Cover Stories: Tough Choice

By WALTER SHAPIRO

< Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men -- the balance wheel of the social machinery.

-- Horace Mann, 1848

How noble the dream, how ignoble the modern reality. Mann's crowning achievement was the 19th century American common school, a place where children from all backgrounds could nurture democracy through a shared educational experience. Not very long ago, that vision seemed an eternal verity, enshrined in the public-school system. But over the past generation, the balance wheel of the social machinery began to wobble badly. American schools today, as any parent knows, are anything but equal. And education, rather than bringing students together, has become a social dividing line, separating children rich with choices in life from those doomed to have nearly none.

The crisis of the common school, the American public school, is that all too commonly it fails to educate. By almost every measure, the nation's schools are mired in mediocrity -- and most Americans know it. Whether it is an inner- city high school with as many security checkpoints as a Third World airport, or a suburban middle school where only "geeks" bother to do their homework, the school too often has become a place in which to serve time rather than to learn. The results are grimly apparent: clerks at fast-food restaurants who need computerized cash registers to show them how to make change; Americans who can drive but cannot read the road signs; a democracy in which an informed voter is a statistical oddity.

Since the 1950s and the era of Why Johnny Can't Read, Americans have worried about the quality of their schools. But this time around, the focus of that anxiety, even desperation, is not the teachers, the curriculum or the school budgets. Instead, public education itself, the very notion that government should run the schools, is under attack. Powerful figures, including President George Bush and his Education Secretary, Lamar Alexander, have begun to assail the public schools as a self-satisfied, self-protective monopoly that needs to feel the hot breath of free-market competition. They pose a radical alternative: rather than one common school for all, many kinds of schools -- public and private -- competing for students, government funds and excellence, with parents and children of all walks of life free to choose among them.

This evolving movement -- an odd amalgam of supply-side conservatives, ! frustrated educational reformers and a handful of militant black politicians -- has begun to take shape on the national stage. Under the banner of "school choice," its adherents are pressing for some form of public financing to cover student tuition at private and even parochial schools. If cost were not a barrier, these schools could then compete with public schools for students.

No issue cuts closer to the core of America's sense of itself than the character of its public schools, for education is the function of government closest to the people. A lack of confidence in the public schools is nothing less than a failure of the state -- different in degree, but not kind, from food lines in the communist Soviet Union. And the Bush Administration's impulse to rely on free-market forces in education has strong echoes in the surge to privatize state-owned industry and bureaucracy, not only across the U.S. but also around the world.

But Choice, the latest answer to the education crisis, raises other questions. If the free market is the only antidote to top-heavy school bureaucracies and time-serving teachers, is America fast becoming an Ayn Rand universe in which everything -- even the education of the young -- is measured only by its price? Can government provide enough money to open the better private schools to all students? Is Choice merely a scheme to perform triage on failing inner-city schools, allowing a few motivated students to escape and leaving the rest to fend for themselves?

With only a handful of educational experiments to point to -- and none a valid test of truly free parental Choice -- these questions defy clear-cut answers. Still, throughout the country there is a growing movement to make the traditional educational system less arbitrary and to grant parents more choices, often among competing public schools. But in no school district in the nation do parents have an unlimited right to pick any school for their children -- that is, of course, unless they are able to pay private-school tuition.

This is the central tenet of the Choice argument: today most parents can select their children's schools, except the poor. Affluent parents exercise choice in the real estate market when they shop around to buy the right house in the right school district. A choice of good schools was the lure as millions of middle-class white families fled the central cities during the past 40 years, leaving behind education systems unalterably segregated by race ) and class. Urban families that can scrape up tuition have flocked to parochial and other private schools. As Chester Finn Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education, puts it, "The only people who can't flee inner-city schools are the residents of the inner city."

True enough, but even with that inequity in mind, it remains murky how Choice might work in practice. The idea has its roots in the "voucher system," first proposed by conservative economist Milton Friedman in 1955, which would abolish existing school budgets and turn the money into tuition grants that students could use to enroll anywhere. This extreme free-market proposal would literally destroy the public schools in order to save them.

