Ramesh correctly notes the anti-religious bias at the heart of many arguments against school choice — arguments often made with little regard to the First Amendment. The ancillary argument he mentions, that public schools are “one of the few experiences that most Americans share,” is also worth refuting.

It is a noble aspiration to say that a public education system should provide a uniform level of education to every child everywhere. But we know that the public education system cannot actually do this, based on decades of experience.

If it is true that public schools are an experience most Americans share, then why are property values so strongly correlated with school district boundaries? Why are parents willing to spend thousands of dollars extra on a house to be in one school district rather than another?

They know that the allegedly uniform public school system is anything but. They know that their children will get a better education from some districts than they would get from others.

They aren’t wrong to think this. Any measure of student performance (attendance rates, graduation rates, test scores, college acceptance, etc.) will generally show that suburban districts perform better than urban or rural districts. Students in urban or rural districts simply do not have the same experience as students in suburban districts.

The top-performing public schools are generally magnet schools, the entire purpose of which is to not provide the same experience to everyone. They often have entrance exams to select for certain students likely to perform well in a different environment.

The allegedly uniform public education system is doing such a great job that basically anyone who is rich enough takes their kids out of it and sends them to private school instead. Are these parents, many of whom serve in positions of power in the government and in civil society, inherently less civic-minded? Is the poor black mother who would give anything to send her son to a private school but can’t afford to do so betraying our national unity?

When students go to college — and remember, college-bound students are the top performers, who the education system has presumably served fairly well — they will often be amazed by how different their education was from their classmates. Few people are under the impression that every state, county, and municipality provides anything like the same public education experience to everyone.

Until you start to talk about education policy, that is. Then, all of a sudden, everyone forgets everything they know about the actual school experiences they have had and recites sentiments about how valuable the uniformity of public education is and how it brings the country together.

Public education isn’t uniform, and it doesn’t bring the country together. School choice is a policy response based on the recognition that education not only is not uniform, but should not be uniform. All children do not learn in the same way, and the government should not expect them to. Expecting them to has led to today’s education dystopia, where students in allegedly unifying public schools have completely different experiences and many, especially the poor, are failed altogether.

On education, it is the left that is nationalist. They wax poetic about national unity, and they support the socialization — another word for which is “nationalization” — of primary education. They do so in the face of reams of contrary evidence, for the benefit of teachers’ unions and to the detriment of students. The U.S. must move beyond education nationalism to have an education system that better serves the nation.