A School of Choice

By Debra Viadero

A dozen years ago, school officials in San Antonio created a school-choice program aimed at improving schooling for Hispanic students. Toward that end, they opened twothematic middle school programs and invited students to apply. Combining language-education with cultural teaching, the two programs now have a solid academic reputation in the city and strong support from the parents whose children attend them.

But only students with strong academic records can enroll. And the youngsters tend to come from those families least in need of extra educational opportunity--relatively affluent families with college-educated parents.

Miles away, in Montgomery County, Md., school officials launched a popular magnet school program a few years earlier to help integrate schools more fully. But the schools that parents pick do little to advance that goal. Indeed, parents tend to ask for schools where the students' families make about the same amount of money as they do and where the students come from the same racial and ethnic backgrounds. That puts school administrators in the hard-to-defend position of having to deny the first choices of as many as one-fifth of program parents--just to...