Public Schools: The Next Decade

...Both unreality and tension mark this new educational world...

...Research on these issues will be difficult and time-consuming...

...This was true for the first tiny coteries of early nineteenth-century European bohemians, and there are signs that it is just as true for the mass bohemians of contemporary America...

...Far from it, schooling-as-reform promised only that inequalities would be more consistent with qualification than with birth...

...Of course, support for these ideas does not arise solely from the recent crisis of confidence in schooling...

...The institutional history of these schools begins with the turn-of-the-century kindergartens, and moves from there through the Progressive movement to the present fascination with free schools, the Leicestershire movement, and community schools...

...Whether it is test scores or primary socialization that cause the relationship is presently unknown...

...Thus the new education programs— which were supposed to benefit poor children—will continue to support the educational professions with little visible benefit for the children...

...No wonder they find the objection unconvincing...

...The notion that education is the best and most efficient way to accomplish this is an old one—our faith in its transforming power has been the basis of compensatory and socialwelfare programs since the late nineteenth century...

...But tuition vouchers, aid to alternative or free schools, and diversification of existing curricula are more of a novelty...

...Several early critics turned up an impressive list of technical problems with which to undermine the report's credibility, but reanalysis of the data (with many of the difficulties corrected) corroborated the original findings...

...Schooling has traditionally been conceived as a mechanism of reform whereby the rewards of adult life would be distributed on the basis of talent rather than inheritance...

...The challenge has come not only from research or program evaluation...

...As these changes continue, the strains are likely to increase...

...The first is clearly untrue, for while the major variations in the demand for schooling probably do lie among ethnic and class groupings, residential segregation by ethnicity and class is far from complete...

...At best they would be somewhat reduced, within the narrow limits that are politically acceptable...

...The problems, however, lie not in the scheme, but in the restrictions I have assumed...

...To say that the schools should create and transmit a distinct ethnic or racial culture, rather than transmit the common culture, is simply heresy when viewed in the light of received doctrine...

...It does not require a superrefined sensibility to discover that on one side the ordering principle is freedom, and on the other the market...

...if these developments have undermined the legitimacy of accepted ideas about schooling and social reform, they also have encouraged such proposals for diversifying public education as tuition vouchers, performance contracts, subcontracting curricula, and direct public subsidies to private schools...

...As Christopher Jencks argued more than a year ago, if PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE NEXT DECADE schools have little or no effect on students' achievement, it would seem perverse to resist community control...

...This fragmentation has been paralleled by grow ing evidence of disillusion with liberal pro grams...

...By 1965 the federal government had launched several major initiatives in education— principally Headstart and Title I of the 1965 ESEA—whose main thrust was to improve the life chances of poor people, especially blacks, by improving the quality of their education...

...But at the moment we don't know how long such efforts would have to be extended to avoid this slump...

...An unrestricted voucher scheme could harden patterns of segregation even more effectively than decentralization...

...This growth can be viewed as an institutionalization of bohemia involving the expansion of values and styles of life radically different from, if not explicitly hostile to, the ethos of industrial capitalism...

...What is the source of these demands...

...While we may be able to tolerate the fact of group distinctiveness, it is less easy to tolerate its recognition as the explicit organizing principle of cultural and political life...

...There is some evidence that students with better test scores and grades complete more years of school, but it is easy to imagine that those with the higher scores were socialized at home to the sorts of behavior that make for success in school...

...choice, the existing class disparities in the allocation of school resources might grow...

...This approach to social reform rests on a desire to promote fairness in the distribution of privilege, but without attacking the dis tribution or ownership of property...

...T T HE OUTLOOK FOR SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS toward diversification of the school system is not terribly hopeful...

...Thus, the answer to my second question is that expenditures on education probably ought not to play a major role in any serious effort to combat the effects of poverty and discrimination...

...Negro parents might want to enroll their children in mixed schools, but whites could prefer it otherwise...

...Others leaped to different conclusions...

...The only remaining argument against organizing schools along ethnic and racial lines is that it would contribute to divisiveness...

...It does not prove that decentralized government is required to make social programs work, any more than it proves that social programs do not work...

