Pick A School, Any School

By WALTER SHAPIRO

It is a hot summer day on Maple Street. See Dick and Jane play Nintendo. See Mommy and Daddy turn off the switch. Whine, Dick, whine! Pout, Jane, pout!

"Today is a very special day," explains Mommy. "You get to pick your school."

The family drives to a big school of red brick. "This was where I went," says Daddy proudly. "In olden days, they made kids go here. But you, Dick and Jane, are so very lucky. You can choose."

A nice teacher with a big smile greets them. She uses large words like achievement and learning modalities. Then she tells Dick and Jane about important stuff. "You could have hot dogs or hamburgers every day for lunch," she says.

The next school is made of stone and surrounded by pretty trees and grass. "This was my school," says Mommy proudly. "It cost your grandparents lots of money to send me here. But it was worth it."

"Do we have the money?" ask Dick and Jane eagerly.

"You don't have to be rich to go here anymore," says Mommy. "These days, the government gives everyone money to go to any school they like."

"Oh, goody!" shout Dick and Jane.

The notion of freely choosing between public and private schools may no longer be just a Dick-and-Jane fable. Next week more than 400 students from Milwaukee's inner city will begin attending private neighborhood academies with the aid of $2,500 grants from the state of Wisconsin. In November, Oregon will vote on a landmark initiative that would give parents as much as a $2,500 tuition tax credit for each child in a private or religiously affiliated school. Already, students statewide in Minnesota as well as in such widely praised individual school districts as Cambridge, Mass., and New York City's East Harlem can select which public schools they will attend. These are grass- roots manifestations of a political idea that is rapidly gaining momentum and, if fully implemented, holds the potential to radically transform American public education.

Originally known as the "voucher system" and now often referred to under the innocuous shorthand of "choice," the theoretical concept is daringly simple. Instead of funding and administering public schools through stifling bureaucracies, government would provide tuition vouchers for every student. These could be cashed in at any state-certified school -- public, private or perhaps even parochial. Ideally, the result would be that schools of all kinds -- both old and new -- would jostle and compete in the free marketplace.

The winners would be those schools that attract a full enrollment of students, probably through innovative programs or a demonstrated record of academic success. But the real victors would be children of the poor and the hard-pressed urban middle class, who now have no alternative other than attending their crumbling local public school. And if some publicly run schools fail to compete successfully, they would go out of business. A brutal system perhaps, but one guaranteed to shake the torpor out of American education.

The battle over educational vouchers blurs ideological lines by pitting theorists of the right and the left against cautious centrist reformers and the custodians of the educational status quo. The idea was popularized by economist Milton Friedman in his 1962 conservative classic, Capitalism and Freedom. Liberal activists then gave the notion a brief vogue in the early 1970s as an experiment sponsored by the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Reagan Administration tepidly tried to revive vouchers in the mid-1980s, and George Bush gave lip service to the concept during the 1988 campaign. But the current intellectual momentum stems from the publication of Politics, Markets, and America's Schools by political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe. This influential book bears the imprimatur of the Brookings Institution, Washington's leading liberal think tank.

At first glance, the book seems unlikely to send anyone to the educational barricades. It is a laborious statistical analysis of the crisis in public education. But in their final two chapters, Chubb and Moe suddenly transform themselves into radical deconstructionists. They theorize that "excessive bureaucratization and centralization are no historical accident . . . They are inevitable consequences of America's institutions of democratic control." The more political pressure is exerted to improve the schools, they argue, the more bureaucracy is created to monitor the new reform nostrums. In their view, only a choice system that frees the schools from political pressures entirely -- and introduces the competition of the marketplace -- can make a lasting difference.

The most controversial aspect of any voucher plan (a term that Chubb and Moe avoid because of its Friedmanesque heritage) is the idea of permitting private and even parochial schools to compete with public institutions. But Chubb insists that choice plans that allow open enrollment only within the public- school system will not provide enough competition or sufficient diversity. "Public-school choice," he argues, "is merely a demand-side test. There's no change on the supply side."

Under a full-fledged voucher system, private institutions would spring up to cater to the needs of parents who demand better education. The vouchers would, in theory, provide roughly the same amount of money as it now costs to educate each student in the public schools; in some over-bureaucratized systems like New York City's, that is more than $5,500 a year, higher than the tuition at some private schools. Government would still have a role: private schools, as they do today, would have to abide by state certification standards and could not racially discriminate. Chubb and Moe also suggest that there could be extra financial incentives to encourage schools to accept problem students. Thus even potential dropouts would have an alternative to their local P.S. 99.

Critics argue that adoption of voucher plans would sound the death knell of the public school as a democratic institution that melds children from all classes, backgrounds and races in a modern-day melting pot. In truth, that pluralistic dream died years ago in most districts. Today 63% of all black students attend predominantly nonwhite schools. Public education is also increasingly economically segregated. A voucher system may not foster the ethnic diversity of a Benetton ad, but by diluting the distinction between public and private schools, it would add much needed equality to American education.

The harshest attacks against Chubb and Moe have come from some of the educators most sympathetic to incremental reform. "Their book is a profound example of the intellectual community's abandoning our most important democratic institution," claims Bill Honig, the California superintendent of public instruction. The choice model of rewarding schools for attracting students rather than successfully educating them troubles Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. "If your goal is merely to recruit students," Shanker says, "you can do that by offering a trip to Disneyland or with a good football team."

The debate over educational vouchers can be seen as a symptom of America's loss of faith in liberal government itself, for public schools have always been the collective institution most closely monitored by the people. If, as Chubb and Moe argue, a free market is the only antidote to educational bureaucracy, then virtually all government programs, save tax collection, are implicitly called into question. Yet the crisis in the schools is so severe that vouchers must be seriously considered, which is why Dick and Jane seem well on their way toward becoming free-market conservatives.

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York