While public-school choice programs will not solve all of our schools’ problems, well-designed plans can help provide the freedom educators seek, the expanded opportunities many students need, and the dynamism the public-education system requires.
As interest in choice has grown, however, a number of misconceptions about this strategy have developed. Unless educators and policymakers reexamine these myths, a powerful tool for educational improvement will be misused.
The rationale for choice is based primarily on economic and market metaphors. Wrong. Although use of controlled competition may encourage improvements, there are in fact several other important justifications for choice among public schools. Among these, a key rationale is the recognition that there is no one best school for all students or all educators.
In the early 1970’s, the St. Paul Board of Education helped a group of parents and educators, including myself, create a K-12 public school that developed individual plans for all students, used an adviser-advisee system, combined classroom work with community service, and required demonstrated competence rather than accumulation of credits for graduation. The school won a federal award as a “carefully evaluated, proven innovation worthy of national replication.”
But while some teachers and students flourished at this school, others wanted less flexibility, and this group convinced the board to establish a second, more traditional school.
Though parents and educators in the two programs disagreed on how schools should be organized and instruction provided, both schools educated students effectively. Both enrolled a cross-section of the city’s population, and both are still open 17 years later.
The lesson of St. Paul’s experience holds true around the country. And the view that no one system works best for everyone is not inconsistent with “effective schools” research. An effective school requires a clear philosophy and a staff committed to its goals--and part of the strength of the finest public alternative schools is the distinctive character of their programs. Effective schools are not identical schools.
Choice may undercut efforts to promote equity. To the contrary, a second rationale for more choice rests on the value of expanding opportunities for all students.
The crucial question here is whether, by adopting choice plans, policymakers will narrow affluent families’ educational advantage. The rich already have choice of schools: They can send their children to private schools or pay tuition to another public-school district; they can move to an exclusive suburb and send their children to a “public” school where the price of admission is the ability to purchase an expensive home and pay high real-estate taxes.
These arguments are a familiar element of debates about educational-voucher plans, in which tax funds would pay for students to attend public, private, and parochial schools.
For many people, choice among public schools is an acceptable compromise. In Minnesota, for example, a number of groups that oppose vouchers--such as the Minnesota pta, League of Women Voters, Elementary and Secondary Principals, and Association of Alternative Programs--endorsed Gov. Rudy Perpich’s proposals for more public-school choice.
Some opponents of choice contend that expanding opportunity may be fine in theory, but in practice it will be the most affluent and informed who use choice systems for their children. But sound plans attract students from all backgrounds.
Programs in New York’s East Harlem and in Cambridge, Mass., show that choice can help produce systemwide improvements, including significant gains in achievement and motivation for black and Hispanic students from low-income groups. Each of these districts has made every school at certain levels an option. Both systems provide two critical features: parent information and counseling, and transportation to schools.
Minnesota’s experience also is encouraging. Many of the students who have used our “postsecondary options” and “second chance” programs come from low-income families. And the percentage of minority students who signed up for open enrollment in 1988-89 is slightly higher than the percentage of minorities in overall enrollment.
Many young people from low-income backgrounds will not reach their potential if they all are required to attend schools with a single instructional philosophy. Some will blossom, for example, in a strict traditional school, or one that emphasizes performing arts along with basic skills. Others will do better in a Montessori program.
Charles Glenn, director of the Massachusetts education department’s office of educational equity, has noted that “choice can do much to promote equity. It does so by creating conditions which encourage schools to become more effective ... by allowing schools to specialize and thus to meet the needs of some students very well rather than all students at a level of minimum adequacy, and by increasing the influence of parents over the education of their children in a way which is largely conflict-free.”
There is little, if any, research showing that public-school choice has a positive impact. Mary Anne Raywid of Hofstra University, who has spent more than a decade study4ing choice plans, reports otherwise. From her research, she concludes that providing families with options among public schools can have dramatic positive results.