...While there always has been evidence to belie these notions, it went virtually unnoticed until the late 1960s...

...The shock these ideas convey has been magnified by the research revelations I discussed above...

...We may be learning that equality cannot be gotten in the bargain basement, by trying to teach the children of the poor to behave differently, while all the other conditions of their lives remain unchanged...

...In the present circumstances, this can only be accomplished through increased community influence over the allocation of resources...

...By way of contrast, proposals for decentralization and community control appeal to those who regard government as an agency for social change...

...A second option is to shift social expenditures to more direct income transfers, such as income maintenance and job-creation programs...

...If either neighborhoods or individuals were made the basis of educational * This discussion is a condensed version of suggestions that can be found in Education Vouchers, a report on various voucher schemes produced by several staff members of the Center for the Study of Public Policy, in Cambridge...

...N N OW, WHATEVER one may think about the merit of these ideas, several facts are accepted by all...

...If racial discrimination in admission were forbidden, and if fiscal incentives for accepting poor children (and thus promoting economic and racial integration) were offered to schools, many of the problems would probably disappear...

...we also know that when the programs are discontinued the children's test ability slumps...

...For it carries the unmistakable suggestion that racial and ethnic integration may not be a good thing...

...There are, of course, other approaches to diversification, most of which center on the idea of contracting out the school program...

...Under these circumstances, it is not enough to argue for future expenditures to provide direct income transfers to families—that may be some time off...

...For one thing, bohemia always has had a pronounced tendency toward romanticism, the worship of feudal forms and cultural exotica, and religious or quasireligious withdrawal from the world...

...Since then, however, events have cast serious doubt on these two venerable articles of faith...

...They parallel the growing class conflict that has begun to emerge over the character of university education...

...Education is esteemed, but there is ambivalence or outright hostility toward the work-oriented and mechanical constraints of urban public schools...

...by now these sentiments are no less strange on the political Left than on the Right...

...Because parents would have more leverage on schools, students would perform better...

...The main prerequisites seem to be competence in the schools' language (formal English), an ability to maneuver in fairly complex urban social systems, and a cosmopolitan cultural orientation...

...Indeed, the entire history of bohemian and middle-class left-wing culture, since its inception nearly two centuries ago, can be framed in terms of a tension between political and social engagement on one hand, and the urge toward the pastoral life, religious contemplation, or obscure and elitist art forms on the other...

...One is that schooling is the key to mobility and social justice...

...Children from those immigrant groups which consisted mainly of non-Englishspeaking peasants, oriented toward village societies (southern Italians, for example, or Poles), fared abysmally in the public schools...

...And it is hardly surprising that workers in the social-welfare and culture in dustries—and especially their children— have come into open conflict with the established educational authorities...

...it is found in certain segments of the urban middle and upper-middle class...

...At the individual level tuition vouchers could avoid part of the problem, at least, by making the size of vouchers an inverse function of family income, and prohibiting parents from spending more on the children's schooling than the value of the voucher...

...This is a sensible approach, not because research shows it to be better, but simply for commonsense reasons...

...The roots of its discontent are not essentially material: the problem is not increasing misery, or even growing relative deprivation...

...This idea has been carried further by the Office of Economic Opportunity recently, in experiments with contracting the entire school program...

...One is to hold all spending at current levels until research provides the "answers...

...It is not easy to see how the legislature in states like New York or Michigan would approve legislation of this sort, when they have recently evidenced such distaste for other, more limited, approaches to school integration...

...upper-middle PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE NEXT DECADE class families in working-class neighborhoods would not be restrained by a local governing board from enrolling their children in a "free" school...

...It is quite a leap from this, however, to the idea that schools can be primary engines of reform for less urbanized groups...

...What is more, evidence on the relation between schooling and later adult social status suggests that the role of education in promoting upward mobility varies enormously among ethnic groups, and in just the ways we would expect...

...No suprise, then, that the movement for community control has profoundly shaken liberal thought about education and social reform...

...The notion is that government at the community level should have more impact on educational decisions...

