Why I'm Pro-(School) Choice

Advocates of school choice should not lose faith in the wake of the recent report issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report concluded that school choice does not necessarily improve student performance and hasn't shown itself to be effective.

But school choice proponents should not see the recently released report as a major setback. Rather, they should regard such conclusions as a call for improvement and restructuring of what is still a relatively new educational experiment. Condemning the program when it is still in its embryonic stages would not be wise.

School choice presents a much welcomed option for parents who have yet to witness any development in our nation's faltering public schools system. But only a tiny percentage of parents have participated in choice programs. Indeed, rather than greeting the emergence of educational alternatives with joy, a recent Gallup Poll showed that 62 percent of those polled opposed the idea of vouchers.

But school choice should gain in popularity as more parents learn about it. Publicly funded vouchers allow parents to send their children to the school of their preference (public, private or parochial), based on which school best suits their children's needs. Thrusting learning institutions into a free market system would keep administrators on their toes as they seek to remain competitive.

You would think that, with well-documented differences in the quality of education among U.S. school districts, people would embrace the opportunity to decide their child's educational path.

Jonathan Kozol describes in his bestseller Savage Inequalities the differential treatment given to many children. He cities expenditures of $5,500 per pupil in the city of New York while that figure jumps to $11,000 in upper middle-class suburbs such as Great Neck and Manhasset. Some of the most affluent areas received as much as $15,000 for each of its students. Similar patterns exist in other cities.

The Carnegie Foundation indicates that the current implementation may actually widen gaps between the rich and poor. It contends that better-educated parents tend to take advantage of the system more readily than those less informed, by transferring their children to schools with more resources. This has left some worried that school choice will create "bottom-of-the-barrel schools."

Still, the solution doesn't lie in taking away parents' options, but in providing parents with more information to guide their decision-making process.

Yet the Foundation recommended that the government correct problems within the present school structure.

This is easier said than done. Dropout rates are higher than they have been in years. Student overcrowding makes classrooms look like zoos. The sanitary conditions in many schools deserve the Board of Health's condemnation. And many faculties are grossly underpaid.

Positive changes in our public schools under the current structure seem like a pipe dream. Instead, we should attempt radical change in policy to save the current generation of public school children.

By introducing the "survival of the fittest" concept, school choice would force the closure of weaker schools and induce struggling ones to renovate and restructure themselves. This would permit otherwise ineligible students to receive an education equal or comparable to that of their more affluent peers.

Unfortunately, the issue of school choice received little attention from the presidential candidates this fall. From the lip service that it has been paid, we do know that President Bush has consistently supported the idea of vouchers. President-elect Clinton supports the idea of school choice, but doesn't believe public funding should finance private school education.

Fundamentally, then, school choice should still receive support from the Oval Office.

For parents to be truly given a choice, however, we must not limit their selections to either public or private schools. Some argue that the installation of school choice will undermine people's faith in our public schools system. However, anyone who has recently examined that system knows that now is the time to question that faith.

If legislators are serious about the program, funding to educate parents must be increased in order to insure that they make an informed choice.

The voucher program thus far hasn't been tried on a large enough scale to make decisive conclusions about its future role. According to The New York Times, researchers discovered that less than 2 percent of students have taken advantage of statewide choice programs even though the past two Secretaries of Education, Lauro Cavazos and Lamar Alexander, have both attempted to expand the program.

School choice is still in its infant stages. Success stories have come out of East Harlem, N.Y., Montclair, N.J. and Cambridge, Mass. as well. These schools fortunately received generous grants, indicating that any new move by the president must be supplemented with further educational budget allocations.

Clearly, school choice can succeed if given support and nourishment. Britain's system, identical to the proposed U.S. school choice initiative, has satisfied many parents since its inception three years ago. Scotland has enjoyed similar success since launching its program in 1982.

School choice as it exists today needs revamping. Currently, most parents chose schools because of their proximity to home, not their quality. Our schools face a desperate situation, and this progressive reform offers us a new alternative which should not be ignored.

Of course, school choice should not be seen as a panacea for our educational crisis. Indeed, this crisis has other causes besides crumbling schools. The decay of the family, for example, has contributed to educational problems. But family decay isn't problem government can readily solve. We have to attack on other fronts.

School choice provides such an opportunity. Vouchers can help bring us closer to educational egalitarianism if used in conjunction with efforts to shake up school bureaucracy and increase funding. Now that a different approach has been offered, America should not be so quick to dismiss it.