What Does 'School Choice' Mean?

...There is no evidence that vouchers will produce good schools for the vast majority of children who need them most...

...If elected president, he proposes to transfer $1,500 per child per year of federal Title I money from failing schools to parents, to use at the school of their choice...

...Reasonable hope for inner-city schools rests on using the link between public funding and public oversight as a means of fulfilling our democratic obligation to offer a high-quality, socially integrated education to all children...

...They don't want to depend on state bureaucrats, who are surely not the best agents for satisfying consumer demand...

...Her reasons are at least as good as the ones that lead her middle-class counterpart to move into a better school district, often in the suburbs...

...More classrooms have to be built and more high-quality teachers have to be hired...

...ACCORDING TO these advocates, our present system—in which public schools are fully funded while private schools receive only tax exemptions and smaller subsidies—is unfair to parents who send their children to private schools...

...But original meaning, in some hands, at least, is such a slippery idea that it lends itself to a philosopher friend's reaction to Judge Smith's ruling: the words of Florida's constitution do not preclude the state's also funding private schools...

...Bringing together children from different backgrounds is a crucial feature of democratic education...

...A thoroughgoing voucher plan, they argue, "has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways...

...One does need to know a few facts, but not many, to say that Florida's voucher program is not an add-on to an existing "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and highquality system of free public schools...

...Public Remedies We are still left with the question of how to remedy the problems of our failing school systems...

...This democracy—if it is to be worthy of the name— needs public action to create the schools that all our children deserve...

...Pursuing "systemic reform" is far more promising than relying on a single remedy...

...The latter all displayed signs that proclaimed the same name: "Private Restaurant...

...We don't have a public obligation to pick up other people's restaurant tabs...

...The problem with defending vouchers on grounds of fairness to poor children is that the inner logic of voucher proposals—and the aim of many proponents—is equal public financing for private and public sc-hools, not good schooling for poor children...

...Not according to the philosophy of Milton Friedman, who can be credited with getting the voucher ball rolling in this country...

...The persistent failure of our inner-city schools is attributable to political neglect, not public control...

...Would it significantly increase educational opportunity for disadvantaged children...

...The unfairness of our present system thus resides not in the absence of choice per se but in the presence of poverty and an inadequate public school system, which disadvantages both poor parents and their children, who deserve better and are entitled to more...

...This worry remains: parental choice—even WHAT DOES 'SCHOOL CHOICE' MEAN...

...But the potential enrollment of the Florida experiment is much greater: all parents of students whose public schools fail standardized tests twice in four years will be eligible for vouchers usable at the school of their choice, public or private, secular or parochial...

...Although there is room for further improvement in suburban schools, the morally and politically salient problem is the ongoing failure of public schools in our large inner cities...

...These are preliminary findings, but they offer another reason to doubt the claim that parental choice is the key to improving education...

...Yes, but the most publicly defensible way of creating competition in education is to give parents good choices among public schools...

...To do that, however, new schools need to be created and old schools radically reformed, often by breaking them up into smaller, more responsive units with smaller class sizes...

...A case in point, which I had the pleasure of confirming, was the difference between the old state-run restaurants and the new private ones in Prague, shortly after the collapse of communism...

...AMY GLTYMANN is professor of politics and director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University...

...But politicians cannot honestly offer inner-city parents hope for their children without also offering them better public schools with smaller classes, stronger principals, more dedicated teachers, more challenging curricula, and whatever else it takes to create a good school...

...There are ways to make schools better and to give parents choice among them—as is demonstrated, for example, by the school system of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which years ago instituted a very effective program of public school choice...

...The privatizing impulse behind vouchers threatens to diminish any common concern about the children in our society who are most at risk and to restrict our vision of a good education for all children...

...We should therefore be wary of programs that threaten to erode public support for public schools, or that present themselves as substitutes for public judgments of every school's democratic and educational merits...

...But they think that these purposes are minimal, and whenever they are controversial—as are many curricular standards, along with the principle of nondiscrimination— voucher advocates oppose public enforcement and defer to parental choice in the marketplace...

...Most acknowledge that schools, as publicly funded and accredited institutions, should serve public purposes...

...There is even something to be said on behalf of voucher plans that serve (some) disadvantaged students...

...Children are...

