Public schooling - Letters

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2002

Alexander Russo ("When School Choice Isn't," September) considers the interest in school choice a distraction. He urges fixing schools "the old-fashioned way": "better teachers, higher academic expectations, summer school, smaller classes and schools."

There's no question the feeble school choice provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act will be effortlessly thwarted by the establishment. But the "old-fashioned way" to "fix" schools has weaker prospects. If you want "better teachers," you need to bypass the education-school licensing monopoly and let districts hire whom they want, which would open the profession to graduates of selective universities. Smaller classes are expensive and lead to minimal gains; they tend to create openings in the suburbs for veteran teachers in urban schools and leave the neediest students with the least skilled teachers. Finally, while smaller schools are a very good idea, small schools are friendly places to work and harder for unions to organize; unions will resist any serious effort to create smaller schools. And while it is politically feasible to create "schools-within-a-school," these are weak substitutes for the real thing. The way to give children a small school experience is to give their parents options, including nonpublic schools.

TOM SHUFORD, Public School Teacher, Retired Ventura, Calif.

Russo got it right about phony "school choice." There is no alternative but to reshape, restructure, and reculture our large, anonymous, and low-performing schools. They won't improve by moving a few kids from one school to another, especially if we don't create many new, viable alternatives within the public school system. Vouchers have the same problem. Now that these underperforming schools have been identified, we need a massive infusion of dollars, good teachers, university and business partnerships, and community will to turn them around.

MICHAEL KLONSKY Director, The Small Schools Workshop University of Illinois at Chicago