Educational justice: back to basics

Is government obligated by its jural mandate to recognize the prior right of parents to educate their own children? If one recognizes that governments, and the democratic majorities behind them, have normative limits placed on their authority, then I believe that it is indeed so obligated. It might be useful here to link to several articles dealing with this issue from the website of the Center for Public Justice, written over the past 15 years or so: "Completing Freedom with Justice in Education," by Charles L. Glenn; "True Education Reform Requires Equal Treatment Under the Law," by James W. Skillen; "Parental Involvement in Education," by David Van Heemst; and "Educational Choice Won't Work Without Perestroika," by James W. Skillen. A good book-length treatment can be found in Skillen, ed., The School-Choice Controversy: What Is Constitutional, reviewed here. Here is Skillen on the subject:

Government's job is not to try to monopolize educational service, but to do justice to the variety of services rendered by parents, teachers, churches, and schools in the education of children. A just public system will build up unity in the midst of diversity not at the expense of diversity. Government should use its public power to guard against racism and poverty, to overcome the growing gap between the educated and uneducated. And it can do this better by upholding a genuinely pluralistic system in which all choices count equally.

And here is Glenn:

Freedom is without meaning if you cannot exercise it. We have, in this country [i.e., the US], educational freedom only for those with money. The National Center for Educational Statistics estimated, several years ago, that 70 percent of the families with incomes over $50,000 had chosen the schools their children would attend, through residential decisions or through paying tuition or through using public school choice and selection programs. For those with low or moderate incomes, educational freedom is an illusion. That is why all the surveys show that the population group showing least support for educational vouchers is white suburbanites. The groups expressing most support for vouchers are black and Hispanic urban residents in the age category with young children.

Perhaps it's finally time to abandon the notion that a one-size-fits-all school system is capable of doing justice to all families, whatever their foundational religious commitments.