...I do not regard this as a pessimistic reflection on the efficacy of liberal social programs, but rather a reflection on the limitations of the liberal notion that schooling is always a suitable instrument for redistributing wealth and status...

...Tuition vouchers would not be subject to this difficulty, for they would permit parents to choose whatever school they liked...

...James Coleman has suggested that segments of public school curricula (math or reading) be subcontracted to nonschool agencies, such as community corporations, profitmaking firms, or nonprofit institutions...

...In any case, since both have the same purpose—eliminating poverty—it is hard to see how income transfers could be less effective...

...Both the "failure" of major domestic programs and the findings that educational institutions have little effect on students reinforce the idea that the traditional liberal approach to social reform is bankrupt...

...And just as the evidence of programmatic and institutional "failure" exacerbates the sensibilities of black activists, so does it make way for ever more radical forms of racial separatism...

...It would be no surprise if the decade passed with little progress on either front...

...There is, of course, nothing new here, save the greater pressure for public aid...

...Still, the contrasts are clear when the standard of comparison is what already exists...

...Decentralization would probably not only increase segregation, but by drawing new district boundaries around "neighborhoods," would lock residential patterns into place with new jurisdictions...

...We know, for example, that highly structured preschool childandparent-training programs markedly improve the children's cognitive ability...

...black parents in black districts, for example, might have more difficulty transferring children to integrated schools than is at present the case...

...We do not know, however, whether less educated people of the same initial ability and motivation as those who complete college wind up at the same place on the occupational ladder...

...The voucher scheme most likely to succeed in a state legislature would be one that satisfies the most powerful interests—none of which are poor or black...

...The elimination of poverty seems much more likely to be accomplished by a direct attack on the structural differences in occupation and income, as well as the other barriers to the possibility of a humane life...

...It does not restrict individual choice as narrowly as community government would...

...If we assume the sort of admissions restrictions discussed just above, present levels of state equalization for decentralized districts, and moderately strong fiscal incentives for enrolling poor children, I suspect there would be little change...

...Has this ever been the way the schools have really worked...

...but the utopia never has been fully realized, either in the free schools or the family—how could it be, in the midst of the existing order...

...Their desirability is probably an inverse function of their political feasibility...

...The pressure to continue the upward trend of educational expenditures will increase, but will greater spending on schools for poor children improve their chances later in life...

...b)Smaller units of educational choice would provide the material with which those blacks and whites now disaffected from public institutions could regain a legitimate polity, since smaller units of choice would establish a new social contract around the schools...

...We already have a slight foretaste of this in the response of "middle America" to the university media-liberal-snob axis...

...that black children need education responsive to their special backgrounds...

...Diversification of some sort is desirable...

...More than a little, these schools are efforts to create utopian enclaves in the midst of capitalist society...

...Schooling, in short, is justifiable only when playful, not conditioned by the mechanical rhythm of the workplace but by the unpredictable rhythm of individual discovery...

...The two leading schemes are decentralization and tuition vouchers, but both could increase segregation by race and class, and they might produce greater disparities in the distribution of educational resources than exist now...

...The debate is no longer over the pace of desegregation, but whether it should occur at all...

...The schools, then, have been most effective in redistributing privilege for already urbanized groups in other ways well-prepared to cope with the academic merit system...

...The most highly valued educational institutions are those that stress spontaneity and creativity...

...The fact is, however, that few government programs are ever reduced, let alone halted...

...But therein also lies their great difficulty: would not the individual freedom to choose schools also imply freedom to restrict the attendance of others...

...and whatever the facts of group life in America may be, the structure of our politics and folklore rests on the notion that this is a nation of individuals, not groups...

...Should it then stick to direct income transfers...

...as professionals, they often deal with the unhappy consequences of market values...

...The individual choice schemes suit the taste of those who have an antipathy to government and bureaucracy...

...Such a scheme would be unacceptable to liberals and radicals...

...Its discontent arises from the creation in the bosom of modem society— in the family, child-rearing, and educational institutions—of an ethos and mode of life that is unusually open and democratic...

...RACIAL SEGREGATION iS not the only major problem that would arise under these schemes...

