Blog: Education and the Common Good

In the previous blog post “Four Principles”, we looked at the four basic principles Church teaching provides as a moral framework for assessing policy positions and political participation generally. In this post, we will examine how these principles can be applied to a key education policy issue: school choice programs.

As Catholics we are called to participate in political life.1 But what should this participation look like? What types of policies should we support, defend, or oppose? Even narrowing the scope to education policy, there is a vast array of issues including, but not limited to, school choice, public school funding, testing requirements, curriculum requirements, exceptional student education, student transportation, athletics, higher education, preschool education, charter schools, testing accountability, district governance, school safety, and state scholarship program funding. These issues each contain a plethora of sub-issues, statutory structures, and countless potential policy solutions, which in turn include changes to, or the wholesale creation of, state statutes and administrative regulations.

Since starting at the FCCB about four months ago, when I tell friends and family that I am the new associate for education, one of the most frequent comments I receive goes something like this: “The FCCB is great! Your action alerts and candidate questionnaires are super helpful, but . . . what do YOU do there?” It’s a reasonable question. The policy world can be complex and rather inaccessible unless your job is to spend most of the day diving into it. Things can get wonky fast. Before you know it, you’re discussing the policy implications of a state agency regulation based on a statute referenced within another statute that’s applicable to your research because you might be able to alleviate budget concerns by eliminating a comma.