Few advocates of Choice are willing to go that far. Instead, the most plausible idea is a system of tuition grants large enough to enable all parents to afford a wide array of private and perhaps parochial or other religious schools, if that is what they think best for their children's education. Public schools would continue to operate, but each would have to justify its existence by attracting enough students in this new educational free market. This form of Choice gained mainstream respectability last year when the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank, published Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. The Brookings plan mandates a key role for state and local governments in monitoring school quality, educating parents and creating financial incentives for private schools to enroll disadvantaged students.

Well-intentioned policy proposals are as common a coinage in Washington as unproduced movie scripts are in Hollywood. Star power is what gets an idea off the shelf: a presidential endorsement is the governmental equivalent of a phone call from Kevin Costner. Bush, unveiling his educational strategy in mid-April, included this provocative passage: "It's time parents were free to choose the schools that their children attend. This approach will create the competitive climate that stimulates excellence in our private and parochial schools as well." For the first time, a President has made it a priority to question the monopoly power of America's public schools. In a few years, Choice has moved from the intellectual fringe to the bully pulpit of the White House.

Make no mistake, a major part of the allure of Choice in the frugal '90s is that it promises a radical restructuring of American schools with a minimal investment of federal funds. To buttress the Bush education strategy, the White House has offered legislative proposals that request $230 million to support state and local Choice experiments. That is only a little more than the total that the National League charged Miami and Denver groups for their baseball expansion franchises.

Rhetorically, at least, the Bush team is sparing no expense to embrace a far-reaching definition of Choice -- including aid to parochial schools, if that will pass the hurdle of the First Amendment. Education Secretary Alexander has called government support of parochial-school students "as American as apple pie." Although the Administration would largely let the states set their own rules for Choice experiments, Alexander hopes eventually to erode the ironclad distinction between public and private education.

Despite the Administration's zeal, there are grave doubts whether Congress or the electorate is eager to enlist under the banners of unfettered Choice. The nation's 2.3 million-member teachers' unions and most other education groups are downright hostile toward aid to private or religious schools. Michael Casserly, a public-school lobbyist in Washington, predicts that Congress will not "turn over public money to private schools when the members believe the Administration is not doing all it can on public schools."

Strong public antipathy to aiding private and sectarian schools complicates the Choice debate. The issue is ready-made for grandstanding, even demagoguery. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, hypothetically asks, "Do we really want tax dollars supporting Muslim schools that teach their students it is an obligation to assassinate Salman Rushdie?" These hyperbolic comments from the senior statesman of teachers'-union leaders underline how divisive church-state questions are in education.

But to bar all religious schools from participating in Choice experiments would automatically toss out Roman Catholic parochial schools -- the often successful large-scale competitor to troubled inner-city public schools. As political scientist Chubb, one of the authors of the Brookings plan, says, "We would insist that if there is genuine Choice, there has to be genuine competition. If there is competition, there must be alternative providers other than the existing public schools."

With few empty seats in most private and parochial schools, a valid test of + Choice requires a dramatic expansion of the supply side. Otherwise, the risk is that Choice will prove to be little more than a government subsidy to parents who already pay private or parochial tuition for their children. Yet the Bush Administration cannot mandate the creation of alternative schools. Washington can goad and coax with the carrot of federal money, but revamping public education is largely beyond the purview of the White House and Congress.

Nonetheless, the traditional structure of public education, where students are assigned to schools by fiat, is under a sustained assault. The Bush plan perhaps should be regarded as a clever White House effort to put its imprimatur on a popular rebellion that was already reshaping educational policy from the grass roots up. Local school bureaucracies are already under siege from a variety of forces -- innovative Governors, activist courts, maverick educators and aroused parents.

