Rampaging Toward Choice

Why parents in Washington, D.C., are embracing vouchers and charter schools--and what that says about public schools.

Michael W. Lynch from the January 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Parents receiving vouchers often have chosen to keep one or more children in the public schools. Sometimes their decision is based on financial concerns; with annual incomes averaging $17,000, any financial setback may force them to pull all their kids from private schools. But sometimes parents are satisfied with a particular public school.

Private and charter schools, in turn, rely on the expertise, skills, and pensions of former public school employees. These teachers are happy to apply their skills in a rewarding environment, and teachers' pensions have been a factor in staffing alternative schools and keeping costs down. Charter schools, which remain part of the government school system, are by far the most popular new option for low-income parents. They have also become an option for families with kids in private schools. In other words, charter schools have begun to compete with private schools, and that has some conservatives grumbling.

It's an evolving mix. Still, as options have emerged for D.C. parents with modest incomes, some things are becoming clear. Urban parents want a choice, even when it means making personal sacrifices. They want schools that provide safety, respect, solid academics, and Bible-based values.

In Washington, where school officials routinely confiscate knives, guns, and razors, parents put a premium on safety, as they do in urban systems across the country. In the first seven months of the 1997-98 school year, there were 80 assaults with a deadly weapon, and 313 simple assaults reported in the D.C. schools, a system serving about 80,000 students at that time. Two students, both 16, were killed. Neither murder occurred on school property, but the incidents reflect a context of community violence in which the schools attempt to function.

D.C. parents also crave what no insulated monopoly provides: institutions that are responsive and respectful. They want their phone calls returned, their questions answered, and updates on their children's progress. Their goal is a simple one: to have their children prepared for college or, at a minimum, for a self-sufficient life. Given that D.C. public schools spend $9,123 per student a year, those demands are not unreasonable. Yet a third of the students drop out before graduating, and those that graduate function below 12th grade level. The University of the District of Columbia reports that it takes two years of remedial work to get a city graduate up to par. And these are the students who go on to college. It's easy to see why government school enthusiasts are incredulous that children could be better educated at far less cost.

Other structural issues are emerging as well. The longer children stay in D.C. government schools, for example, the further behind they fall. This has implications for political reforms as well as private programs. Private schools can get a second-grader caught up quickly, but an eighth-grader who is working at a fourth-grade level presents an almost insurmountable challenge.

Good, relatively low-cost private schools exist that will welcome former public school students and work to bring them up to grade level. And where money is available, myriad organizations will found new schools. Roughly one third of D.C.'s charter schools are specialized schools designed to meet the needs of the very students the public schools blame for their failures.

That is what Virginia Walden has discovered. Walden is executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, located in the basement of an apartment building four blocks from the headquarters of the National Education Association. She stumbled upon school choice when her son William started to get in trouble at Roosevelt High School. "As soon as he started going there he became a terror," says Walden. "He said if he did well in school he would get labeled `smart' and harassed." When he brought home all F's without warning, Walden knew she had to get him out. "Two teachers didn't even know his name," says an exasperated Walden, who was active in the school's PTA. A neighbor offered to help send William to Archbishop Carroll, a Catholic high school. "We saw an improvement right away," she says.

Walden decided to be the same kind of good neighbor to other D.C. parents in need. "If I have an education and parents who can support me, and I feel backed up against a wall," she says, "then what about other parents?" She is an education broker for low-income D.C. parents, matching families to schools. "We have become a one-stop issue shop for poor parents," says Walden, a warm woman whose deep laugh serves her well in her work with the public.

Having served more than 1,000 parents since 1998, she says the issues are simple: quality of education, safety, and responsiveness. "The biggest complaint we get is that traditional public education doesn't encourage parents to be part of their kids' education--and they don't say it that nicely," says Walden.

In 1997, about the time Bernice Gates was beginning her "rampage," the Republican-led Congress was attempting to assist her. It eventually passed the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act, which dedicated $7 million in new government money for D.C., to be used for $3,200 scholarships for 1,800 students. Democrats argued that the vouchers were unconstitutional, that the money wouldn't help enough children, and that it would build a new bureaucracy. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who led a filibuster, derided the bill as a "foolish ideological experiment." D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in Congress, provided cover for the anti-scholarship forces, assuring her colleagues that the people of D.C. didn't want "vouchers imposed on the District of Columbia." President Clinton agreed and vetoed the bill in May 1998.

At the same time that Democrats were working to block federal funds for low-income children, private philanthropists were focusing on scholarships as a means to provide parents with opportunity. Private scholarship programs, which typically fund about half the tuition of low-cost private schools, were already operating in 30 cities, serving 23,625 kids with more than 300,000 on waiting lists. At the time, the Washington Scholarship Fund was supporting 239 D.C. students.

In 1997, financier Theodore Forstmann and Wal-Mart heir John Walton decided to pump some liquidity into the D.C. private school market. Each promised to contribute $1 million a year for three years to the scholarship fund, enabling it to provide 1,000 more scholarships, each worth 30 percent to 60 percent of tuition, up to a cap of $1,700. More than 7,600 D.C. families applied.

Shocked, then heartened, by the demand, Forstmann and Walton decided to take the program national. They set up the Children's Scholarship Fund, donating $50 million each and announcing their intention to raise more. The demand was overwhelming. In 1998, more than 1.25 million families applied for 40,000 scholarships. In Baltimore, 44 percent of eligible students applied. One-third of the eligible students in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Newark, and New Orleans also wanted in.

Charter schools are essentially deregulated government schools that receive the per-pupil allotment of money so long as they stick to their mission. Minnesota was the first state to allow charter schools, in 1991; there are now 1,800 such schools serving 350,000 children in 36 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico.