Reading, Writing, Roulette - school voucher program in Milwaukee, WI

Offering parents questionable choices, Milwaukee's ten-year-old experiment with voucher schools may be gambling with poor children's education

Brenda D. Gordon will be the first to admit she has made some pretty bad decisions in her 46 years: "Living a life without the Lord," as she calls it, for much of her youth. Trusting the instructor at her beauty school, who took her tuition and equipment but left her without a license or a viable way to earn an income. Falling into bed too soon with too many men.

Brenda is sitting in the crowded living room of her rented flat facing Milwaukee's major north-south freeway. The apartment is on the second floor of a muted brown house in a predominantly Black neighborhood just north of the heart of the city. She now has 11 children, eight of them by different daddies. "I started having kids when I was 19 years old," she says with a roll of her eyes and a shrug of her slender shoulders. "I graduated from high school and got on welfare. I had no booty control." You strain to hear her soft Tennessee twang over the traffic's din. The rumble outside is relentless, especially at this hour on a warm spring morning, as Brenda checks faces and bus fares, skirt hems and shirttails. It's her weekday ritual of preparing six of her kids to head off in pairs to three separate schools, each in different parts of town.

There's Fransau, 18, and ZsaZsa ("I wanted her to be a star," Brenda says), 16, both high-school students; Anastasia, 11, and Joe, 10, who go to the neighborhood school; Nefataria, 8, and Dempsey, 6, who attend a private school established by a Black church across town. Jacquilin, 5, and Shelbie, 3, won't enroll in school until September, but they join in this morning's commotion just the same. By sheer force of her own hand; Brenda explains, her three eldest kids--Antennile, 23, a bank teller; Rosalin, 25, a college student and phone-company employee; and son Kelly, 26, a computer operator--managed to transcend this neighborhood, which is still recovering from an epidemic of crack and crime. Brenda, a single mom who made the most of welfare and food stamps, got those three now-grown children into private schools by working there in exchange for tuition.

Brenda is now working two jobs, but she still pays close attention to her children's studies. She wants the mistakes of her past to end with her kids. "Their education means so much to me," she says. "I don't want people teaching my children how to be in a gang, how to be poor." Brenda today gets by on the night shift at UPS and a day job at the same McDonald's where Fransau and ZsaZsa work, plus child-support payments for one son. For the eight littlest ones still under her roof, she's striving to get the best that Milwaukee's schools have to offer.

That clear goal has placed Brenda Gordon in the midst of what's arguably the largest--and most controversial--revolution of Blacks in public schools since separate but equal was outlawed in 1954. Ten years ago, disgusted with Milwaukee's schools, an unlikely coalition of Black parents and political and civic leaders and White conservatives pushed legislators to make Wisconsin the first state in the nation to pay for public-school children to attend private schools on taxpayer dollars. In Milwaukee, families of four earning less than $30,000 a year are eligible for vouchers worth $5,106 per child toward private-school tuition (less than the nearly $8,500 per student per year spent by the public schools). Under the Milwaukee Parental School Choice Program, the voucher option is one of several forms of school choice and perhaps the most hotly debated (see "A Guide to the School-Choice Debate," page 158). And as this is an election year, vouchers are a hot-button presidential issue: Democrat Gore opposes; Republican Bush supports. The theory behind vouchers and other forms of choice is that if you apply free-market forces to education, as in any industry, competition will force schools to improve to get students' "business."

Vouchers--which use public funds for nonpublic and, in some cases, even religious-school expenditures--have stirred up a hornet's nest in Milwaukee. They've attracted the support and money of national interest groups, pitted some Black leaders against one another, embittered the teachers' union and turned the school board on its ear. Supporters argue that they provide poor Black parents an option that many better-off White parents have exercised for years: to put their kids in private schools or transfer them to a better public school (which affluent parents routinely have done by moving to a better neighborhood). Opponents say vouchers serve only a fraction of public-school kids, that they skirt constitutional laws on separation of church and state and that there is no way to tell if the voucher schools are educating any better than public schools.

