A Thought Experiment on Grocery Stores Assigned by ZIP Code

This post is a thought experiment, and it is satire. Nothing described below has happened, no such law exists, and no sentence here is a news report. It is an invented country, built for one purpose: to take an idea that most Americans accept without a second thought about schools and apply it to something they would never accept, which is groceries. Then we come back to the real world and see what the joke was hiding.

Now. Welcome to the Republic of Assignmentia.

The Public Food Act

In Assignmentia, there was a time of great anxiety about whether children were fed. Some families had good grocery stores nearby, and some did not. A commission was formed. It issued a report, and the report had a bold recommendation: every family shall be assigned a grocery store by address.

Look how reasonable it sounds. No more worrying about where to shop. No more comparing prices. No more driving across town. A family's assigned store would be the one nearest its front door, funded by a tax on the homes in the neighborhood, and the store would be free at the counter. The public could not be asked to pay for a hundred different stores, the commission explained, so they would pay for one, and the one would be "public food."

The measure was called the Public Food Act. It passed with a large majority, because the speeches were moving and the other side was accused of hating hungry children.

I want you to notice something about that last sentence. In Assignmentia, as in our own country, the person who asks whether a system works is rarely accused of caring about the result. He is accused of hating the people the system claims to serve. Hold that thought.

Year one: no transfers

The first rule of the Public Food Act was simple: you shop at your store. Not the one across the street, if the one across the street belongs to a different zone. Not the one with the better produce. Yours.

Families who tried to shop elsewhere were not arrested, because Assignmentia is a civilized place. They were simply informed that they were "outside the attendance boundary." A kindly clerk would explain that the other store was funded by a different neighborhood's taxes and that the purchase would be "an unfair drain on public food." If the family wished to shop elsewhere, it could do so, as long as it paid for the groceries twice: once through the tax that funded the assigned store, and once at the cash register of the store it actually used.

That is already, if you squint, our own school system. Most American children attend the public school assigned by their address. A family that wants a different school can usually get one by paying private tuition on top of the taxes already paid for the assigned school, or by moving. Our Your ZIP Code Picks Your Child's School, the Case for Open Enrollment post lays out the mechanics. In Assignmentia, a family who moved a mile to be near a better store was said to be "exercising housing choice." The moving company was the only business that benefited.

Year three: the lines

By the third year, the stores had learned an important lesson. They did not have to compete for customers, because the customers were assigned. A store whose shoppers could not leave was not a store; it was a utility with a produce section.

This did not mean the stores were villainous. Their employees were, for the most part, kind and hardworking people who stocked shelves in the face of a budget they did not control. But the incentive had changed. In a normal market, a store that runs out of bread loses a customer to the store down the road. In Assignmentia, a store that ran out of bread received a visit from a committee, which concluded that the problem was insufficient funding and recommended an increase in the tax.

The lines grew. A store designed for six hundred households now served nine hundred, because the neighborhood had been rezoned. The manager explained that the store was "at capacity" and that new shoppers would be placed on a waiting list, in the same breath as the announcement that the store would receive a new brochure.

The most beloved feature of the system was the weekly circular, which described the store's commitment to "excellence" in nineteen paragraphs and did not mention milk.

Year five: the good store

Here is the part of the story that every Assignmentian understood without saying it. There was one store that was, by common agreement, wonderful. Bright aisles, fresh bread, a butcher who knew your name. It happened to be located in the richest neighborhood, and because the rule said you shopped where you lived, the only way to shop there was to live there.

So the price of a house within the boundary of the wonderful store rose, and kept rising, until the real tuition for the store was paid not at the register but at the real-estate closing. Families who could afford the house got the bread. Families who could not were assigned a store three miles away whose produce department was, to put it gently, theoretical.

Nobody planned this. It was simply what happens when you tie a service to an address. The commission, which had promised equality, had created a market, but a bad one, in which the price of the good store was hidden inside the mortgage and the people who could least afford it were the ones locked out. The wealthy, in the meantime, kept all their options. They could buy a house near the wonderful store, or buy a second one, or pay for deliveries from a boutique grocer. Assignmentia had designed a system in which choice was reserved for people who already had money.

And the speeches in the legislature continued to say that the system was the great equalizer.

Year seven: the Commission on Freshness

Eventually the situation came to the attention of the authorities, who did what authorities do. They formed a commission.

The Commission on Freshness spent two years studying the problem. Its report, sixty pages in length, found that milk had a tendency to spoil. It recommended further study. It also recommended an increase in funding, a new mission statement, a Director of Dairy Equity and a task force on "the future of cheese." The commission's members were paid for their service, and so were the consultants who advised the commission, and so, indeed, was the consultant who advised the consultants.

The report was received with great seriousness. A news program described it as "a bold step." A rival news program described it as "a step that does not go far enough." Neither program asked whether any shopper had been allowed to take her money to a store where the milk was fresh. That question would have been impolite.

The spending went up. The staff grew. A store that once had a manager and four clerks now had a manager, four clerks, a Deputy Assistant Manager for Outreach and a coordinator for something called "customer journey." The price of the grocery bill, adjusted for the cost of everything, was now double what it was a generation earlier, and the milk was exactly as fresh as it had been. Does that sound familiar? We examine the real numbers behind that pattern in Real Spending Per Pupil More Than Doubled Since 1970, So Where Are the Gains and the headcount behind it in The School Staffing Surge, Hiring Outpaced Enrollment for Decades. Assignmentia, remember, is invented. The trends we point to there are not.

