to you, there are 1,700. I ask you now to help us meet our goal of 3,000 charter schools by next year.”11 Choice outside the public school system has been promoted as a major educational solution by leaders of widely differing political backgrounds. This movement is not the product of research showing that choice produces educational gains; that is usually simply assumed, even though research is, at best, mixed.12 The debate is not about evidence—it is often about ideology.
No one who has looked at stagnant achievement scores and graduation rates or examined the reality of many public schools that serve communities of poor minority children can deny that these children deserve something far better than the schools they are assigned to.13 There are many public schools that have been officially branded as failures for years under No Child Left Behind and state standards. They daily confront the personal and community consequences of concentrated poverty and often find it very hard to attract and hold the qualified, experienced teachers these students badly need. Accountability policies have documented the students’ poor outcomes, but threats, sanctions, and many other reform ideas have failed to work. The achievement gaps have been virtually unchanged in the high-stakes testing and charter school era.14
The opportunity for students in these schools to enroll in much better schools would clearly be a benefit. Much of the publicity about charter schools assumes that they are the best way to provide such opportunities. Choice is attractive, usually does not cost much, and leaves those already satisfied with their schools undisturbed, just where they want to be. The politics and parent eagerness are not difficult to understand. Yet the questions remain: Do the common forms of choice help students learn more, graduate, go to college, become better citizens, or get good jobs? Are there better answers?
After half a century of unfulfilled pledges to fix the most troubled schools, we need to be sure that this is not another empty promise. Are we betting on something that has no net educational advantages and might even increase the already dramatic stratification of school systems that gives the best education to the most privileged families and segregated and inferior schools to the most disadvantaged? Markets and competition sound good, but a look at the kinds of grocery stores and health care services provided by the private market shows that competition has not provided quality in poor and minority communities equal to that available to middle-class neighborhoods, even with the substantial increases in their residents’ buying power provided by food stamps and Medicaid.15 Does school competition work any better? What kinds of choice are most effective?
Varieties of Choice
Analysts often say the devil is in the details when talking about whether or not a policy will work. Choice programs can differ in several fundamental aspects, producing major differences in the kinds of opportunities offered, who gets the best choices, and what the overall outcomes are. Choice can be within one school district or among school districts. It can be within public schools or between public and private schools. It can be open to all equally on the basis of interest, or choice schools can have admissions requirements, making the schools the choosers. It can have a plan for diversity or ignore the issue of segregation. Management can be nonprofit or for-profit. The program can provide free public transportation to chosen schools or require the family to provide its own transportation. It can offer genuinely beneficial choices of much better schools or limit choices to weak receiving schools. There can be good educational provisions for language-minority and special education children or there can be none. It can include subsidized lunches for poor kids or not. The receiving schools can feature strong professional faculties or inexperienced and untrained newcomers. The choice system can have strong outreach and counseling for all parents or limit its market to particular groups or neighborhoods. Special and unique magnet curricula may be offered or not.
All the combinations and permutations of these features mean that there are a great many kinds of choice and that the kind of choice offered matters greatly. Choice approaches cover the gamut from those likely to offer few benefits to children in poor communities to programs that could be of great value. In many voluntary transfer programs, few families understand their options, few transfer, and some transfer to even weaker schools. In Boston, however, thousands of families of color register their children years in advance for a limited chance to attend a strong suburban school system.16 In many cities where students in schools that fail to meet standards have the right to transfer, only one or two in a hundred do so, in part because there are few schools that offer truly superior opportunities.17 Choice is only meaningful as an educational reform strategy when better options are available and when the parents who need them know about them and are supported in making their decisions.
Is Choice an American Tradition?
Sometimes choice is discussed as if it were a basic American right, but it is not. Education is mandatory in the United States, it is a crime not to educate your children,18 and the vast majority of American students have long been assigned to a particular public school, not asked to choose their own. School districts and state regulations were created with the goal of professionalizing teaching and assuring that all children received access to the essential curriculum. Public schools were designed to serve communities, not individuals, and students were legally required to go where assigned, unless they left the public system for a private school or homeschooling.
Educational choice within school districts is no more an American tradition than choice about police or fire service. We don't have competing bus or garbage services or park systems. Public agencies were created to do things that were seen as essential, providing common services meeting uniform standards, and their rules were meant to staff them professionally, avoiding patronage, nepotism, and the misappropriation of public funds. In many cities, educational administrative standards and professionalization followed scandals and serious inequalities in decentralized and politicized schools. Administrative control by state and local education agencies was long seen as a good thing. This is still how almost all major suburban school districts are run, and in those settings, no one is proposing to change it. Both choice and the other currently preferred interventions—high-stakes testing, accountability, and sanctions—are applied most extensively in poor nonwhite communities with schools highly segregated by race and poverty, while these same interventions are almost irrelevant in affluent communities, which leave the traditional system in place because they are not pressured by policies forcing schools with low scores to change. The presumption is that since things are so bad in poor communities of color, policy makers should be free to impose their experiments there. And because choice is primarily aimed at troubled, segregated, impoverished urban school systems, this suggests that it is not advisable in already successful areas. It is therefore all the more important to understand the different forms of choice, their impacts, and why what is seen as such an important reform—even a right—is usually targeted and limited in this way.
THE HISTORY OF CHOICE AS A MAJOR EDUCATIONAL POLICY
The Linkage of Choice and Desegregation
The initiative for educational choice is deeply wrapped up with struggles over race and the decline of our central cities and their school systems. Choice was traditionally a rare exception: there have been a few special schools within public school systems for many years and, of course, a tradition of vocational-technical schools that dates back to the early twentieth century. But the vast majority of U.S. students have always attended schools to which local officials assigned them. Special elite schools like Bronx Science in New York, Boston Latin, Lowell High School in San Francisco, and the North Carolina School of the Arts were not schools that families were free to choose; these schools used examinations, grades, and other methods to choose their own students from among those who applied. The same was true of gifted programs within regular schools.
Although choice advocates often trace their origins to the market theories of Milton Friedman, and some mention the War on Poverty's choice experiments in Alum Rock, California, the real beginning of choice as a serious force in U.S. schools traces back to the struggle over the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education in the