But despite the critics, vouchers are flourishing. Since the state supreme court let Milwaukee include religious schools two years ago, the voucher program has grown immensely. Nearly 8,000 kids attended 91 "choice" schools during the 1999-2000 school year, up from 341 in seven schools during 1990-91, the first year of the program. Current cost to the state: an estimated $38.9 million. Vouchers were added to a number of public-school options started more than 20 years ago to desegregate the system--magnet schools, charter, Montessori and other programs. These specialty schools have been widely praised and used, but they educate only a segment of public-school students. And because of integration efforts--in a city that's 35 percent Black and 56 percent White, while the public-school system is 61.2 percent Black and 17.6 percent White--White students often have a better chance of getting into the specialty schools.

Vouchers are in demand in other states as well. A national poll conducted last year by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Black think tank, showed that among Black adults with children, 71 percent support vouchers. And lawmakers have responded. This year, voucher bills are pending in eight states, including Arkansas, Georgia and Missouri. In California, voters might face a voucher initiative on November's ballot. (The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the issue: programs in Ohio, Maine and Vermont were found to violate state or federal constitutions on the separation-of-church-and-state issue, while Florida's program violates a state "quality system of public schools" clause.)

Given this national debate, all eyes are on Milwaukee and its radical experiment. The majority of choice students attend elementary schools, so the Gordon household provides a good opportunity to see how choice works. Brenda uses vouchers to send two of her younger children to a new Christian elementary school affiliated with her church on the city's northwest side. Two other little ones attend their neighborhood elementary, four blocks from home. As it turns out, Brenda is as satisfied with her younger children's choice school as she is with their public school. But for every Brenda Gordon there are less fortunate parents--and their--kids who have found themselves at the mercy of a startup choice school that's untried and unproven. The lesson in Milwaukee is that while choice may mean different, it doesn't always mean better: With a free-market approach to school, the buyer had best beware.

A Black Church School

About 7:04 A.M. each school day, Brenda Gordon's Nefataria, a wide-eyed 8-year-old, and her younger brother Dempsey, who's thin like his mom, are scooped up by one of the hundreds of tiny school buses that shuttle across the city. After a 45-minute ride to the northwest edge of town, they're deposited in a well-kept neighborhood, where Christian Faith Fellowship Church, which is affiliated with the Church of God in Christ, beckons with a blue-and-red neon sign: Sinners Are Welcome Here.

The two attend DLH College Preparatory Academy of Excellence, a kindergarten-through-third-grade school that's so new it smells new. "I sent them there because I wanted them to have a Christ foundation," their mom says. Indeed, lessons are steeped in biblical principles, says Barbara Horton, executive director of DLH, which is attached to the church where Brenda worships on Sundays with as many kids as she has bus fare for. "Our mission is to educate the whole child," Horton adds as she gives a tour of the white hallways lined with tiny orange lockers, pictures of African-American heroes and Bible passages. "It's not enough to deal with the social, the physical and the mental. We have to deal with spiritual growth as well." DLH teachers use an educational method that encourages children to understand the world and recognize their own potential as change agents. She believes in this method so strongly that she's planning to have her second graders take the public school's standardized third-grade reading test just for practice--confident they will pass easily.

DLH is named after Christian Faith Fellowship's copastor, Darrell L. Hines, who in 1996 moved his now--5,000-member congregation from Brenda Gordon's neighborhood. Hines, affectionately known as Pastor Darrell among his worshippers, leads the congregation, one of the largest predominantly Black churches in the state, with his wife, Pamela, also known as Pastor Pam. Pastor Darrell says the members' tithes paid for the $2.5 million school, which was completed in spring 1999 and opened that fall. "Our hope is to start with kids at a young age and give them principles to grow up with," he says.

Taxpayer-funded vouchers account for more than 80 percent of the student body's tuition at DLH, so the school would be hard-pressed to operate without vouchers. (Many kids come from rougher parts of town, and few students are members of the church.) Nefataria and Dempsey are together in Mrs. Pate's class of first and second graders, and today, the students in their crisp blue-and-white uniforms are talking about freedom of the press. Down the hall, a group of kindergartners is learning how to use maps. Horton shows off the spacious cafeteria, the gym with a regulation-size basketball court and the preschool on the first floor. Just three of her teachers are board-certified, a requirement of all public-school teachers but not of private ones. "They're working on it," Horton says of the two uncertified faculty members. But how much does certification matter? Some critics argue that bad teachers who are certified have been the bane of public schools for years.

