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 1960s.19 It first developed on a large scale as a strategy by recalcitrant school districts to respond to the legal demand by black families, backed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown decision, for access to the better schools provided only for white students. Supporters of school segregation initiated both choice plans designed to leave segregation almost completely intact and voucher plans designed to permit white families and children to avoid integration. In Brown, the court found the school systems segregated by law to be “inherently unequal.”20 State laws mandating total segregation were now void and change was needed.21 A leading southern federal court ruled shortly after Brown that the Constitution did not require desegregation of schools but instead only some choice for some black students to transfer to white schools.22 The Supreme Court left most decisions about desegregation plans to the lower courts for a generation. Until 1968 it did not define what kind of desegregation had to be achieved. Meanwhile, the debate raged, and the southern position was that the Constitution would be fully satisfied by providing a limited choice to transfer for those students. No one thought that whites in the seventeen southern states would chose to transfer to all-black schools, and they were right. Black students who transferred to white schools often found themselves a small, isolated, and unwelcome minority. A decade after Brown, 98 percent of black students were still in all-black schools.23
Still, it became apparent that the South would not be permitted to blatantly defy any compliance with Brown. Southern leaders searched for ways to hold desegregation to a minimum, and the strategy known as freedom of choice was adopted across the region. Separate school systems with their separate student bodies and faculties would be kept as intact as possible. The black students who tried to get into white schools had to run a gauntlet of procedural barriers and their parents were often threatened within the community, and very few families were willing to face these problems.24 The historically black schools remained absolutely segregated. Freedom of choice became, in reality, freedom to retain segregation.
Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which required that recipients of federal dollars end discrimination, in 1965 federal education officials set minimum civil rights standards for choice, including (1) a clear chance for every family to make choices each year, (2) a guarantee that these choices be honored, (3) a guarantee of free transportation to receiving schools, (4) a prohibition on transfers that would increase segregation, and (5) a requirement of fair treatment of new students in receiving schools.25 Federal authorities who evaluated the results of freedom of choice in thousands of districts knew that real choice required strict preconditions.