Year ten: the great defense

Then something remarkable happened. A small group of citizens, mostly parents, proposed a modest reform. Instead of giving the money to the assigned store, they suggested, the government could give each family a grocery card for the same amount, redeemable at any store that met basic standards of safety and honesty. The family could shop at the assigned store if it liked. If it did not, it could go somewhere else.

You would have thought they had proposed to abolish breakfast.

The response was immediate and passionate. The head of the Grocery Workers Association said that the proposal "would drain public food." A prominent columnist said it was "an attack on the very idea of shared nourishment." A university professor warned that grocery cards would lead to "the Balkanization of the pantry." A senator said that he had nothing against choice, in principle, but that this was the wrong kind, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

Several worthy points were made. The stores in poor neighborhoods needed more money, not less. Some families would use the card badly. Some stores that accepted the card would be mediocre. Some would not, in the end, be better than the assigned store.

All of that may be true, and I will take each argument seriously in the next section. But I want you to notice what nobody said. Nobody said that the milk was fresh. Nobody said that every family was happy with its assigned store. Nobody explained why the family, the one buying the groceries, should be the only participant in the arrangement without a vote.

Now the part where I stop joking

Time to take off the Assignmentian costume. Every joke above has a counterpart in a real argument about assigned schools, and I owe you the argument. Here are the turns, in order.

1. Assignment by address is a design choice, not a law of nature. Most American children are assigned a public school by where they live. That is a policy, not a principle of the Constitution, and it can be changed. Many states now offer open enrollment, charter schools, tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts, and some of them allow a family to use public money at a school it picks.
2. The price of the good school is the house. Where school quality is tied to address, families pay for it in housing prices. The result is that wealthier families already have choice, and the policy question is whether other families may have it too. Milton Friedman asked this in 1955, and the answer he gave is told in Milton Friedman's 1955 Voucher Essay and Its Seventy-Year Road. The idea's most surprising champion was a Milwaukee Democrat, in Polly Williams, the Milwaukee Democrat Who Started the Voucher Movement.
3. Attacking the question is not answering it. "You hate public education" is an accusation, not a reply. A parent who asks for a choice of school is not attacking teachers. She is asking for the same power the wealthy have always had. The question is whether children are better served, and that is a question about evidence.
4. The commission is real. Every school system has its blue-ribbon panels, task forces and strategic plans. Some of them do good work. But a system whose customers cannot leave faces a much weaker pressure to change than a system whose customers can.

Now, the strongest objection, which I promised to state fairly. The best argument for assigned schools is not that the system is perfect. It is that a school is not a grocery store. A child has one childhood, and a failed store can be replaced by another while a lost year of reading cannot. Public schools also serve every child, including those who are hardest to teach, and a school system that is open to all has a civic purpose beyond the individual family's preference. And some families will choose poorly, as families do in every market, and the child will pay for it. Those are serious points, and conservatives who wave them away are not making an argument. They are enjoying the joke.

But look at what those points actually prove. The first says that the stakes are high, which is an argument for giving parents more power over the choice, not less, because parents bear the consequence of getting it wrong. The second says that public schools must serve every child, and so they must, but serving every child is not the same as owning every child. The third, that some families will choose poorly, is true of every freedom ever granted. We let families choose a doctor, a church, a home and a spouse. We do not conclude from the possibility of error that the state should assign them.

The Founders did not assign groceries, or children

There is a founding principle in the joke, and it should be said plainly. The Declaration of Independence rests on the claim that governments are instituted to secure the rights of individuals, and that they derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." A system in which a family has no exit from the institution that shapes its child, and no voice except at a meeting it must attend on a weeknight, is a system with a thin grip on the consent of the people it governs. That does not make it tyranny. It makes it a system that is worth asking questions about.

And the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 called for "schools and the means of education" to be "forever encouraged." It did not say the district, the zone or the assigned building. We read that clause in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause. The founding generation wanted education to spread, and it did not insist that every child should get it from the same door.

A closing scene from Assignmentia

Let us close where we began, in the invented republic. Imagine a mother, which I label an invention, standing in the assigned store with a card that says she may shop anywhere, and, for the first time in ten years, she walks out the door. She is not angry. She is not trying to destroy public food. She wants bread.

The store notices. The manager, to his credit, rearranges the shelves, and the milk starts to be fresh. That is not because the manager was a villain but because he had been given, at last, a reason to care whether she came back. That is what the satire is for. The aim of choice has never been to close the assigned school. It has been to make the assigned school work as if the family could leave.

The case in brief

1. Assigning families to one provider by address, and funding it whether or not families are satisfied, is the structure of most American public schooling, and it is a policy choice, not a constitutional requirement.
2. When quality is tied to address, the price of the good school is paid in housing costs, so wealthier families already have the choice that others are denied.
3. Spending and staffing have risen for decades without a matching rise in results, and a system whose customers cannot leave is under weak pressure to change.
4. The strongest objections, that a child has one childhood and that public schools serve everyone, are arguments for putting more power in the parent's hands, not for assigning children.
5. Choice programs do not aim to close the assigned school; they aim to make it behave as if the family could leave.

What you can do: Find out how your state assigns students to schools and whether it offers open enrollment, then ask a school board member or state representative at a public meeting how a family in your district can transfer.