...In recent years, Americans have ranked improving education as their first or second highest priority in politics, and a majority of all citizens also say they are willing to spend more money to improve public schools...

...But neither do public schools as they now exist, and until this obligation is honored, as many students should be as well served as possible...

...The truly bold reform—one that is also clearly constitutional— would be for the public to support decent-paying work and a real safety net for everyone, including good child care, public schools, and health care...

...But the most defensible system would not limit the choices of inner-city parents to schools in the inner city...

...The private schools, however, would not be democratically governed, while the public ones would be...

...Our vision will inevitably narrow if the association of children within the schools is wholly determined by the market...

...He therefore did not consider, for WHAT DOES SCHOOL CHOICE' MEAN...

...First, the market model is based on consumer sovereignty, but parents are not the consumers of education...

...Each year in inner-city public schools, tens of thousands of students fail to learn even the barest minimum that is necessary— never mind sufficient—for democratic citizenship and economic opportunity...

...In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman compared schools and restaurants...

...First, the least advantaged students may be made even worse off than they otherwise would be, since these students do better (by conventional measures of educational achievement) when they attend schools with more advantaged students...

...Many Americans rightly think it unfair that rich parents but not poor ones can opt out of a failing urban school system and send their children to private schools...

...Catholic schools in inner cities—which are often integrated by race, gender, and even religion—are eager to admit more students, but most inner-city parents cannot afford even their relatively low tuition...

...We therefore need to ask, do schools educate children from many backgrounds together in the same classrooms to a high level of literacy, numeracy, economic opportunity, toleration, and mutual respect...

...That inner-city parents cannot find good public schools for their children has become a major source of the appeal of vouchers— particularly to these same parents, who are disproportionately African American and Hispanic American...

...One part of this question is constitutional...

...Not, I think, if some disadvantaged students will be better served than they would be by staying in their neighborhood schools...

...According to the economist Cecilia Rouse, the improvements are more likely attributable to smaller class size than to competition or private control...

...Means-tested voucher programs would represent a commitment to find some way to deliver a decent education to the most disadvantaged students...

...George W. Bush's idea is to give parents "whatever offers hope" for their children...

...The advantage of charter schools is that they remain under public control, as voucher schools do not...

...Is there no significant difference between improving schools in Chicago and restaurants in postcommunist Prague...

...Although some are recent immigrants, most are products of our primary and secondary school system— whose mission is to produce citizens capable of sitting on juries, assessing policy proposals (about schools, for example), exercising their rights, and seizing their opportunities to live a good life...

...elsewhere than in the public's refusal to fund any school preferred by any parent...

...Economists Alan Krueger and Diane Whitmore found that small class size significantly increased educational achievement, especially among disadvantaged minority students, and narrowed the blackwhite gap on college tests by 54 percent...

...Voucher advocates might say that this is because economic incentives push parents toward public schools...

...example, the relative quality of the education provided by the private schools that accepted voucher students...

...Unlike restaurants, primary and secondary schools serve public purposes...

...The most eminent and vocal voucher advocates think it is unfair that any parents, even the richest, should have to pay more to send their children to private schools than they would to send their child to a comparably costly public school...

...At least as troubling from the perspective of a constitutional democracy, the analogy suggests that the public has no obligation to ensure that schools are desegregated or that they teach to high standards...

...It coincides with the idea of consumer sovereignty: the market should deliver whatever the consumers of its goods want...

...The movement to create small charter schools—sometimes as schools within a school—may be one positive step in a better direction...

...The problems with applying the market model to vouchers should now be apparent...

...city schools...

...The unfairness of our present school system must be located DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 19 WHAT DOES 'SCHOOL CHOICE' MEAN...

...It would be interesting to see whether Justice Scalia agrees with this lower court ruling, which is faithful to his preferred judicial doctrine...

...The argu20 • DISSENT / Summer 2000 ment is that parents whose preferences tend toward private schools are double-taxed...

...Why, then, do vouchers have public appeal even, say, among people on the center left...

...Ironically, if the market model supports any side in this controversy, it supports the public side...

...Second, the market model is based on the idea that "he who pays the piper picks the tune...

...But we should remember that if this is the complaint, then the controversy is not about achieving parity between rich and poor, but rather whether private schools, in "fairness" to the rich more than the poor, must also be publicly funded...

