When school choice isn't: this fall, millions of kids have the right to leave failing schools. Too bad there's nowhere else for them to go

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2002 by Alexander Russo

CENTRAL JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL IS A typical troubled school in the down-on-its-luck working-class town of Zion, Ill. Located an hour north of Chicago near Lake Michigan on the Wisconsin border, Zion's religious origins and former glory are still apparent in the town's biblically named streets, parks, and skating rinks. In recent decades, however, the city has struggled with drugs and gang violence, and tax revenues from the nuclear power plant built here 20 years ago dried up after the plant closed in 1999.

Zion's schools have also struggled. Going by last year's test scores, Zion is home to four of the nearly 600 failing schools in Illinois. More than half of the town's 3,000 elementary and junior high students are poor, and more than 60 percent are minorities. Before the local bond referendum passed last year, the schools were seriously underfunded. Central, which houses more than 600 seventh- and eighth-graders from around the district, has been "failing," and resorted to school uniforms in an attempt to limit gang and racial conflicts on campus.

Carol Suetmeyer's daughter, a student at Central, has witnessed firsthand the school's problems, which aren't limited to academics. In one harrowing incident last year, teachers and administrators couldn't find the 14-year-old girl for several hours. She was eventually located, sale and sound, but for her mother the experience was terrifying. "I'm very protective of my daughter," she says. "Nobody knew where she was"

Like several other parents in her town, Suetmeyer would love nothing better than to take her daughter out of Central and send her to another school this fall. Federal education-reform legislation passed this year--the No Child Left Behind Act--was designed by President Bush and Congress to allow parents like Suetmeyer to do just that, by giving them the option to transfer their children to better schools. But here's the catch: In Zion, there is no better school.

A small school district, Zion has five mostly overcrowded elementary schools but only one junior high school. The next closest junior high schools are not far away, in the next town over, but the new law doesn't require schools to accept transfer students from other districts. And neighboring school districts--especially wealthier ones--are no more interested in opening their doors to poor students than they were during the days of busing. As a result, Suetmeyer will be sending her daughter back to Central.

Her difficulty is a snapshot of what's likely to come this fall, when the nearly 10 percent of all students who attend the nation's 8,600 "failing" public schools (4 million students in all) will have the right to choose other public schools. There are more than 14,000 school districts in the nation, but about one in three has just a single school per grade level.

"My guess is that each district will want to keep itself separate," says Dennis Divoky, the principal at Central. "Community control [of schools] is the reason that there are 900 districts in Illinois"

School choice, as written into federal law, was intended to provide an escape for kids stuck in lousy situations, while at the same time spurring competition for reform. It came about as a compromise between advocates and foes of private school vouchers by creating parental choice, though only within public schools. In exchange for a significant increase in federal funding, the new law demands that failing (or "persistently unsafe") schools give parents new transfer options and cover the costs of transportation to another school. To give teeth to this requirement, up to 20 percent of each district's federal funding can be spent on transportation and such supplemental services as after-school tutoring.

Zion's experience, combined with the results of a recent two-year-old federal choice program, suggests that the impact of school choice on school performance will be far less revolutionary than its supporters from both parties envision. As a result, if left unaddressed, the situation is likely to strengthen the conservative argument for vouchers, which was recently bolstered by a Supreme Court decision allowing public money to be spent on such payments to private religious schools. More importantly, though, the choice program promises to leave struggling parents like Suetmeyer even more frustrated, and threatens to distract attention from the work on proven remedies to fix poorly performing schools.

Exercising Options

Despite its fanfare, the choice program enshrined in the new federal law is not exactly new. It is, in fact, based closely on a two-year-old federal program created in a compromise between the Clinton administration and House Republicans that funneled $360 million to help improve failing schools, but failed to provide any real choice for parents. State reports from the program's first year revealed that remarkably few transfers occurred. In Vermont, just 12 students transferred from two schools in 2000-01; in North Dakota, 34 students transferred; in Kansas, none; and in Florida, not a single school met the state's definition of failure. The numbers didn't increase much last year, either. In Baltimore, for example, just 22 students changed schools.