School choice: Who gains, who loses?

Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 1996 by Fuller, Bruce

School choice is hot. Affluent parents in Washington, D.C., flock to the suburbs in search of better schools when their children turn five. Driven by the same motivation, poor Hispanic parents in Milwaukee are pushing the courts to free up vouchers so that they can send their kids to Catholic schools. When President Clinton moved to Washington, he exercised his freedom to choose by enrolling his daughter Chelsea in an expensive private school rather than a local public school.

After a rocky coming-out in policy circles three decades ago, school choice now enjoys unbounded popularity. It is not, however, free of controversy. Strident debate in Congress over a modest voucher experiment for District of Columbia schools hog-tied the District's budget for months. Opponents of taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools have introduced legal challenges to voucher initiatives in Ohio and Wisconsin. President Clinton, with teacher unions peering over his shoulder, has urged ordinary Americans to choose only from among public schools.

In the heat of enthusiasm and reaction, little attention has been paid to efforts that aim to measure the actual effects of school choice programs. A research program organized by myself and colleagues at Harvard's Graduate School of Education raises serious questions about the wisdom of unregulated forms of school choice. We found that choice programs can worsen the already unequal access to quality schools, reinforce the racial isolation of children, and fail to boost the achievement of participating students. Many local choice programs, as presently designed, serve to deepen the chasm between parents who are strongly involved in their children's education and those who are not.

Paradoxically, we also found that support for choice programs is broad and growing, especially among ethnic minority and working-class white parents, who are profoundly dissatisfied with their neighborhood schools. There should be no doubt that the choice movement is here to stay. Many Americans are convinced that they have a right to choice and that it is the best way to achieve a high-quality education for their children. The pragmatic question thus becomes: How can choice programs be better designed or managed to mitigate against unequal effects and maximize the creation of innovative schools that boost children's learning?

Empirical research cannot determine whether it is proper to use public funds to help pay tuition at religiously affiliated private schools or how to balance an individual's interest in obtaining the best education with the society's interest in promoting fairness. It can only provide the hard evidence that should inform the policy debates. Our research team sought answers to three critical questions: Which families are more likely to participate in choice programs? Do liberalized rules spark the creation of innovative schools? Does student achievement rise?

A PRIMER ON THE MOVEMENT

It's important to understand the school choice movement's roots and the varieties of choice programs that have emerged in recent years. The stage was set at an education summit meeting of the nation's governors that President Bush convened in Charlottesville, Va., in 1989. The governors set six major gols to be achieved by America's schools by 2000, including that all children be ready to learn and read when they begin kindergarten and that U.S. high school students be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement. This year the governors will reconvene to confront one painful question: Why has so little progress been made?

Incremental school reformers plead with critics to just wait; more money or national curriculum frameworks will eventually carry the day. They wave a recent Rand Corporation study showing that since the 1960s, "systemic reform" has led to significant gains in the achievement of black urban students, the hardest educational nut to crack. But per pupil spending has tripled in real dollars over the past three decades, and local signs of improvement are scarce in the eyes of many parents.

Frustrated with the apparent intransigence of the educational establishment, parents and community leaders are seizing the initiative. Many parents simply seek the freedom to exit their neighborhood school and enter another public school close by. Affluent parents make their school choice by moving to neighborhoods with good schools. In many cities, a move of a few miles--and in some cases a few blocks--can mean the difference between a school in which the average student ranks at the 20th percentile and one in which the average is the 95th percentile. Parents who are unable or unwilling to move have launched a variety of efforts to create better schools. In Milwaukee, it's an alliance between black churches, Hispanic leaders, and big business that has organized privately financed vouchers to enable low-income parents to pay the tuition at a Catholic school. Local activists in Boston, Cleveland, and Los Angeles are creating community or charter schools with bicultural or Afrocentric curricula, speaking to parents' desire for safety, discipline, and cultural complementarity between home and school.