...The most desirable scheme—an egalitarian version of tuition vouchers—seems not to have nearly the political promise of performance contracting— the least desirable scheme...

...Chief among the difficulties, however, is that the criterion of success in all cases is the children's standardized test performance and, as I pointed out earlier, there is little evidence that this is salient in any way to later success...

...T T HE LEGACY OF THE 1960s can be reframed as questions for the 1970s: •Should choice in public education continue to be constrained by famliy budgets and school jurisdiction boundaries...

...The question is whether diversification could be arranged without becoming politically retrograde...

...Should expenditure on education continue to play a major role in government efforts to combat the effects of poverty and discrimination...

...Through it all, the main themes are similar: children should learn at their own pace, from things that interest them...

...Two IDEAS have dominated American thought about education during the last half-century...

...Once we strip away the rhetoric about bureaucracy, it becomes clear that one likely implication of community control is that education would be governed more rather than less...

...for those reared in an atmosphere of freedom, it is not hard to decide which is preferable...

...school should not prepare for the mechanical routines of the workday world but should develop individuals toward the outer reaches of their own capacity...

...PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE NEXT DECADE This course, however, is much more costly, and inconsistent with established ideas about schools and social reform...

...Until late in the 1960s there was little confusion on the liberal Left about school segregation...

...One obvious rejoinder to pleas for community control has been that political and administrative separation will disadvantage the black community in the competition for scarce educational resources...

...Their scale of payment and/or parents' patronage would be contingent on the contractors' performance in teaching the children...

...But let us suppose we knew that higher test scores caused more years of school to be completed, and that completing more years of school caused higher occupational status...

...These developments provide grist for radical and conservative elements who—for a wide variety of reasons—believe that liberal reform must or should fail...

...EVEN THIS CURSORY review of these two DAVID K. COHEN alternatives suggests that diversification schemes are worth considering...

...Education has long been seen as both the chief antidote to poverty and the principal means for assimilating ethnic and racial minorities...

...Yet how can one maintain this argument in the face of evidence that variations in the quality of schools—whether measured in dollars or staff qualifications—relate not at all to student achievement...

...By 1968, newspaper accounts of the failure of local Headstart and Title I programs had become commonplace...

...An earlier version of this paper was prepared forthe American Jewish Committee's Task Force on Group Life...

...Thus, the question is whether the inequalities likely under decentralization or vouchers would be greater than those we now have...

...By 1969 several national studies of these programs had found no discernible impact on children's performance in school...

...It is a notion peculiarly suited to liberalism, for the redistribution of social and economic status promised through education does not threaten to reduce the magnitude or importance of class differences...

...The chief developments of the late 1960s have, then, a remarkable political coherence...

...On balance, I have come to regard the voucher plan as more desirable...

...Let us pause at these two phenomena for a moment, since they promise to be of increasing political importance in the 1970s...

...All the evidence suggests that the school system has "worked" principally for groups well-situated to make the most of the academic meritocracy that has evolved over the last six decades...

...First, almost no one thinks that this is the way the public schools worked in the past for immigrant children, when blatant assimilation was the rule...

...Several religious groups, especially Catholics, have a strong interest in supporting parochial education, and their legislative activity toward this end has increased markedly during the past few years...

...The emergence of education, social welfare, communications, and culture as mass industries has begun to create new lines of class and cultural division in American society...

...There is, of course, a problem: these schools are only for children, and thus in the ordinary sense of the word partly playful...

...One thing that does seem certain is that for the foreseeable future the main issues in education will center on diversity...

...Third, one of our most fondly held ideas is now bluntly challenged—that in the public schools children of all creeds, colors, and nationalities come together helter-skelter to learn from one another about life in America...

...It would be perverse to further entrench reliance on test scores, and to restructure incentives more firmly around them—unless we knew that they bear some powerful intrinsic relationship to adult achievement...

...There is no assurance that the outcome will be progressive...

...It demands large-scale study and experimentation, which is both expensive and politically burdensome...

...This group has exhibited more and more political discontent over the past several decades...

