TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091691/0916120.000

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                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 54

COVER STORIES

Tough Choice


Lamar Alexander claims to have a cure for the sorry U.S. public-
school system. Right or wrong, something must be done.

By WALTER SHAPIRO -- With reporting by Sam Allis/Little Rock


    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.