The public-school choice provisions of No Child Left Behind have been getting plenty of attention in recent weeks, mostly negative. It's time to reflect more broadly and candidly on the potential of public-school choice to solve vexing education problems.
That potential seems limited at best. For one thing, public-school choice can't work unless constantly tended, fertilized and watered by education officials who WANT to help children move to better schools. But how often do we encounter that situation?
Moreover, when public-school choice appears on their radar screens, even the best intentioned of policymakers are apt to attach scads of conditions and restrictions to it. In the end, like Gulliver pinned to earth by the Lilliputians' strings, little movement can actually occur.
A related problem is people who say "choice" but don't mean it, except as a fig leaf to hide very different purposes. That's how to understand the new report from the Century Foundation, whose Task Force on the Common School, chaired by former Senator Lowell Weicker and staffed by foundation fellow Richard Kahlenberg, has just delivered a 250-page tome entitled "Divided We Fail: Coming Together Through Public School Choice." (You can find more information at http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Detail.asp?ItemID=168.)
Be not deceived by the title. This report is not about choice, not about improving school quality and absolutely not about freedom or competition. Indeed, the task force is bluntly hostile to vouchers, would entangle charter schools in much red tape, and objects to "unregulated public school choice." Its report is actually a blueprint for a complex social engineering project aimed at racial integration of the schools, except that compulsory busing is here replaced by precisely calibrated transportation routes along which children may "voluntarily" travel so long as they end up in the schools the engineers want them in, sitting alongside the kids the engineers think best for them.
Kahlenberg has beaten this drum for some time, notably through his earlier book, All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice. Now he has mustered a blue-ribbon panel to boost the noise level. The task force probably had a swell time when it met, as its members pretty much agreed about education, race and politics before they even got together. Most are veteran school integrators and social engineers, presumably selected by the Foundation not because they would bicker but because they would readily assent to Kahlenberg's essential proposition: integration is an overriding education policy goal but, at a time when courts and lawmakers are loath to move people around against their will, when education choice is in the air, and when race is a suspect category (at least in some circuits) by which to shape enrollment in publicly operated educational institutions, racial integration must be pursued through less overt means, such as tucking it within socio-economic integration. "Controlled choice" is the mechanism selected by the task force to effect this integration.
The panel's core belief, like that of the Harvard Civil Rights Project from which numerous reports have recently emanated, is that "school integration is imperative, both to promote equal opportunity and to forge social cohesion." Its central recommendation is that "federal, state and local governments adopt a policy of giving every child in America the opportunity to attend an economically and racially integrated school. Every education policy decision&should seriously weigh whether the action will promote or hinder the central goal of integrated schools."
Talk about a time warp: "the central goal of integrated schools." Not high-achieving schools full of effective teachers who know their subjects and assure that children learn them. Not safe schools where parents know their children will be well looked after. Not schools that impart to youngsters the values, morals and character traits that parents prize. Not schools that do a stellar job of satisfying their clients. No, just "integrated schools," to be achieved through "controlled choice."
What exactly does that mean? First, find a geographic area large enough to house a diverse array of people, varied by race and socio-economic status, but not so large as to make student transportation unwieldy. It's no accident that most of the places where this has been tried are smallish communities like Montclair, Cambridge and La Crosse.
Then invite parents to select several schools in order of preference using whatever basis they like - curricular variety is mainly what the Task Force envisions - but actually assign children to schools according to an elaborate computer program designed to foster the maximum amount of socio-economic integration in each building, on the understanding that this will also yield racial integration without having to use that legally questionable criterion.
Finally, within each school, obliterate all forms of tracking and grouping that might tend to "re-segregate" classrooms.
Since it's a safe bet that this advice will be widely ignored - schools are busy trying to get kids to read and cipher, every state is awash in reform schemes, and the country has little stomach for social engineering - why is this report worth our attention? Mostly because it shows how easily "public school choice" can function as a Trojan horse in the larger debate over education in America, slipping inside the policy walls on the assumption that it's a gift to the choice movement rather than a menace. (This one, however, is none too subtle. Its overt hostility to what most people construe as school choice is so strong that two task force members entered dissents, saying they're not convinced that vouchers are a bad idea.)
How many times have you heard someone say, "Of course I'm for school choice, so long as it stays within the public system"? It's time to start calling people on that statement. Sometimes, sure, it's innocently earnest, but mostly it means "choice" as a warm veneer behind which government bureaucracies continue to make all the important education decisions, as if one of those political consultants who advises on word selection had said "People will like your authoritarian policy better if you say it involves 'choice'."
America's experience with public-school choice has not been great, at least when poor kids are involved. Note the widespread resistance in recent months to the public-school choice feature of the No Child Left Behind act. Note the refusal of Cleveland's suburbs to let youthful voucher-bearers enter their schools. Note the mounting efforts by school systems to foil parents who fib about their address (or send the kid to live with Grandma) in order to access a public school outside their district. Baltimore County is reportedly deploying 35 staff members to root out this practice; a Vermont father could face a long jail term for establishing a "false residence" in order to send his daughters to a safer school.
It's true that many troubled school systems don't have room for more students in their handful of high-performing schools. The larger truth, however, is that many well-functioning systems don't want to accept non-residents, especially if they're poor and black or brown. As a suburban "community activist" told The Baltimore Sun, "When you allow that to happen, you allow those behaviors to come in - negative behaviors."
What to do? One can give up in despair and wait for bad schools to improve, however long that takes and however many kids are lost meanwhile. One can join Rick Kahlenberg and Gary Orfield and the Century Foundation in dreaming of top-down fiscal and regulatory schemes so meticulously engineered and heavy-handed as to (maybe) overcome the barriers that public schools erect to bar kids they don't want. Or one can throw open the doors, urge youngsters to abandon failed schools, encourage new charter and private schools to come into being and let families take their education dollars to whatever school suits them. Perhaps there's also a way to get good suburban schools to open their doors-but it's not through the engineering schemes of the Century Foundation and its ilk.
"Divided We Fail: Coming Together Through Public School Choice," Task Force on the Common School, The Century Foundation, September 2002
"Balto. County seeks out schools' 'outsiders,' " by Jonathan D. Rockoff, The Baltimore Sun, September 16, 2002
