This is the latest post in our series on the center-left roots of school choice.

Surprising things sprout in the ideological compost that sustains the school choice movement, but not all grow to bear fruit. At the risk of jinxing their viability, let’s pause to marvel at the first shoots of an organic hybrid: Sprawl-hating, choice-loving Green Apples.

Over the past year or so, a handful of “conservative” and “libertarian” think tanks and media outlets have thankfully drawn attention to the potential for expanded school choice to curb sprawl and benefit the environment (see here, here, here and here). As often happens with arguments about educational freedom, they dovetail nicely with positions advanced by folks from other perches on the spectrum.

Like Elizabeth Warren.

In her 2003 book “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren, now the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, boldly makes the case for “an all-voucher system” that would “shock” an education system that she says remains “public” in name only. Why would iconic “progressive” Elizabeth Warren want to shock public education with more choice? Because, she says, in no uncertain terms, doing so would expand the diversity of educational offerings, empower parents over bureaucrats and ease the “crisis in middle-class economics.”

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education. Bad schools impose indirect – but huge – costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy. The only way to take the pressure off these families is to change the schools.

Warren doesn’t include private schools in her universal voucher solution, but let’s give that a pass for now. (Hopefully we can more fully explore her positions on choice down the road.) Instead, let’s highlight the fact that Warren backed the notion of choice as a brake on sprawl:

If a meaningful public school voucher system were instituted, the U.S. housing market would change forever. These changes might dampen, and perhaps even depress, housing prices in some of today’s most competitive neighborhoods. But those losses would be offset by other gains. Owners of older homes in urban centers might find more willing buyers, and the urge to flee the cities might abate. Urban sprawl might slow down as families recalculate the costs of living so far from work.

The links between schools, zip codes and sprawl are obvious and, I think, deserving of more attention. I would think arguments for weakening them would resonate especially well with environmentalists; with the liberals, progressives and Democrats who are more likely than others to consider themselves environmentalists; and with mainstream news media looking for fresh angles on a complicated problem with repercussions in many directions. But will they?

On the one hand, the arguments for choice as an antidote for sprawl are still relatively new (as far as I can tell), so I won’t leap to my own conspiracy theories about why they haven’t surfaced with more zeal in more places. 🙂 On the other hand, as long as choice continues to be portrayed as right-wing, and as long as it’s “conservative” or “libertarian” groups who make the points, I fear it’ll be tougher for those arguments to bounce out of the echo chambers. So, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

For what it’s worth, Elizabeth Warren wasn’t the only one talking choice and sprawl a decade ago, and not the only one whose credentials appear to be something other than “conservative.” In 2005, writer Daniel Akst made this pitch in the environmental news outlet Grist: (more…)