...We do not have a public obligatiorrto dine at a common table or to eat good food...

...The list could be longer, but it cannot be formulaic...

...The boundaries between city and contiguous suburbs are otherwise porous, and suburbanites, after all, draw heavily and asymmetrically upon the city's resources...

...The political will of these citizens, at state and national levels, is especially critical in improving innerDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 23 WHAT DOES 'SCHOOL CHOICE' MEAN...

...IS INCREASING parental choice important at all...

...But is it really unfair that the public does not fund, say, schools that teach Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or for that matter, atheism as the truth, and give preference to children of parents who have the true faith or who eschew all faith...

...They should ensure that all children—regardless of their socio-economic status, gender, race, ethnicity, DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 21 WHAT DOES 'SCHOOL CHOICE' MEAN...

...Most would not require voucher schools to renounce racial, religious, or gender discrimination...

...The vast majority of parents who can afford private education send their children to public schools, and poll after poll shows that they are satisfied with these schools...

...There is no simple or single way of improving inner-city schools...

...Moreover, there is no evidence that without public school choice, failing schools will improve faster (or at all), or that with public school choice, failing schools cannot be improved...

...Voucher advocates put their trust in market forces and distrust public standards and values, such as the integrationist idea of bringing children from different backgrounds together in learning as preparation for democratic citizenship...

...George W.'s brother Jeb, governor of Florida, has already initiated what the New York Times calls the "nation's boldest voucher experiment...

...If their tune is that schools should serve public purposes, then the market model collapses into a defense of democratic control of publicly funded schools...

...The vouchers this year are worth $3,400 on average—the lesser of the perpupil cost of the failing public school or the private school's tuition...

...Judge Smith ruled that although the fifty-three children may finish the school year on vouchers, the state can take no other action to implement the voucher law because the state constitution prohibits using "tax dollars . . . to send the children of this state to private schools...

...What fairness requires is that (in any given school district) the same tax dollars should follow all children—not just poor or otherwise disadvantaged children—to private or public schools...

...Their educational accomplishments (or lack thereof) warrant more attention...

...Cleveland and Milwaukee together total more than ten thousand...

...24 n DISSENT / Summer 2000...

...If the public's interest in schools and restaurants is so similar, then citizens have no obligation to pay for schools for other people's children...

...Voucher programs have both these problems...

...Are vouchers therefore a secondbest response to a much broader problem of unfairness that this country does not have the will to address...

...we would do whatever it takes to improve public schools...

...Over the past century, highly bureaucratized school systems developed in our inner cities, unresponsive to the students whom they are supposed to serve...

...But this support has not been forthcoming, nor is it visible on the political horizon...

...John Chubb and Terrence Moe, two of the most prominent academic defenders of vouchers, put the positive case most straightforwardly: "Choice is a panacea...

...The public's obligation is to make all schools good schools (for all students), and voucher plans do not do this...

...Second, the education of all students suffers when schools are segregated by ability or by socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, or religious background...

...Unlike voucher schools, they are typically required to choose all their students by lottery...

...This year, © Amy Gutmann Florida's experiment enrolled only fifty-three students...

...Some private schools in inner cities— Catholic schools especially—have demonstrated that they are able to do this for a small but significant number of inner-city students...

...The reform proposal that has gained the most press and political ground in recent years is school vouchers...

...BUT IS market choice in primary and secondary schooling also a panacea for improving the quality of education for disadvantaged inner-city children...

...Rather there are many ways, no one of which is sufficient (and there are even more ways of creating and maintaining bad schools...

...Her hypothesis is supported by the project STAR experiment in Tennessee, where 11,600 students were randomly assigned to either small or regular-size classes within public schools...

...In many states and most suburban areas, students score higher on standardized tests than in any other country in the world, and the vast majority of these students attend public schools...

...The public school systems outside of inner cities have also improved over time in their teaching of civic values such as toleration and nondiscrimination...

...Besides, those of us who support Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade or who oppose capital punishment should be wary of rejoicing in a court ruling based on the constitutional doctrine of original meaning...

...I say "may be" because the educational results of charter schools are as uncertain as those of voucher schools...

...It is not only unfair but also unjust that people who are willing and able to work cannot find decentpaying jobs (that cover child care) and cannot afford to live in safe neighborhoods that provide good public schools for their children...