These potentially explosive changes, all happening beyond the orbit of Washington policymakers, include:

PUBLIC-SCHOOL CHOICE. The alternative-schools movement of the early 1970s gave parents in some cities options beyond sending their children to the neighborhood school. Prodded by desegregation orders from the courts, many urban school districts now practice open enrollment, which permits parents to place their children in any public school with vacant seats as long as racial balance is maintained. Some of these public-school Choice experiments (notably Cambridge, Mass.; St. Paul; and a New York City district in East Harlem) have been praised for encouraging innovation and raising student performance.

Beginning with Minnesota in 1988, and followed by Arkansas, roughly 15 states have taken the next step and have enacted or are seriously debating legislation to allow children to attend public schools outside their own districts. Again, such cross-district transfers are generally not permitted if they would undermine racial balance; white students, for example, cannot opt out of schools in Minneapolis or Little Rock. So far, few parents have taken advantage of their newly found freedom; in Minnesota about 1% of the state's students have attended schools outside the districts where they reside. Choice advocates believe that the principle is as important as any numerical test. "People need to know they can walk away from bad schools," argues Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. "Choice changes the psychology of it."

| The consensus in Minnesota -- the state with the largest open-enrollment plan -- is that public-school Choice works as far as it goes. True, there is some evidence that black and Hispanic parents, in particular, receive limited information about their school options. Transportation costs also could become a public burden if many more students decide to cross district lines. "Open enrollment has been fully in effect for only one year," summarizes Van Mueller, a professor of education policy at the University of Minnesota. "We don't know much, but almost all the participants are pretty happy with it. And most parents made their choice based on academics, not on finding the best soccer coach."

THE PRIVATE-SCHOOL OPTION. It began as a last-minute 1989 budget compromise in Wisconsin, an odd-couple deal between Tommy Thompson, the conservative Republican Governor, and Polly Williams, a black-separatist Democratic state representative from Milwaukee. The result was a virtually unprecedented school-voucher plan: the state approved legislation that would allow a group of inner-city Milwaukee students to attend private schools with $2,500 tuition grants. Bitterly opposed by the N.A.A.C.P. and teachers' unions, the program was delayed for a year and whittled down in size. "What about the common school?" Williams asks in response to her critics. "How come nobody talked about destroying the system when the whites left? Now they want to block poor kids from leaving."

But what can a 258-student experiment reveal about how a free market in education would work? There are, after all, 97,000 students in the Milwaukee public schools. Without greater funding and many more alternative schools, the voucher plan will remain mostly a symbol of black anger at the quality of public education. Herbert Grover, Wisconsin's superintendent of public instruction and a fierce opponent of the voucher program, argues, "Our preppy President went to Phillips Academy, which costs about $13,000 a year. But it's O.K. to set a limit of $2,500 for little black kids."

Polly Williams has inspired free-market visionaries elsewhere in the country. A proposal to provide tuition vouchers for 5,000 students in troubled New York schools was defeated this summer by the State Board of Regents by a surprisingly narrow margin. And a private corporation, the Golden Rule Insurance Co., has pledged to donate $1.2 million over the next three years to help 748 inner-city students in Indianapolis attend private schools.

CORPORATE SCHOOLS. Despite the pro-business rhetoric of national life, America has always been wary of mixing the profit motive with education. Private schools are usually run by not-for-profit boards rather than corporations worrying about second-quarter earnings. But in the middle-class suburb of Eagan, Minn., just south of St. Paul, Tesseract is a 200-student private elementary school run as a business by Education Alternatives, a for-profit company spun off in 1986 from multibillion-dollar Control Data. With Spanish lessons in the preschool, dozens of computers in the elementary grades and free-flowing wall-less classrooms, the school appears a success, though the secret seems more a dedicated staff flocking to an educational experiment than the magic elixir of the profit motive.

Education Alternatives originally envisioned running a national chain of for-profit schools. Instead, the company soon realized its primary skills were in teaching and management, not bricks and mortar. Last week, in another intriguing experiment, the company began operating a new public elementary school in an impoverished Hispanic neighborhood in Miami Beach. The firm has a contract from the Dade County school system, which was desperate to try new managerial techniques. "If we succeed with public-school teachers and these children in Dade County," says Kathryn Thomas, who oversees the project for Education Alternatives, "it will be Katie bar the door."

