Choice and the School

...In Texas, at the time of Rodriguez the ratio of richest to poorest community based on property values was 45-1...

...The lower courts had oluered the city and fifty-three surrounding suburban school districts in a three-county area to combine for a desegregated solution...

...That decision of the Warren court had become a symbol of the social forces of which it was a part and which have occupied so much of our political and judicial attention in the intervening years...

...But during these years many have begun to get some sense of the real differential costs and the 4 October 1974:12 lack of choices not only to blacks, but to those in the lower middle- and working-class white suburbs who charge--with the evidence of twenty years supporting their arguments--that their lives will be most disrupted while the wealthier, outer suburbs remain almost unaffected...

...In the favored reaches of the suburbs there is---de facto, if you will--a system of private schools...

...In Yoder the Court upheld the right of some Amish parents to keep their children out of the schools for the last two years of compulsory education required by the laws of Wisconsin...

...Private" may not be the right word for suburban schools...

...That remedy, Justice Marshall reminded the Court in a caustic, at times bitter, dissent had been precisely the one the lower courts had found impossible in Detroit, where two out of three public school students are black...

...Justice White declared in a separate dissent that Michigan "has successfully insulated itself from its duty to provide effective desegregation remedies by vesting sufficient power over its public schools in its local school districts...

...It was not asserted in the lower courts that the suburban districts themselves were practicing segregation...

...The parents argued the damage to their religious beliefs and their culture was greater than the advantage to the state of the continued schooling of their children, which would have required busing out of the Amish community...

...They are also, though less evidently, about the options available to parents in a mixed system of public and private schools...

...so it might be expected that th~ white suburbs of Detroit, and the rest of the urban North, however resistantly, would have been set on the slow, hard road toward the goal envisioned in Brown in 1954...

...Now in Bradley he stated that argument once again: "We deal here with the rights of all children, whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens...

...Had the lower court been upheld and had white suburban students been bused, it is likely that there would have been some further flight to beyond the tri-county suburbs...

...The event reflects the strong imprint of the Nixon years, a relatively short period in the continuities of judicial opinion...

...In its absence there was no justification for introducing a remedy which he said, "would disrupt and alter the structure of public education in Michigan...

...Almost certainly private school enrollments would have risen sharply...

...The questions remain open...

...In public education, meanwhile, the fault line of social, economic and racial privilege emerges unmistakably...

...Such reforms need not limit the movement toward the deeper needs of citizen participation, of connecting schools to their neighborhoods, and of strengthening the commitment to diversity in them...

...Because in both cases the same members of the Court divided 5-4, it is helpful to consider them together...

...Black indifference and opposition to busing are more significant than white hostility to it...

...For those who can afford them, they offer substantial choices...

...The main source of money for public schools comes from the relation of the number of students, to the value of local real estate, to the other burdens on local government such as safety, welfare, and health...

...Invariably this combination of factors favors the wealthiest middle-class districts...

...More recently, with a certain ideological evenhandedness, a voucher plan was approved for the whole state of New Hampshire...

...It is in this connection that he cites Justice Powell's opinion in Rodriguez with its emphasis on the need for local control in order to fit local programs to local needs, and to provide for "experimentation, innovation, and a healthy competition for educational excellence...

...In England, a concept of parental choice is embodied in the 1944 Education Act which has governed the organization of English schools for a generation...

...In a single week, the last of July, the Supreme Court not only took what Thurgood Marshall called "a giant step backward" from Brown but the House passed, 32383, an education bill limiting busing to no farther than "the next nearest school...

...A growing number of blacks are less indifferent to busing...

...Norman St...

...See Brian Wicker, page 4.] In an American system that is far more ambiguous than England's, the present need is to illuminate and to generate some accurate thinking about what we have in the past called simply the public and private sectors...

...As the NAACP counsel, h~ had argued that case himself before the Court...

...Though largely unrelated to urban education, the "free school" movement has also emphasized the importance of "choice" in education, and the need everywhere for providing alternatives to existing public schools...

...That may be more useful...

...The Detroit case, Bradley vs...

...Early in the Nixon Administration the OEO supported a Jencks voucher plan limited to the public schools in a mixed urban district in California...

...The majority and minority opinions of the Court are equally interesting...

...Milliken, seems almost an ironic commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Brown vs...

...Reducing them remains on the whole simpler within a district than within the up-state/down-state politics of state legislatures...

...The argument in Rodriguez was extended this summer in Bradley...

...4 October 1974:14...

...Justice White connects the case to Pierce in 1925, which established the modern rights of private education...

...The Chief Justice stressed in his opinion the deeply rooted tradition of local control in public education...

...The second kind of school case has been concerned with inter-district inequalities in public systems...

...They press more urgently as the traditional private sector becomes smaller and undeniably of less significance...

...Measured in one direction, July's decision may have been the "giant step backward" that Thurgood Marshall declared it to be...

...The day after the Supreme Court ordered the release of the Presidential tapes, it reversed the findings of lower courts which would have resulted in the desegregation of the schools of Detroit and its suburbs...