...Integrated schools are a place where children from different backgrounds learn from each other, to respect each other...

...But democratic citizens, not parents, pay the piper...

...We would do well to begin by locating where the system is actually failing...

...Even among the highestearning fifth of American families, only about 15 percent of children attend private schools, and despite the skyrocketing incomes of the top quintile over the past twenty years, the proportion has actually decreased slightly...

...The results after three years of the private-pub22 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 lic school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, which targets the least advantaged students in the city, show modest improvements in mathematics test scores but no improvement in English scores over non-voucher school students...

...Still, public school choice is not an adequate remedy either...

...Constitutions and Markets Should private schools be publicly funded...

...No constitutional rulings will relieve citizens of the need to decide whether vouchers are a remedy for the problems of our public schools...

...Some of the most promising, mutually reinforcing, improvements include decreasing class size, expanding pre-school programs, setting high standards for all students, engaging students in cooperative learning exercises, empowering principals and teachers to innovate, increasing social services offered to students and their families, and providing incentives to the ablest college students to enter the teaching profession and, in particular, to teach in inner-city schools...

...There is no mantra—whether of parental choice or democratic control...

...Public schools are publicly funded while private schools are not...

...If we (the citizens of this country) were committed to giving poor parents what most parents want for their children, we would not follow the voucher route...

...Many state constitutions and the United States Constitution are not worded in a way that is so apparently restrictive...

...State Circuit Court Judge L. Ralph Smith ruled against Florida's voucher law without considering any evidence other than the state constitution's language, which guarantees a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools...

...or religion—receive an education that prepares them to exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities as citizens...

...Florida's voucher program may be discontinued because its state constitution mandates public provision of a free education through a system of public schools...

...But they also offer long-awaited hope for at least some parents...

...Are these sufficient reasons to oppose parental choice among public schools...

...Florida is the first and only publicly funded voucher experiment at the statewide level, although citywide experiments in Cleveland and Milwaukee have been in place longer and therefore enroll more students...

...Vouchers for poor parents could make a difference...

...And even the most ardent advocates of the market model don't argue that children's preferences are the ones that should be counted...

...A successful voucher movement in this country would therefore provide an enormous subsidy to affluent parents...

...True enough...

...Beyond funding school vouchers, the sole role of government in education, he argued, should be to inspect schools to assure that they meet minimal curricular standards "much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards...

...If inner-city public schools do not improve and suburban schools continue to be off-bounds to inner-city parents, it will become politically harder and democratically less defensible to oppose subsidizing private schools that are willing and able to provide a better education on a nondiscriminatory basis...

...among public schools—may drain away the best students from faltering or failing schools, creating two problems...

...Parents—regardless of their income— should be able to choose a public or private school for their children, at public expense...

...It would be extremely difficult— probably impossible—for the court to determine this in any case...

...Nobody can tell an AfricanAmerican inner-city parent who wants to send her child to a better public (or private) school that her reasons are selfish, sectarian, or in any sense illegitimate...

...The problem is that the results of the few voucher programs in existence lend no support to the claim that school choice by itself is a surefire way of improving the education of a sizable proportion of students at risk...

...Again, advocates of parental choice and market control downplay the public purposes of schooling, and this is not accidental...

...And it should always be remembered that schools educate not only by what and how they teach, but also by whom they bring together in their classrooms...

...In any case, the political argument for vouchers is still an option in all those states with constitutions whose educational provisions are more openended than Florida's...

...Many also oppose the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state...

...This analogy, which drives the market model, is more revealing than George W. and other politicians defending vouchers may want to admit...

...She is author, most recently, of a new edition of Democratic Education...

...Good schools must be created before parents can choose them...

...Little doubt about it: market choice in restaurants is a panacea for improving the quality of cuisine—or close enough to a panacea not to quibble...

...Charter schools have been multiplying far faster than voucher schools, and they now serve many more inner-city students...

...Education tops the public's list of salient issues in American politics, and there is no shortage of suggestions for quick fixes...

...Voucher plans uniquely have this capacity, proponents say, because competition in a free market is the only way of improving the quality of just about anything people want in the world—and parents certainly want better primary and secondary schools for their children...

...The case against vouchers surely will not be settled by this lower court ruling...