Choice Challenges

First steps on the road to education reform.

John Hood from the October 1991 issue

It seems like a dream come true. To longtime advocates of competition in American education, the much-publicized adoption of Polly Williams’s voucher plan in Milwaukee and the release earlier this year of President Bush’s choice-driven education strategy seem to form the crest of a long-awaited wave of reform, soon to crash through the rickety edifice of the public-education establishment. New Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and Deputy Secretary David Keams are strongly pitching a parental-choice program encompassing private and religious schools, using terminology cribbed from Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, a highly praised choice manifesto by John Chubb and Terry Moe. And state and local policy makers are enacting new programs, with varying degrees of early success and acclaim, to give parents choices among publicly funded schools.

But judging the size and power of an approaching wave is often difficult at long distances. You have to be close to it. That’s why it’s important for us not to drown in the homilies and hype surrounding choice, and not to ignore the still powerful undercurrent of opposition beneath the surface. The adoption of truly meaningful reforms isn’t guaranteed. It requires a calm and honest assessment of the choice experiments to date and a realistic view of the political and legal obstacles that lie ahead.

Teachers’ unions and other groups with a vested interest in the current system wield tremendous power in state legislatures and local school politics. Their lawyers have a number of weapons to employ, from questions about re-segregation to constitutional challenges to state aid for religious schools. And the general public, while favoring the concept of choice in education, is still largely unfamiliar with the specifics of voucher plans. Their support is broad but not deep.

Even given these caveats, advocates of choice can triumph- but not all at once, like a crashing wave. Instead, they will need to work gradually, eroding the education establishment’s own power base and letting news of choice’s early successes trickle down further into the public consciousness. They need to examine the practical, legal, and political obstacles to choice, and determine ways to overcome them. And they need to make allies among educators, business leaders, politicians, and power brokers in both parties, and the news media. If choice advocates go too far, too fast, their reforms-vital to educational improvement and therefore to America’s future could fail.

So far, most choice programs have been limited to public schools, with competition further restricted by bureaucratic barriers. The momentum to establish such “controlled-choice’’ programs is growing. In Massachusetts, for example, a statewide public-school choice plan proposed by new Gov. William Weld passed the legislature in early 1991, with the crucial backing of State Senate President William Bulger and other Democrats. In Michigan, bills authorizing intradistrict choice among public schools and experiments with interdistrict choice made it out of the education committee in the state Senate, although they ultimately failed on the floor. And influential Democratic politicians, from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley to Arkansas Gov. (and potential presidential candidate) Bill Clinton have endorsed school choice in varying forms.

One reason for the popularity of public-school choice initiatives is the record of a few long-term choice experiments. These programs give advocates successes they can point to-examples of systems that, while far from perfect, offer a better education, more freedom, and greater flexibility than the typical no-choice public-school system.

One of the oldest public-school choice programs is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city of 100,000 located across the Charles River from Boston. Under court orders to desegregate its schools, the city phased in a choice plan over three years, beginning in 1979, as an alternative to the busing that ripped Boston apart. Without the choice plan, it seems likely that the school system, which still operates under cumbersome court decrees, would have exploded long ago. Certainly many observers believe the choice system has helped the city avoid at least the magnitude of white flight and school decay that occurred next door in Boston. Chubb and Moe report that in 1987, after six years of controlled choice, 89 percent of new elementary students in the district were enrolled in the public system, compared with 78 percent in 1979.

In Cambridge, elementary and middle schools compete for students (with considerable bureaucratic intervention), and several different program s operate within the city’s single public high school. Parents select at least three elementary schools for their child, ranked in order of preference. The school system’s student assignment officer then intakes those preferences and evaluates their compatibility with racial balance, available space, and other controls. The system is far from a true market, since unpopular schools don’t close down and popular schools don’t expand to reflect demand. But, according to Cambridge officials, 87 percent of kindergarteners entering the system receive their first choice.

Cambridge’s schools of choice divide into “traditional” and “alternative” camps, with some programs unique to Cambridge. For example, the K-3 Maynard School, formerly considered undesirable by many parents, became one of the most popular schools in the district by starting the “Amigos” program, in which students speak English half of the day and Spanish the other half. The program is a favorite of Cambridge’s middle- and upper-middle-class white parents, many of whom are employed at nearby Harvard University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But what about the city’s less privileged population? A major objection to choice, even controlled choice among public schools, has been that poor parents aren’t knowledgeable or responsible enough to make good choices for their children. Cambridge takes this objection very seriously. It operates a Parent Information Center to provide information packets and to answer questions about school choices. The system also employs 13 parent-liaison officers and a number of part-time and volunteer people (speaking every major language in the city) to serve as intermediaries between parents and the school system.

“It takes a conscious, active effort on our part” to provide all parents the information they need, says the system’s parent coordinator, Margaret Gallagher. She and other officials visit Head Start centers and public housing projects, mail information, and make phone calls to parents to tell them about school choice and remind them of deadlines. “Poor parents are often overwhelmed by school choice,” she says.

More educated or affluent parents may ask about a school’s teaching style, atmosphere, or past performance, says Gallagher, but low-income parents seem most concerned about how far the school is from their home or whether their children will fit in with other students who may be better dressed, better fed, and generally better off. Of course, most schools don’t differ that much from one another, at least within the “alternative” or “traditional” categories.

Cambridge’s parent information efforts provide its critics with plenty of ammunition with which to snipe at the “controlled- choice’’ approach. Most recently Abigail Thernstrom, an adjunct associate professor of education at Boston University, evaluated the Cambridge system in a report on school choice in Massachusetts for the Boston-based Pioneer Institute. She specifically criticized parent information centers in Cambridge and other Massachusetts school systems for advancing the school system’s interests over those of parents and for over-selling their success at informing disadvantaged parents.

“Parent information centers too often steer parents into those schools that have room for members of the racial or ethnic group to which they belong,” she reported. “Often those will be the schools with space precisely because they are regarded as problem institutions.”

Themstrom also questioned the entire effort. Low-income parents, she wrote, are by definition poorly educated and disciplined-otherwise, why should they be in their present predicament? More important, it’s inherently difficult to tell schools apart by just hearing about them or visiting them once or twice. “Schools are not quite like a grocery store in which products can be easily compared,” she contended.