...A number of states were in the process of passing such aid...

...The Federal District Court, upheld by the Court of Appeals, agreed and said that there were de jure conditions...

...and currently the state has an unmistakably congenial, conservative political climate...

...Thus it helps perpetuate the unmistakably inferior modern schools which serve the 70 percent or more students who fail to enter the selective grammar schools...

...Vouchers for free schools would give them some financial base, which they almost universally lack, and release them as well from their near total bondage at present to the upper-middle-class parents...

...Milton Himmelfarb once called them "the notso-public schools...

...Nor need metropolitan solutions be antithetical, as some fear, to the direction of another reform in urban education---decentralization and community control...

...Like Mayor Young they have become more interested in reforming school finance and getting money to the children who need it most...

...The use of vouchers, he has argued, regulated by income and minority group standards, can give urban parents and their children some equalizing power to choose alternatives to the monolithic schools of the city--which Jencks once observed are about as responsive as the United States post office to the needs of its ordinary users...

...Topeka Board of Education...

...It is a solution which has lost the interest of many blacks who have come to maturity and to positions of influence since 1954...

...There can be little doubt that the Court must return to the issues which rise from them...

...In his Rodriguez opinion, Marshall was carefully explicit about his belief that there was indeed a very substantial public interest in the local control of schools...

...In some form they have been a major concern in each session of the Burger court...

...The deficiency of this view may seem most striking to those who are closest to urban schools...

...These included required curricula, state central purchasing of textbooks, the qualifications of teachers and many details like regulation of the length of the school day...

...The larger questions revealed are those which ask how shall educational Ol>" portunity in this society be provided...

...They range over questions of choice not only for parents but, in Douglas' forceful dissent, for the students as well...

...At the national level--which is not to say the local level such as Boston where a bitterly resisted court ordered busing scheme is taking effect this fall--large scale desegregation with busing is a logic and a strategy PAUL HAZELTON, a ]ormer member of the Maine State Board of Education, is a professor of Education at Bowdoin College...

...With that event, school desegregation appears to have reached the end of its present momentum...

...In that case the Court found unconstitutional the Pennsylvania law subsidizing secular instruction and services in church schools...

...It is a hard political line and one that has not been much cracked by the Socialist rejoinder of over a generation that it ignores the absence of any choice for the overwhelming numbers who don't make it in the system...

...In the Texas ease last year, he catalogued some of the restrictions imposed by that state on local boards...

...Church schools, which account for about 80 percent of the total private school enrollment in the state, are excluded by the Lemon decision, but there are other private schools...

...Essentially two other kinds of school issues besides desegregation have been before the Burger court in its six years...

...The first were a series of cases concerned with public aid to private schools, the most significant being Lemon in I972...

...The existing organization of schools had "the natural and probable effect of continuing racially segregated schools by local board and state governmental actions...

...Busing aside, a metropolitan district formed in Detroit and its suburbs would be a major step toward the fair use of the large public resources of that area which are generated by the city itself...

...The best case for illuminating the questions, if not the answers, is one the Court heard in 1972, the year between Lemon and Rodriguez...

...In both Bradley and Rodriguez it wasargued that the states failed to establish a sufficient degree of equality among the school districts of the state...

...Essentially, the case sought to have the de jure standards of Brown applied to the de facto segregation of the urban North...

...He recalled an earlier decision in which the Court said, "direct control over decisions vitally affecting the education of one's children is a need strongly felt in our society...

...In these the notable decisions are Rodriguez and the Detroit case this summer...

...They deal with the relative powers of state and local governments in education...

...But this in no way diminishes the responsibility of the state...

...The emerging issues are less ones of integration and more ones concerned with questions of authority and choice...

...It lies in their kinship to the economist Milton Friedman and his followers who are committed to a marketplace economy for all social programs...

...and in New York 84-1...

...But the force of the Brown decision carries in other directions as well...

...It is, as many English politicians have found, a slogan of great potency...

...Commonweal: 13 The idea of choice has become a major element in much recent discussion of educational policy...

...Writing the majority opinion which overturned the lower courts, Chief Justice Burger held that specific evidence of racial discrimination in suburban schools was indeed necessary...

...A similar vote had passed the Senate earlier and Congressional liberals felt lucky to have eliminated from the bill's final version the reopening of all existing court-ordered busing plans...

...They see the whole attempt to desegregate Northern schools as simply another white assumption of the inferiority of black children...

...If this is so, it will not be because it has been successful...

...Only where it could be shown that two districts were discriminating, he said, would the Court order busing between them...

...Justice Marshall rejected the majority's "interposition" argument of local district and state authority...

...The Detroit case turns, not on busing, but on the question of the state's power and responsibility in designing the local school districts...

...It was the exercise of the state government's authority in public education, a concern assigned to it by the 10th Amendment and for which the state must guarantee the equal protection of its laws under the 14th...

...In the latter, the emotionally charged busing issue tended to obscure the central concern of the Court...

...Embedded as it has been in the busing issue, the Detroit case has obscured other aspects of the metropolitan district solution...