...As a result, the most typical artifacts of this group have been their schools, expressing for children the values their par DAVID K. COHEN ents want most to realize for themselves...

...Poor districts—those with low assessed valuation and/or a greater burden of municipal services—typically must tax themselves much more severely to raise school funds than districts with less burden and greater wealth...

...and arguments for massive is worth speculating about what the answers compensatory treatment for blacks exacer-ought to be...

...Other ways must be found by which these programs can directly benefit the people they are supposed to help...

...Children from this class have been raised in an atmosphere where individual differences and self-expression are highly valued...

...Both notions rest on what appear to be similar assumptions: (a)Smaller units of educational choice would provide greater efficiency—there would be a better match between the schools' taste in pupils and the parents' taste in pedagogy...

...Just as the political cement of the liberal coalition seems to be dissolving, the intellectual legitimacy of its program has been seriously weakened...

...Almost everything presently emanating from this "New Left" threatens the working and lower-middle classes: the proclamation of social and cul tural freedom is unsettling to those attached to more traditional notions of authority...

...Diversity Pressures to widen the framework of educational choice come from two sources: those who want to abandon district lines altogether in favor of individual decisions, and those who simply want to redraw jurisdictional boundaries around smaller and more homogeneous school communities...

...We also know that the number of years of schooling people complete is strongly related to their later occupational status...

...The new culture I have described evokes hostile reactions in the society...

...The "performance contract" experiments involve conditioning contractors' fees on children's performance...

...If it proves anything at all, it is that greater equality cannot be purchased cheaply...

...Blacks in mostly Negro districts who preferred white schools would not be restrained by their community of origin...

...learning should occur from the inside out, not the other way round —and the only legitimate discipline arises out of the learning situation...

...This is not a trivial matter, but much of the interest in it—indeed, the concern for the school "crisis"—arose from efforts to eliminate race and class disparities in the outcomes of schooling...

...Many liberals and radicals think the results prove that liberal social welfare programs cannot work as long as they are controlled by centralized bureaucracies...

...Combine all this with the tendencies toward nativism still present in rural and small-town America, and there is the potential for a powerful rightward shift in American politics...

...In my view, therefore, the "failure" of recent social action programs in education simply manifests the results of misdirected efforts...

...There is, however, no evidence that this is needed for schools...

...In this view, the public schools should help develop managerial and political competence in the adult community, serve to create and transmit an authentic black culture, and instill a sense of group identity and pride in black students...

...Spending more money on social programs will be futile, they argue, until the programs are made accountable to those they are supposed to serve...

...In addition, city schools do not reflect as well as they might the large underlying diversity of taste in education: in fact, for most of their history the public schools have sought to avoid or deny these differences, especially if they were related to class or ethnicity...

...bate both the cultural antagonism and the economic anxiety...

...it would be likely to result in more integration and provide the foundation for greater diversity...

...Outside the South, the most articulate opponents of school integration are blacks who argue that desegregation amounts to little more than brutal assimilation...

...All the experience with elementary-grade compensatory programs suggests that simply spending large sums of money on such gross changes as reducing pupil-teacher ratios has little or no noticeable effect on students' test scores...

...Decentralization is a suitable alternative, then, if one believes (a) there are no important variations in the demand for education within communities, and (b) no values in integration...

...peasant immigrants from Englishspeaking countries (the Irish), fared a good deal better...

...Such demands express not a desire to reflect more fully traditional intergroup differences in the school system, but to allow more freedom for individual expression in the quality, style, and character of schools...

...Although no one knows what all the effects of income transfers would be, any money spent directly on increasing the income of poor people would be much more effective than money spent on the school programs...

...It is a manifestation of the strains accompanying the development of advanced industrial societies away from the factory system, unregulated capitalism (or, in the "socialist" countries, emphasis on heavy industry), and elite possession of education and culture— toward technological industrialism, greater regulation of the economy in the interest of social welfare and consumer goods, and more democracy in the possession of education and culture...

...the advocacy of radical social change is unset tling to those with a minimal stake in eco PUBLIC SCHOOLS: THE NEXT DECADE nomic security...

