Among the best and most eye-opening books on education I’ve read in the last decade is Ashley Berner’s Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School (Palgrave, 2017). Having spent not a single minute of my career focused on international education, I likely would have assumed if asked that “public education” means the same thing everywhere as it means in the United States: a system of government-funded, government-run schools that a majority of children attend. Any exception to this—private or faith-based schools, for example—would be considered “non-public” just about everywhere.

Not so. Berner, who is the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, made the point that other democracies are far more likely to practice “educational pluralism” than the US—systems where the government funds all manner of schools on an equal footing, but it doesn’t necessarily run them. The Netherlands, for example, supports 36 different types of schools with vastly different cultural, pedagogical, or philosophical approaches. “The difference,” Berner wrote, “is that in educationally plural systems, many types of schools are considered to be part of the public education system.” In the US, by sharp contrast, “our imaginations and our public debates remain captive to the existing paradigm in which only district schools are considered truly public,” she observed.

As I noted last week, several states have recently proposed or adopted universal “education savings accounts” (ESAs), which transfer to parents a percentage of a state’s per-pupil spending, in most cases between 85 and 95 percent, to pay for private school tuition, books, tutoring, or other education programs and resources. I reached out to Berner last week to ask if the groundswell of support for ESAs that we’re now seeing presages an emerging age of educational pluralism here in the US.

Not necessarily, she said. Pluralism is not just a clever way to say “school choice.” Neither is it a simple matter of the state ceding control—and its interest in the education of children—to parents. But do ESAs move us closer to the more capacious definition of public education familiar to most other countries? “It depends,” she told me in an interview published at the website of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “I find pluralism arresting because it generates this middle path between the individual and the state. It doesn’t valorize parents, and it doesn’t valorize the state. It creates space for both. I’m interested in creative ways to get us there in a system like ours that’s not used to those concepts.”

It’s possible that a market for low-cost private and religious schools may emerge, newly eligible for public funding, such as the network of planned classical Christian academies announced last week by Arizona’s Great Hearts charter schools. But at least in the short-term, ESAs seem more likely to be used by parents to create a bespoke education, catering to their child’s specific interests and needs, not necessarily based in a single school, or any school at all. Pluralism “doesn’t just support diverse school types—it also requires all of them to reach a specific academic quality,” Berner concluded. “If ESAs jettison all public assurance of quality, I would be pessimistic about their long-term success.”

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