I feel better when I make my own choices in life. If I had children, I know I’d take an active role in making my own choices for their education. Most of the parents who ask me for advice on schools like to make their own choices, too. From their feelings, and my own, I conclude that choice is the core issue for Americans and their schools, and that creating more and better choices is the central mission of reform.

However, when I counsel parents, I mention that many of us have a tendency to think that we are looking for “good schools” for our kids when what we’re really looking for is a set of thoughtful and caring adults and other kids we’d like ours to emulate.

Neither of these things is constrained necessarily by a school. Nor is either necessarily negated by a lack of school choices.

In the hundreds of schools where I’ve worked—even those I judge to be the least effective—there have always been some great adults and some wonderful children. The choice, then, as I see it, is not in choosing a school but in choosing the human beings I want my child to interact with at school.

Does this play into racism and other human failings? For some of us, possibly. But it also plays to the truth of what most of us want for ourselves and for our children in terms of personal agency and positive influence.

Moreover, I have found that what I want for children is often far stronger than any prejudice I may hold, and that with the full exercise of conscious choice, my prejudices diminish over time. For example, finding the right teacher for a child often crowds out other agendas—even when I am rife with fear about almost everything else.

So is it community involvement that’s most important here? I don’t think so. I think it’s choice, but not just choice of schools; choice within schools is, in practice, far more important. Why? Because most families have only a few choices of which schools their kids will attend. Once in a school, however, there are often many opportunities for parents to choose the people their kids interact with.

The best path for parents in facilitating the best education for their children sounds like this to me: “Know my kids. Know my kids’ teachers. Know my kids’ friends. Know how to put it all together in the best way possible regardless of the school my child attends.”

I remind myself that schools don’t teach kids, people do. This is an effective mindset whether I like my school or not, or whether I had any role in choosing it. When I do this well, I not only ensure kids a better school experience, I model for kids what they will have to do for themselves when they make their own learning choices in high school, college, work, and in all aspects of their lives where I am not the dominant influence.

There are two groups of children I see who don’t get a lot of what they need in this regard: disadvantaged kids whose families may not have the energy or experience to work the system; and the children of affluent suburbanites who assume that any school their children attend (public or private) is a “good school” by definition. Sadly, many of these well-intentioned parents turn off their radar and their advocacy based on the assumption that zip code (or tuition) guarantees quality educaitonal experiences for their children.

Does the larger community play a role here? If so, it’s a minor one. As a community member, I pay my taxes (and generally don’t oppose tax increases for schools); I support wise school board candidates; and regardless of everything else, I take a pro-learning/pro-kid position on issues rather than an ideological stance I might otherwise hold. In the grand American tradition of enlightened self-interest, I think of my community involvement in schools as serving my own desire to have well-educated community members living alongside me in the future.

The United Way study suggests strongly that people think “faith communities need to play a greater role in helping children succeed”. I do not; I think we all need to play a greater role. Why are faith communities so often singled out as being the communities we want to help our schools? I want other communities to help, too, don’t I? Moreover, why do we think of community support for schools as being factionalized by definition? Why can’t we all support our schools? Sharing the load, rather than compartmentalizing it, is more conducive to creating a stronger communal bond.

These days, when I hear the phrase “community involvement in schools”, I read it with a lot of subtext attached. It’s code, I believe, in many cases, for a kind of influence that I don’t think is always productive or even appropriate. Yes, communities pay for their schools, and community members have a right to express their opinions and cast their votes. But schools created by and for the public are best supported by the public at large. Laying the responsibility off on a single subgroup may be convenient but it is certainly not optimal.

The key to powerful school and community relationships is people in schools who know what they’re doing and community members who support them in doing it. Absent clear and strong leadership from schools, community members and their organizations can’t really know what support is needed or how to provide it.

The best school-community relationships arise when schools go first in defining the interaction. In order for communities to have the strongest positive impact, schools must accurately identify key areas of need, goals for improvement, and means of implementation. After that, schools must engage community members transparently regarding support for specific and meaningful purposes.

The path to helping children succeed, then, doesn’t initially involve communities at all—even faith-based communities. Rather, the path begins in school communities with the adults who define them and the actions and attitudes they bring to their work. Next, parents must have both inter- and intra-school choices along with any support they may need to exercise wisely their right to make choices. Finally, and only then, does direct community support make sense. After all, what is the purpose of community support, if not to support its families and its schools?

David Mathews, former Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Gerald Ford, has posited that NCLB was really the result of a grand miscommunication between the public and the politicians. He noted that the public was clamoring for more responsive schools: they felt the schools were ignoring their interests and input, so they went to the politicians demanding action. The politicians interpreted this as a demand for accountability, and were happy to comply.

But responsiveness and accountability aren’t the same thing. Just think: ten years after NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, who exactly is happier with public education?

The school choice debate seems to be a similar situation. I don’t believe that the public is clamoring for choice; rather, they are continuing to clamor for responsiveness. Choice may be a component or an expression of that, but it’s not the core issue.