...If a new kind of logic is evolving for remedying urban education, especially in the North, much of it has been foreshadowed in recent school cases before the Burger court...

...and he added, "having created a system where whites and Negroes were intentionally kept apart so that they could not become accustomed to learning together, the state is responsible for the fact that many whites will react to the dismantling of the segregated system [in Detroit] by attempting to flee to the suburbs...

...Two Cases Rodriguez originated in a poor, Chicano district in San Antonio...

...in Michigan 30-1...

...The cost of tuition for them is the price of residence in those communities and their relatively tolerable real estate taxes...

...and usually they are also favored with a disproportionate share of additional state support by~ complicated state aid formulae...

...Vouchers About the voucher idea there has been a persistent irony for liberal reformers...

...The balance to be struck between choice and need in organizing our schools, it becomes more evident each year, extends toward the largest questions of equality and personal liberty in our society...

...All these made a "sham" of the state's advocacy of local control in that case...

...There is no evidence in the recent history of urban schools to refute this...

...Others need to be lifted to some intermediate point between the local district and the state...

...Autonomy at that level, the Chief Justice writes, "has long been thought essential both to maintenance of community concern and support . . . and to quality of the educational process...

...Yet after twenty years we are obliged to consider other routes t o that destination...

...It has been especially important in the voucher plans of urban school critics like Christopher Jencks...

...Choice" as an educational principle would surely have been raised to new levels of concern in the Detroit suburbs if the recent court decision had gone the other way...

...On this point, he cited Justice PoweU for the majority in Rodriguez, and he returned the Detroit ease to the lower court "for the prompt formulation of a remedy which has been delayed since 1971...

...And on what terms...

...It was contended in it that the common method of financing schools in this country is unfair because it makes the money available for a child's education largely dependent on the value of real estate in the community in which his parents live...

...In California, it was 25-1...

...But in the Texas case he concluded that the need was not being met by a purported concern for local control which was "an excuse rather than a justification for interdistrict inequality...

...Unless children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will live together...

...and to the use of which, they have about as much choice...

...In any case, twenty years after Brown we are beginning to understand that our ideas of desegregation are inseparable from other questions of privilege in education...

...The new conservative party spokesman on education, Mr...

...In his dissent this summer, Justice Marshall sounded again the idealism that shaped that goal...

...The majority opinion shifts the point of view...

...In general the history of school district reorganization in this country has resulted in greater fairness as well as effectiveness...

...The guarantee of parental choice continues to frustrate the development of comprehensive secondary schools, the Labor party alternative to the present system...

...After this summer, it is evident that the prevailing majority view of the Court with its consequences for financing as well as for school district organization sustains inevitably a dual system of public education in this country...

...But just as the growth of white segregation academies in the deep South has not substantially held back the movement toward integration there...

...He found, as in Rodriguez, the existing district lines in Michigan "both flexible and permeable" when the state chooses to consider them so...

...But for simultaneous movement...

...It remains the governmental entity to which the 14th Amendment guarantees are directed...

...Such evidence, it had been argued, was not necessary since the school district boundaries were simply administrative conveniences of the state which had primary responsibility for public education...

...Intra-district inequalities persist, but they are usually markedly less than before reorganization...

...These commonly describe such views today as the conventional wisdom or pious fictions which have their uses but which scarcely correspond to the reality of the bureaucratic, professional and other interests contending at every level for control in education...

...They oppose it...

...and the decisions of the Court plunged private education, Commonweal: I1 especially Catholic schools, deeper into their present financial crisis...

...The need in government of schools everywhere is neither for upward nor for downward movement by itself...

...which appears to have served its time...

...Some of these bear directly on the kind of financial reform envisioned by Mayor Young...

...It declares that "the notion that school district lines can be casually ignored" damages a deep-rooted tradition of local control...

...CHOICE AND THE SCHOOL PAUL HAZELTON Taking what Justice Thurgood Marshall called 'a giant step backward" Among the many political events of this summer, one which occurred at the height of the Presidential crisis will surely be more than a historical footnote...

...In his concurring majority opinion he probes sensitively not only questions of parental rights but the state's need for compulsory education as well...

...nor simply because of white resistance...

...Jolm-Stevas, who abruptly replaced another Tory judged to have been "soft on comprehensives," devoted his first speech to his party's commitment to parental choice in the state system...

...This summer when Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, learned of the Court decision which rejected the busing plan involving children from nearly a 2,000 square mile area around his city, he said, "I shed no big tears for cross district busing...

...Nor does it square with more than a decade of academic studies of school government...

...Some things are best located in the individual classroom, and in the schools, and their neighborhoods...

...Only the tax base of the whole area can support the planning, the administrative reorganization, the special services for students that are required for more than the city schools alone...

...It was a politically necessary assurance to the influential, variously grant-aided private and county grammar schools which still control access to the university and to all the important educational credentials in that country...

...Marshall accepted the logic of the lower court decision that the school district lines were due to state action...

...In this instance it was not a question of financing, the plaint;ffs argued, but of segregation...