Far more ambitious are the aims of entrepreneur Chris Whittle, whose company, Whittle Communications, is partly owned by Time Warner. (Last week the Manhattan investment firm Forstmann Little & Co. agreed to buy a one-third interest for $350 million.) Whittle has announced plans to spend up to $3 billion to create a coast-to-coast network of for-profit private schools that theoretically could enroll 2 million students by the year 2010. What Whittle -- and other corporations that may follow in its wake -- adds to the Choice debate is the potential to vastly expand the supply of schools that might compete with the public sector. But the stigma surrounding profitmaking schools makes even the Bush Administration nervous. "We don't see moving in the direction of for-profit public schools," says Assistant Secretary of Education Bruno Manno. "Our plan is more closely along the lines of supporting what's in the not-for-profit sector."

Still, new schools might embrace new social roles as they compete for "customers" by providing a greater array of services. This notion is buttressed by a two-year assessment of U.S. school systems sponsored by the advertising firm of Young & Rubicam. The researchers warned that the schools had become an inadequate receptacle for America's social problems. In response, they called for the creation of new types of schools, especially in the inner cities. Such schools would go beyond their traditional educational role to function as all-day community centers that would provide social- welfare services, medical clinics and a healthy after-school environment.

Author Nicholas Lemann in The Promised Land -- his best-selling study of black migration from the South -- demonstrates that "community action" became a linchpin of the 1960s War on Poverty, even though few policymakers understood its mischievous implications. Lemann quotes a key Johnson Administration official as saying that community action (mobilizing the poor to pressure the local political establishment) "might lead somewhere, but we didn't know where." What makes this historical point relevant and disconcerting is that the same can be said about current White House support for unrestricted Choice: no one knows what it will produce. For as Bush White House domestic policy adviser Roger Porter puts it, "The Administration is committed to shaking up the system and breaking the mold."

In the end, almost all educational debates in America come down to questions of race and class. So too with Choice: What would it mean for students trapped in the holding-pen schools of the inner city? What are its implications for racial balance in the South, where the very word Choice conjures up white flight to private academies in the 1960s and '70s? Can the nation offer parents true educational Choice without formally abandoning the ever-elusive goal of school desegregation?

Once again, there is little objective evidence, only personal speculation. David Bennett just stepped down as school superintendent in St. Paul to become president of Education Alternatives, the company that runs the Tesseract schools. It is easy to imagine that Bennett, a proponent of public-school open enrollment, would be a missionary for unrestricted Choice in his private- sector role. Not quite. "No matter how you dress up a voucher system," Bennett says, "the poverty kids will end up with the short end of the stick." In any game of educational musical chairs, someone has to lose. And almost certainly, the last student stuck in a failing school will come from an impoverished background.

Many Choice proponents, like Chester Finn -- whose proposals for reform appear in a new book, We Must Take Charge -- do not believe school competition will cure all the ills of urban education. Still, Finn asks the blunt question: "Under Choice, would the kids attending inner-city schools be any worse off than they are today?" There is something irredeemably tragic about the question. But equally sad is the difficulty of framing either an affirmative answer or a plausible alternative vision for dramatically uplifting disadvantaged students.

The bitter truth is that American schools have become a reflection of the nation itself: divided by race, class and aspiration -- and all too often animated by no higher calling than the selfish preservation of the status quo. A decade of educational reforms has produced incremental results, laudable but limited. Against this bleak landscape, Choice might -- just might -- be worth the gamble as a way to radically transform the nation's schools in time to help educate today's children.

Early in the century, Louis Brandeis called state governments the laboratories of democracy. The phrase has become patriotic boilerplate, but in education the truth endures. No social experiment is more worthy than for an entire state -- with a significant minority population -- to embark on a true test of unrestricted Choice, complete with the participation of private, parochial and for-profit schools. The risks are grave, but so are the consequences of continued educational mediocrity.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Little Rock