As can be seen in the United Way report, the public feels somewhat shut out of their schools. They are disappointed and discouraged by the state of their schools; when they try to help, many feel unwelcome. Of course, this is not universal: there are plenty of examples of strong community/school relationships out there. But there are more than enough of the poor relationships as well, and lots of problems could be fixed if those relationships were to improve.

How do we fix it? It’s not easy – but others have done it, and we can learn from them. It starts with building relationships: getting school leaders into the community, and bringing the community into the schools. It requires building a common language: as anyone who has worked on partnerships understands, school and community leaders lack a common language, and are missing an understanding of the other’s perspectives, constraints, and motivations. Finally, it takes the building of a shared vision for what schools do and how they do it, and a commitment – and investment - from both sides to make it happen.

This is a guest response from Neal McCluskey, Associate Director at Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute:

Looking at the evidence suggests that school choice is the best educational system to build strong communities. A lot, though, depends on how you define “community.”

Diane Ravitch essentially defines a community as a “neighborhood,” and certainly neighborhoods can be a form of community. But neighborhoods are hardly close to the only type of community, and to the extent that neighborhoods – or, given education reality these days, school districts, states, and the federal government – often include people with very diverse backgrounds, desires, and norms, public schools can be very destructive to social cohesion.

Start with simple logic: If diverse people are required to support a single system of schools, is it more likely to result in unity or conflict? The answer, of course, is conflict. If people cannot agree on what math curriculum to use, they have to fight it out politically. If they cannot agree on whether or not there should be school uniforms, they have to fight that out. Indeed, any disagreement has to be resolved in a political arena, and the term “arena” certainly does not connote cohesion.

We see this forced conflict manifested constantly in education. States and communities are regularly inflamed over the teaching of human origins, whether we’re talking Scopes Monkey or Intelligent Design. We have disputes of which religious groups will get their holidays off from school. And then there’s the ever contentious teaching of U.S. history.

And conflict is only one manifestation of the division caused by trying to bring diverse people under a single government umbrella. Renowned social capital theorist Robert Putnam has found that where there is significant diversity there is also major atomization – people “pull in like a turtle” – quite possibly because they have few recognized, shared norms to hold onto. So not only don’t you have cohesive – but separated – groups, you have seriously compromised intra-group cohesion as well. Communities of all types are weak.

How do you overcome these very real problems through the education system? Let people choose schools – especially private schools – with the money that currently all goes to public schools. Then, not only can you phase out the inherently adversarial system that is public schooling, you can empower people to choose schools based on their shared norms and values.

But won’t this “balkanize” Americans? Maybe, in that many people will choose to attend schools with people like themselves. That, though, is certainly preferable to forcing us at each others’ throats. Moreover, there is evidence that allowing people to choose schools helps to meaningfully overcome serious divisions. Research by Jay Greene and Nicole Mellow, for instance, found that lunch tables – where students sit by true, voluntary choice – at private schools were better integrated by race than those at public institutions. Why? There could be many explanations, but a very reasonable one is that the ties that bind kids at private schools – common religious values, perhaps shared interest in a particular curriculum – help to overcome divisions such as race.

Does more work need to be done to prove that choice is crucial to building communities? Absolutely. Unfortunately, for the most part we haven’t even considered that government schooling might be more divisive than unifying, despite the very real – and painful – evidence that that could indeed be the case. Well, we need to seriously consider the possibility that choice is better mortar for building communities than government schooling because, respect for “neighborhood schools” notwithstanding, the evidence in favor of choice – and against government schooling – is both real and mounting.

In the past, school choice advocates used to claim that competition would improve the local public schools, but they seem to have given up on that hope in light of Milwaukee's twenty years of vouchers. In Milwaukee, there has been no improvement in the Milwaukee schools and continued unimpressive results for students in voucher schools. So now choice advocates claim that school choice builds community. But communities of choice come at a high price, because they cause collateral damage to neighborhood schools.

The best way to build community is to strengthen neighborhood public schools. After all, children and families live in geographic communities, where services and problems are mutually experienced and affect everyone. Democracy begins in local communities, where neighbors have the opportunity to work together to improve their neighborhood and solve its needs.

Unfortunately, school choice programs today tend to shatter neighborhoods and to set neighbor against neighbor. In New York City, for instance, charter operators flood neighborhoods with flyers and invitations to enter their lottery. They make extravagant (and often untrue) promises about the academic advantages their school will offer. The leadership of the city's Department of Education locates most charter schools in regular public school buildings, despite the overwhelming opposition of families whose children already attend the local public school. At public hearings, neighbors argue with each other about the city's plan to insert a charter into the local school, knowing that it will take space away from existing programs.

So, in this city, possibly others too, school choice has become a battering ram to disrupt communities, to set parent against parent, and to create dissension.

It was often said in recent years that it take a village to raise a child, but the advocates of school choice eagerly set members of the village in opposition to one another. Instead of uniting around the common needs of their children, parents are encouraged to compete with one another and to battle over space and resources. School choice creates a mentality of each one for himself and his children, rather than a sense of shared responsibility for the children of the community. Meanwhile, the wealthy supporters of school choice policies, many of them graduates of elite private schools, whose own children attend elite private schools, fund the disarray and enjoy their victories. The end result is not stronger communities, but the disintegration of natural communities, the places where families live.