...c)Smaller units of choice would allow more educational variety than is possible within the present overregulated and standardized school system...

...The new education programs allocate relatively little money to poor children, and almost all of it is used to pay the salaries of school professionals...

...One result of all this has been a sense of DAVID K. COHEN trouble within the democratic Left, which has experienced spectacular political frag mentation during the last few years...

...This, of course, is the great appeal of vouchers: by allowing "communities" of very limited liability to come together around schools, vouchers permit the fullest expression of variations in the demand for schooling...

...Although this approach has some promising elements —unlike the present school system, educators would be rewarded for doing better with the students they have, rather than for teaching in schools where the students already do well—there is a swarm of problems, including fraud, social class differentials in access to information, and antiunion practices...

...The issue seems clear: can education be the key to social justice if schools have no effect on children's achievement...

...School government in the cities has grown in ways that weaken accountability without improving efficiency: transportation and other support systems require metropolitan or regional government (because they would be either economically more efficient, or administratively and politically less clumsy...

...While the first would not be a major problem (schools could be given more money for enrolling poor children), it is hard to see how the second could be effectively enforced without creating the sort of bureaucracy tuition vouchers are supposed to dissolve...

...Help will not soon be forthcoming from this quarter...

...parents, consciously seeking to comport themselves in nonrepressive ways, teach their children to make their own rules and develop their own discipline...

...In the short run, at least, this tendency is hostile to familiar liberal ideas and institutions...

...But that is not the case...

...They rest, for example, on fundamentally different ideas about the role of government...

...Several states have passed parochial aid statutes, and others seem almost sure to do so in the near future...

...Decentralization would presumably increase diversity within a given city by giving communities more voice in decisions about staff, curriculum, and style...

...Now all that is changing...

...Within decentralized or voucher-supported schools, inequalities in the ability to support schooling would surely remain...

...All the tables have been turned: the only acceptable work is that which is play, and the only really desirable play is that which is instructive or otherwise useful...

...Other things being equal one would not want to impede the expression of that variation in taste for schooling while allowing the expression of others...

...Still, the results boggle the mind...

...The evidence on this point is mixed, and likely to remain so far some time...

...If the schools "make no difference," as Coleman's research seems to show, why spend more on them...

...Its appeal is that all problems of the direct redistribution of wealth are deferred, and translated into a matter of individual ability and effort in schools and the market...

...One purpose of the Kennedy–Johnson education programs, after all, was to eliminate poverty...

...At a minimum, this would increase the likelihood that the programs would be used to support more direct assistance to the poor, in the form of food, clothing, health care, etc...

...It may be that the schools' "failure" to affect the transmission of status from generation to generation will only serve to focus attention on the political arrangements governing education, rather than on the more important need to directly attack the underlying social and economic inequalities...

...Do they indicate as some hold, that government will not effect social change by improving social services...

...but as is also now the case, they would receive no direct tax subsidy...

...It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that under either scheme the educational advantages of wealth would be eliminated...

...The federal government has shown only limited enthusiasm for this, and has not yet developed the capacity for carrying out even the present limited efforts in a satisfactory fashion...

...It no longer seems so clear that education is the high road to equality or social integration...

...Though many of the arguments for community control or decentralization are historical— stressing the slowness of Southern school desegregration and its virtual absence in the North—these really distract from the main point: the path to social integration for American minority groups is now seen to lie in group solidarity—cultural unity, community economic development, and political control of community institutions...

...For parents in any given district, however, the range of choice would be no greater—it might even be less...

...There is, however, no evidence that changing the framework of choice in education will have much effect...

...Some researchers have speculated that more refined approaches—changing teachers' behavior and attitudes—will help, but there is next to no evidence for this, and DAVID K. COHEN there are no clues how it might be done...

...One way or another, the main problems in education will turn around these issues...

...A year later, in the federally sponsored Equality of Educational Opportunity report, James Coleman announced that differences in the quality of the nation's schools bore only a trivial relationship to differences in the educational achievement of the nation's students...

...In this situation, several courses of action are available...

...the Jews, who were on the average a good deal more urbanized and cosmopolitan, performed remarkably...

