School Choice: It's Still a Seller's Market

Sixteen thousand parents in New York City signed up last spring for 1,300 privately financed vouchers that would enable their children to attend private schools. ( "16,000 N.Y.C. Parents Apply for 1,300 Vouchers to Private Schools," April 30, 1997.) That's a ratio of 11-to-1, or greater than the odds of getting into Stanford. In San Francisco, the city's open-enrollment system generates similar ratios when 2,000 apply for a high school with 160 seats in the freshman class. Certainly we have evidence that parents want school choice and that they will compete for it. But does this improve schools?

As a parent who has chosen a magnet public school for her children, and as a writer of two education guidebooks for other parents, I am more an advocate than a critic of choice. But unless we make a major commitment to educating consumers, the cure school choice promises is much more snake oil than panacea for the ills of our schools.

If every child were to take advantage of choice, then every seat in every school would be filled voluntarily, which would mean every one of them would need to be worth choosing. Only then would "choice" truly mean something. In the meantime, as the New York experiment demonstrates, choice is simply a way of rearranging who...