Taking a Chance on Choice

Giving parents a choice of public schools looks clear-cut on paper. On the ground, however, a murkier picture emerges.

By Caroline Hendrie

College Park, Ga.

The idea seems simple enough in the abstract: Poor children stuck in schools that aren't working should be given a better alternative. But matters quickly become complicated when that concept is put into practice. Just consider the case of Conchita Robinson.

By last summer, the 40-year-old former IBM executive was becoming increasingly disenchanted with Camp Creek Middle School, the 988-student school her elder son Chaz attended in this small city on the outskirts of Atlanta. It wasn't so much that the school was virtually all-black, although as a believer in integration, she didn't necessarily consider that a plus. Nor was it just that the school drew many of its students from a corridor of working-class apartment complexes that seem worlds apart from her subdivision of half-million-dollar houses filled with prosperous African-American families like her own.

What worried her were the signals she was getting that the school's academic atmosphere—or lack thereof—was making Chaz uncomfortable. In many of his classes, as he put it, "the kids were more in control than the adults." Even though he was an honor-roll student, he had asked his mother if there were some way he could go elsewhere for his last...