TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091691/0916122.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 81 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 60

COVER STORIES

Britain's Brand of Choice


By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by Anne Constable/London


    George Bush's ideas about school choice bear a strong
resemblance to portions of former British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher's 1988 Education Reform Act. Under this plan,
England's education standards were unified under a national
curriculum. District lines within the public system were eased
to allow open enrollment at any of the 23,000 primary and
secondary schools, and schools are assuming greater control over
their own budgets, without interference from district
authorities. Most pointedly, the government pledged that state
money, an average of $2,550 per student annually, would follow
pupils to their public school of choice.

    The Thatcher plan also offers a radical choice for which
there is, as yet, no U.S. equivalent. Individual public schools
may "opt out" of local school systems and instead receive
funding directly from the national government. With this
declaration of independence, a school's headmaster and a
governing body that includes parents become responsible for most
decisions, from hiring teachers to spending priorities. Because
opt-outs do not lose a portion of their budgets to
district-authority overhead, they often have money for more
books, new facilities and additional teachers.

    To opt out, a school must first secure the consent of a
majority of its students' parents. In the two years since
Thatcher's plan went into effect, 102 schools have cut their
ties; 11 are on the verge of final action; 88 more await
government approval. They are the first patches in a quilt of
autonomous schools -- which are tax supported and tuition free
but in effect can operate as if they were privately run -- that
the country's Conservative government hopes will blanket the
country.

    Do opt-outs live up to the Thatcherite vision of
efficiency and competitive excellence? Two years ago, Hendon,
a public secondary school in north London, faced dissolution and
the merger of its dwindling student population into a nearby
school. Today, as an institution that opted out, Hendon, with
850 students, gets two applications for every available place.
(Students with hearing problems and learning disabilities are
given priority.) Since it changed status in 1989, Hendon has
doubled spending on books and teaching materials and quadrupled
its payout for classroom equipment and furniture. Money that
once disappeared into bureaucratic coffers has hired more
support staff and refurbished a computer lab. Parents have also
been galvanized: they are painting the school's walls for free
in order to save money for books and other educational tools.

    Foes of the program warn that successes like Hendon do not
reflect the real impact of the program. Schools that opt out
disrupt county planning efforts and drain from districts money
that traditionally has been applied to a wide range of
services, including the provision of child psychologists,
substitute teachers and special-education instructors. Says
Margaret Maden, the chief education officer of Warwickshire:
"Opting out takes money from the system as a whole and affects
the schools that are left."

    Many educators also warn that opting out may mean sliding
back into the class-based system of education that divided
England into elite schools for the Oxbridge bound and lesser
places for everyone else. "Better schools get better; worse
schools risk terminal decline," says Tony Edwards, an education
professor at the University of Newcastle. But for those who try
it, Britain's version of Choice seems to deliver considerable
rewards.