Opposition to School Choice and Status Quo Bias

Many Americans enjoy a good deal of school choice even if they don’t have access to a formal school choice program. Buying a house because you want your children to be educated in its school district amounts to shopping for schools just as much as using a voucher amounts to shopping for schools. Vouchers simply give poorer families some of the freedom that richer families already have.

Of course, many people oppose voucher programs that would increase school choice. Here’s a hunch: status quo bias—our tendency to stick with the current state of affairs even when switching things up would be better—might be playing a role in opposition to school choice.

To guard against this bias, we can use the reversal test. Suppose you oppose the use of biotechnological enhancement to increase human life expectancy. Now ask yourself if you’d support decreasing human life expectancy. Probably not. So you support neither increasing nor decreasing human life expectancy, meaning that the status quo just so happens to get things exactly right. This is of course possible, but it would be a rather convenient coincidence. At a minimum, this convenient coincidence should prompt you to consider that your opposition to changing human life expectancy is due to status quo bias.

Circling back to school choice, opponents of vouchers oppose increasing parents’ effective freedom to move their children to different schools. But would those opponents of vouchers also support decreasing parents’ effective freedom to move their children to different schools? For instance, we could imagine a school departure tax—if a family moves to a new city and thus sends their kids to a different public school, they have to pay a tax used to finance the public school they left. I suspect most opponents of school choice would reject this tax. So they’d support neither increasing nor decreasing school choice—meaning that the status quo just so happens to get things exactly right. This convenient coincidence suggests that we should consider the possibility that at least some opposition to school choice is due to status quo bias.