The Education Gap: vouchers and urban schools. (Book Review).

Coons, John E.

By William G. Howell and Paul E. Peterson, with Patrick J. Wolf and David E. Campbell

The "gap" that serves as The Education Gap's leitmotif is a catchall for educational inequalities among demographically distinct groups--racial, ethnic, and economic. The scene is painfully familiar, with the "haves," well-off whites, receiving resources and opportunities not available to the "have-nots." With little distortion (and some convenience) I will refer to these two groups respectively as the Lucky and the Unlucky. The hypothetical gaps between them lurk in an array of particular inputs and outputs of schooling. On the input side are certain personal and family attributes plus all those features of schools-- skilled teachers, computers, updated facilities--that money now buys directly and that those without money could, instead, buy through school vouchers. On the output side are test scores and the various behaviors and attitudes of parents and children who enjoy (or do not) a subsidized choice,

The measured effects of choice on the relative positions of the Lucky and the Unlucky can be surprising and even paradoxical. For example, though today there is no systematic gap between the Lucky and Unlucky in per-pupil expenditures, the existing systems of vouchers, in cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, automatically create one by setting the value of the voucher lower than the cost of educating a child in the public schools. Now the paradox: at least for black students, the authors of The Education Gap find, this decline in financial support is associated with higher test scores; the notorious gap between white and black students is diminished. Nor does the decline in dollars injure the test scores of whites and Hispanics who also choose the private sector.

The book takes the measure of other alleged gaps, bringing me to my principal criticism. Statistics are always about something that is selected before the counting begins. The Education Gap sometimes gives the impression that it has identified everything still needing to be counted, and, indeed, it does suggest various sensible projects. But these appear to have been selected--and the project thereby limited--largely in response to criticisms from opponents of choice. When Professor X complains that choice for the poor will skim the "best and the brightest," the authors answer that it did not do so in the programs studied. Fine, but might we also wonder whether, over time, students switching from public to private schools could have a "pioneer" effect, alerting the more apathetic families to their opportunity for responsibility and autonomy?

Or, when Professor Y worries that vouchers will destroy the unity of the curriculum and thereby diminish our "civic" focus, the authors rightly report the superior record of private schools on measures of tolerance, What they fail to question is their opponent's premise of an existing civic curriculum. Others observe that contradictory moral and civic theories flourish among public schools, making coercive assignment of the poor an intellectual lottery. If they are right, any civic criticism of choice is at best incoherent. If The Education Gap's substance and tone throughout is relentlessly fair to its ideological opponents, at some points it seems modest to a fault.

This forensic constriction of the authors' agenda is illustrated more broadly in its dogged focus on test scores and the empirics of school life. Their questionnaires for parents inquire mainly about their experiences in the chosen school yet only skirt the possibility of deep effects on the family itself: "How often did you ... help this child with ... homework; ... talk ... about experiences at school; attend school activities; work on school projects?" And "How many parent-teacher conferences .... How many hours ... volunteered .... Are you a member of the PTA," and are you "satisfied" with this school and why?

I would not discourage such inquiries, as long as they do not scant the larger hypothesis that "the problem" to which choice may be an answer lies in the unlucky family itself. The middle-class parent who enjoys choice can function as a full and responsible human being; the child senses this and remains consciously integrated in this little platoon of potent and important people. By contrast, conscriptive school assignment strips the unlucky family of its dignity and power, inviting the parent to accept the passive role of the permanent loser; the child grasps this impotence as the deadly threat of his or her own isolation and vulnerability. Before all else the extension of school choice is an instrument of family policy, as Lyndon Johnson and Patrick Moynihan understood and as free-market theorists tend to forget.

Nearly as fateful is the question of the child's own autonomy. If freedom is a value of childhood, is it imperiled by our subsidizing parents? Some "liberals" say as much, but all we really know in empirical terms is that small children are inevitably dominated by particular adults. The middle class nevertheless has supposed that such inescapable adult sovereignty can liberate when exercised by the family; autonomy is the product of love harnessed to the parent's practical capacity to act responsibly over time, I hear that teenagers in the suburbs influence the family's choice of school, Would it be any different within the unlucky family? The Education Gap tells us only that the effect of parental choice on student self-confidence "appears to be moderately positive." I should think so. And the unluckier the family, the greater its rejuvenation.

"Family effects" of this sort could explain the grand phenomenon that so puzzles the authors: "How greater choice translates into achievement gains for African-American students remains unknown." But which among our unlucky families presently have the least coherence simply as families? We know that Hispanics and Asians retain a surprising integrity; for them the pretensions of conscriptive state schools may be simply a huge annoyance and little threat to family identity. But, as Moynihan warned us long ago, the "Negro Family" verges on prostration for want of serious mission. Before all other therapies, it cries out for a devolution of responsibility--for real tasks that are important, dignified, and civic. What could be better for demoralized parents and children than to acquire the last word on school assignment? Perhaps it is deep inside the family that we should look to explain these happy effects of experiments with school choice--higher test scores included.

Chesterton wrote of his friend and opponent Bernard Shaw that he "is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of him is admirable' One could say the same of The Education Gap with this twist: what is well presented of the "statue" of choice are her amiable extremities--arms from an otherwise missing figure. It is time to seek the body, the head--and the heart.

-John E. Coons is a professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley and coauthor, with Patrick Brennan, of By Nature Equal: The Anatomy of a Western Insight (1999).