...There would, of course, still be plenty of private schools outside the system (most of the exclusive schools would not accept lottery admissions), just as there are now...

...In tone as well as character this is reminiscent of the new world Karl Marx described when he ventured a few ideas about communist society...

...but that, after all, is just what the proponents of community control proclaim to be the underlying principle of intergroup relations in America...

...Despite much controversy and some reluctance to press ahead, there was never any doubt that racial desegregation in schools and housing was a structural prerequisite for the full social integration of black Americans...

...DECENTRALIZATION would be a desirable alternative if there was any evidence that smaller school districts would permit a greater range of alternatives for parents...

...But to do research well requires a political commitment to improving federal social-action experiments, and as the present administration reveals, those politicians who are enthusiastic about reducing costs are ambivalent about experimenting with social-action programs...

...its partisans even welcome evidence of failure...

...Perhaps the most important development of the last half-century has been the "massification" of social welfare and culture, two sectors of the economy which have experienced enormous growth...

...As for the second, whatever one's own view, many black and white parents do prefer integration...

...This assumes, of course, that the public interest in education is relatively small compared to private interests, and it implies that school reform is mainly a matter of reducing government control over schools...

...but given the assumptions I have made, it seems unlikely that they would be larger than those we now have...

...If in addition a large proportion of students in all schools were admitted by some device for random choice (a lottery, for example), there would probably be more integration under a system of voucher-financed schools than there is now in most public school systems.* The difficulty is not in conceiving ways to avoid segregation, but in imagining how they might be implemented...

...those groups whose children did well in school show the strongest effect of schooling on social status...

...It derives in part from a long-standing desire more fully to reflect religious and ethnic differences in publically supported education, and in part from a more recent upsurge of interest in free schools, alternative forms of schooling, etc...

...that the only way to attain this is by setting up black communitycontrolled schools within the public system...

...THE MOST PERPLEXING ISSUE is the relation between schooling and social justice...

...The main support for these notions lies outside the established religious and ethnic groups...

...The growing power of the education establishment's national lobby (evident in the 1970 session of Congress), makes it doubly unlikely that federal antipoverty funds will be shifted from education to other categories...

...this assumes that political communities, not individuals, are the proper units for making decisions about the allocation of public goods...

...And early in 1970 the White House released a special presidential message on education, which argued that federal education spending should be held down until new research could turn up some answers about the schools' effects on students...

...Workers in the welfare and culture industries are trained to value humanity, openness, and creativity...

...It Spending This issue is so vexing that there can be no quick answers...

...still, very little is known about raising test scores, except at the preschool level...

...Early results from the new education programs offered one answer...

...There are ways in which these problems might be avoided...

...Despite such similarities in assumption, the two sorts of proposals are by no means iden DAVID K. COHEN tical...

...Changes in the politics of race during the past five years have created uncertainty about school reform...

...Whatever position one takes on the politics and ideology marking this clash, it would be a mistake to write it off as an unhappy accident...

...Finally, changes in the class structure have begun to generate fundamental changes in the demand for education among the urban middle and upper-middle class, all tending toward greater freedom for individual expression, more diversity in the character and quality of educational offerings, and increased individual control over the substance and timing of schooling...

...But as existing programs are not going to disappear, the community that is involved should have a major voice in the allocation of these resources...

...The other group of proposals, by contrast, rests on the notion that decisions about education should be based on individual choice, and that government should have a much smaller role in making them than it now does...

...Arthur Jensen interpreted the reported failure of compensatory programs as evidence of underlying racial differences in the inheritance of intelligence...

...Not only is the notion contradicted by the schools' past performance, it seems unlikely on its face...

...Similarly, the most likely decentralization schemes are those that change the balance of power only slightly...

...Second, the demand for community control violates a cardinal rule of ethnic politics in America: it overtly proclaims ethnicity as the basis for organizing public institutions, rather than leaving the principle undeclared...

...the other that it might be a major instrument of social and cultural integration...

...All of this is puzzling...

...State equalization formulas would retard this somewhat in many states, but the disparities there are still great...