School choice builds community

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, Melissa Marschall, Christine Roch

School choice poses a fundamental challenge to the age-old concept of neighborhood schools. So, unsurprisingly, it has been surrounded by intense controversy. Despite this, school choice is spreading. Back in 1987, Minnesota became the first state to approve school choice. Less than a decade later, over half the states had considered, many of them adopting, some school-choice reform. In a handful of cities - New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Montclair, New Jersey - school-choice reforms have been in existence for much longer. Many others - Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee - have recently followed their lead.

One of the frequent arguments made against school choice is that it disrupts community or that it turns an important civil institution such as the school into a market-like enterprise. The supposed result: Parents and families act as private consumers seeking a better product rather than as citizens looking after the commonweal. We argue that the benefits of school choice accrue not only to the individual as consumer but to the broader community as well. That higher levels of consumer satisfaction follow from school choice is becoming increasingly evident. What our study shows is that school choice also has public benefits in the form of more robust civic involvement - or, as it is now popularly called, "social capital."

Our analysis compares parental behavior in two pairs of school districts. We analyze the effects of choice on the formation of social capital in two inner-city school districts: One with considerable choice and one without much choice We then replicate this analysis in two suburban school districts. In both cases, the pairs are demographically similar, differing mainly in how much school choice they offer.

We interviewed approximately 300 parents of children in public school, grades kindergarten through eighth, across four districts. The first pair of districts we compare are located in New York City. District 4 has used choice programs for more than 20 years; District 1 has recently introduced choice, but in a limited fashion. The two other school districts discussed here are located in suburban New Jersey. One is in Morristown, which strictly maintains assignment to neighborhood schools; the other is in Montclair, which has had school choice since the 1970s.

District 4 is located in Manhattan's East or "Spanish" Harlem, one of the poorest communities in New York City. The District serves roughly 12,000 students from prekindergarten through the ninth grade. In the early 1970s, District 4 ranked lowest of the city's 32 public-school districts in math and reading scores. In response, the district instituted a system of school choice.

Years before, the administration of New York City's public-school system was decentralized to allow for greater community control. Thirty-two separate community school districts were established, each governed by both an elected community board and the central Board of Education. (Meanwhile, New York City high schools remained under the exclusive authority of the Board of Education.) The new decentralized system allowed reformers to institute choice at the district level.

Such favorable conditions might have gone unexploited if not for the leadership of Anthony Alvarado, District 4's superintendent from 1972 to 1982. Alvarado bent rules, attracted outside grants, and won support for choice from powerful teacher and principal unions. When Alvarado first took over as superintendent, District 4 ran a traditional neighborhood school program. It had 22 schools in 22 buildings with students assigned to schools on the basis of neighborhood location. The first alternative school, Central Park East Elementary, was developed in 1974. It was followed by an alternative program for seventh and eighth graders with serious emotional and behavioral problems and then by the East Harlem Performing Arts School, a fourth- through ninth-grade program. These schools exercised great flexibility over staffing, use of resources, organization of time, and forms of assessment. Perhaps more importantly, they engaged parents and took steps to facilitate their involvement.

District 1, the other Manhattan district we examined, is located on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Also largely Hispanic and poor, its residents are quite similar to District 4 residents. District 1 was created out of the Two Bridges School District, one of the most active districts in New York City's fights over school decentralization in the 1960s. The Community School Board was marked by continual bickering over a variety of issues, including the choice and tenure of the district superintendent. Despite the attention it drew early on, the schools foundered. In 1992, following the success of District 4, District 1 started a limited choice program - but only a small number of alternative schools were created.

How do the two districts measure up? District 4 has earned a reputation in the city and in the nation as an innovative, successful district. There is a sense of mission evident among parents, teachers, and administrators. While there is some dispute about how much of the success can be attributed to choice per se, there is no question that performance in District 4 improved as choice was implemented. In contrast, District 1 has faced considerable turmoil in general as well as acute problems like heavy administrative turnover.