced by the psychoanalytic model, and teachers were supposed to know all about Freud and child development. That kind of thing became the currency of teacher preparation.

England actually also went down that path, but the ministry of education kept the curriculum knowledge-based. So whatever else was going on in the training programs, aspiring teachers had graduated high school with subject-matter expertise. They came back from the brink, but we haven’t here in the States. To this day, our teaching programs are not institutions that really promote knowledge building. Just look at the science of reading.

How do these dynamics influence policy discussions? It’s unclear how this debate involves teachers’ unions, for example.

There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.

We need to push against both those dogmas because they’re distorting of what healthy school systems need in the long term. That’s why I’m attracted to the pluralist vision: It acknowledges the rightful role for the parent, it acknowledges the rightful role of the state, and it locates the delivery of education in civil society and voluntary associations. No system is perfect, but I think this vision does a good job encompassing all of those realms. It’s a third way.

Do you think it’s a philosophy that is so attractive that most developed countries are just inevitably going to adopt it?

I’m on the board of an NGO [non-governmental organization] that works on educational pluralism and has privileges at the U.N. I’ve learned so much just from the U.N. covenants that affirm the rights of cultural minorities to enroll their children in schools that reflect their values — and the obligation of the state to ensure quality. Both of those things are there, and they’re both practiced in so many countries.

Internationally, the historic practice in many, many countries has been to support nonprofits and religious groups to deliver education. According to UNESCO, 171 out of 204 countries are pluralistic in some fashion. But there is a huge pressure against those funding systems, and it’s coming from both the international teachers’ unions and a number of NGOs that have some animus against religion.

There have been a lot of conversations at UNESCO wrestling with these questions. What do you lose if you say that only the state can deliver education, and how does that comport with the organization’s human rights documents? So these arguments are very much international.

Where are you looking for signs about the future viability of a more pluralistic system? It seems as though there’s still room for growth in state ESA systems, and the Supreme Court has taken up the case of a proposed Catholic charter school in Oklahoma.

I’m not someone who thinks that all school choice systems have to offer religious options, and I don’t think that more state funding for private schools is contingent on that Oklahoma case. The funding is already happening, and there’s a wide array of state policies making it possible.

You’ve got Iowa, where ESAs can be applied to any private school. I’m personally a little more skeptical of the ESA in places like Arizona or Florida, where parents get a lump sum and a huge menu of options. I’m skeptical that that’s sufficient quality control to drive better outcomes. No doubt it’ll work fine for most families, but will it work for a majority of families? Will it actually change academic outcomes? I’m not sure it will.

What I’m hoping will happen is that the momentum to expand options will be met with a reasonable concern for academic quality. That’s where centrist Democrats can come along and be supportive. The teachers’ union was able to kill the school choice legislation that went through in Illinois, but that law was bipartisan. There was support for more funding for district schools, funding for tax credits for low-income kids to go to private schools, and the requirement of an assessment for those students.

I think that’s a reasonable approach. I’m looking for the grand bargains that can sustain education into the future. For me, it’s not just about destroying the situation we have; it’s about making sure that all families can choose among good options.

How would you accomplish that? Should big school choice expansions always be accompanied by a curricular or accountability reform, including testing if necessary?

Texas is actually doing this. They’re starting to change their curriculum, and while they’re unlikely to command all funded schools to use some individual curriculum, there are ways of incentivizing the use of better curricula across the board and testing the knowledge base.

In places like Texas, the horse is out of the barn. It’s going to be a school choice state. The question is, how do you protect quality in the long run? Should all participants have to take a nationally norm-referenced test? Most private schools require their students to do that and report the scores to the state. But if you’ve got a plug-and-play ESA model where parents can buy a trampoline here, a homeschooling curriculum there, it’s pretty hard to ensure that children are getting an appropriate education. So in my view, you have to test outcomes.

We all get attached to things that don’t serve us well, and that’s true of parents and schools along with everything else. Even a miserable school, whether it’s public or private or charter, can win the affection of parents who don’t want to shut it down. So it seems like an appropriate goal of public policy to make sure that bad providers don’t get into the market to begin with.

Look at the Drexel Fund, which helps high-quality, low-cost private schools scale up. Well, if I were expanding access to private schools, I would want those Drexel Fund schools to be able to grow rapidly in my state. We should go where the high performance is, where there’s already attention to detail and quality. We simply don’t have enough good seats right now.

What was so great about Florida is that they built it slowly, and the market responded. There are schools for autistic kids, schools for kids with dyslexia. But it’s taken time. We need stability around high-quality providers, and we need to remember that we’re educating for a purpose: civic preparation, academic capability, and social mobility. If we’re not doing those things, we’re failing.

We have to keep these purposes in mind. There’s confusion around some of these points because of the political dogmas on both sides. To teachers’ unions, I would say that the key question can’t just be how school choice will affect district schools. District schools are a means to the end. I also would say to libertarians that parental choice and autonomy is a means, not the end itself.

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