Ms. Raywid cites more than 120 studies indicating that when families have the opportunity to select among different kinds of public schools, students’ academic achievement and attitudes improve. Graduation rates have also risen.
In addition, Ms. Raywid has found that parents allowed to choose among different schools are more involved, supportive, and satisfied.
While research on Minnesota’s programs is limited, it is encouraging. More than 12,000 students have taken advantage of the state’s postsecondary-options law, adopted in 1985. Many of them were not doing particularly well in high school; hundreds had dropped out in frustration or boredom. But such young people are earning grades as high or higher than those of college freshmen in rigorous courses at postsecondary institutions.
Another choice law, enacted in 1987, enables youngsters who are not succeeding in one district to attend public school in another district. This law has been used by several thousand students, about half of whom are returning to school after having dropped out.
And Minnesota’s choice policies have helped stimulate improvement for students who decide to stay in a district, as well as for those who transfer. The number of Advanced Placement courses offered has quadrupled since high-school students gained the right to attend postsecondary institutions. More than 30 high schools have created new cooperative courses with universities since the program began.
The primary beneficiaries of school choice are parents and students. In well-designed choice plans, educators benefit along with parents and students: They are given the time and freedom to create distinctive programs.
Ms. Raywid’s research shows much higher morale among educators who have helped develop alternative approaches or worked in nontraditional public schools than among educators in conventional programs. They have been empowered; their ideas are respected.
This outcome helps explain why choice plans complement “school-based management” programs--and why neither choice nor school-based management is sufficient by itself. With choice only, a school may try to implement many different approaches--open, fundamental, Montessori, language-immersion, performing-arts--at one time; the result is a bland mediocrity satisfying almost no one.
And school-based management without choice can lead to frustrating conflicts. What happens when some parents, teachers, and students do not like the established program?
While choice within a district may be acceptable, interdistrict choice is a bad idea. Some of the strongest proponents of interdistrict choice are parents and youth workers from rural areas. They have testified about being “captives” in certain districts; they have asked for alternative programs or advanced-mathematics or science courses--funding of which would require modest decreases in athletic budgets--only to be called “elitist.”
Participants in Minnesota’s second-chance program, which has enabled thousands of youngsters who were not doing well in one school to attend another outside their district, have said that the new opportunity changed their lives.
And certain legal limits shape the overall impact of interdistrict choice in Minnesota: The programs cannot have a negative effect on desegregation, and districts may not select students on the basis of previous grades or behavior.
But what works in Minnesota may not be appropriate in other states, as Governor Perpich has noted. After examining the results of choice in Minnesota, Massachusetts, East Harlem, and elsewhere, other states and districts should determine how it can best be applied to help solve their most pressing problems.
Nevertheless, all proposals are not equally effective. To increase the likelihood of success, all plans should:
- Clearly state goals and guidelines for schools;
- Provide information and counseling to help parents select among various programs;
- Avoid “first come, first served” admissions procedures and prohibit admissions on the basis of past achievement or behavior;
- Offer opportunities for building-level educators at a range of schools to help create distinctive programs, rather than concentrate resources on a few schools;
- Make transportation within a reasonable area available for all students.
- Require that dollars follow students;
- Implement racial-balance procedures that promote integration;
- Continue oversight and modification.
Choice is an alternative to spending money. Both liberal and conservative governors are proposing public-school choice plans because choice reinforces other education-improvement efforts. Expanding educator and parental choice encourages better use of existing funds, but it also costs money. So do providing time for staff and program development, and arranging parent information and transportation. While these costs need not be staggering, they are real.
Seventy percent of the public thinks parents should be able to select among public schools. Chris Wilcox agrees. A Minnesota student who had not succeeded in one public school, Chris used the state’s new laws to attend an alternative school and a local community college.
He recently wrote that choice “gave me the chance to personalize my education and the confidence that I can make something of myself and control my own destiny.”
There are millions of youngsters like Chris who will benefit from well-designed public-school choice plans. Let’s move ahead thoughtfully but decisively.