With its 109 students in space meant for 190, library with a computer center and about 20 students per teacher, DLH seems like an educator's paradise. To Tracy Laster, a certified kindergarten teacher, it is. For seven years Laster taught in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), specializing in working with "at-risk" children. "It was like a war zone," remembers Laster, who has a master's degree in education. "The day I found myself wrestling a 10-year-old down to the ground to keep her from hurting someone was the day I decided to leave." She gave up the public schools' teachers contract and its larger benefits package and salary for "peace of mind, and an administration and classroom that are conducive to teaching."

Horton also came from the public schools. She'd spent three years in high-level human-resources jobs and was at one point acting deputy superintendent of Milwaukee's system. After losing a bitter struggle for the superintendent's post, she was approached by Hines, her pastor of four years, to head his faith-based school. "I want the children here to have what I'd want my children to have," she says. "Everybody knows what's happening with MPS. Failure is failure."

Public-School Options

Certainly no one would disagree with the statement that at one time Milwaukee's schools were indeed failing Black children. Isolated in one of the most segregated cities in the nation, the city's majority-Black public schools were known in the mid-eighties for their abysmal standardized-test scores, for a dropout rate that was more than double the state average, and for twice as many suspensions among Black students as for Whites. Back then, says John Gurda, a White historian and author of The Making of Milwaukee (Milwaukee County Historical Society), "The school board was widely viewed as a place where good ideas went to die."

The system is changing: Last fall, voters booted five school-board members who were backed by the teachers' union for a prochoice board, and public schools are responding to the competition posed by choice schools. Log on to the district's Web site and you'll find engaging marketing descriptions like "We invite parents as full partners ... "

But many of the changes were just part of an evolution. Long before vouchers were an option, Milwaukee parents had many public-school choices. Following a desegregation lawsuit in the late 1970's, court-ordered busing led to a Byzantine system that shipped disproportionate numbers of Black students to outlying areas and brought in few White students in exchange. Today nearly 70,000 of Milwaukee's 105,000 public-school students are bused, mainly to relieve overcrowding, not segregation. In a practice known as double busing, Black students pass one another in buses on the way to one another's neighborhood schools. "The perception today is that you've got to get on a bus to get a quality education," says Aquine Jackson, Ph.D., director of MPS Student Services. "We're now asking parents what it would take to make your neighborhood school your school of choice."

Within the public schools, Milwaukee parents can send their kids to a neighborhood school, or, if space is available, to one of about 32 charter schools, one of 5 immersion, or one of 49 intensive-training magnet schools. But those public-school options weren't enough for the parents of the 8,000 children who've chosen voucher schools. The problem, says historian Gurda, whose children are products of Milwaukee's public schools, is that "there's no clear outline of a system that's emerging. The more choices there are, the higher potential there is for confusion."

With so many options, some parents are less likely to do the research, and instead focus on a friend's recommendation, proximity or connection to a church. And just as Brenda Gordon's kids found themselves at a place like DLH Academy, simply because she attended a certain church, other students have landed in choice schools like the one in the Y.

A Struggling Choice School

At the North Central YMCA, there's no indication that a school shares this building except for this small sign posted outside a second-floor office: Medgar Evers Baptist Academy. And the 48 children in the private kindergarten-through-fourth-grade school do indeed share the space with members of the Y--the gym, the bathrooms, the conference rooms that double as classrooms. Children's feet dangle from adult-size chairs as they stretch to work at adult-height tables. Their books are stored in a closet, but there's a public library across the street.

By necessity, Medgar Evers is a make-do school. While established parochial schools were bolstered by the infusion of students and their voucher cash, many new choice schools have struggled for lack of basic infrastructure, like a building and support staff. All the children at Medgar Evers's Y site are voucher students; as are those in a sister site, which serves 41 middle-school students in the lower level of a church a few miles away. The two student bodies are the sole source of funding for the school, which pays rent and salaries, along with books, supplies and operating expenses. "We're working toward getting our own building so we can expand," says Avis Wright, the school's CEO and founder, as the children at the Y assemble to hear a visiting public-health nurse discuss conflict resolution. But to expand, she'll need more space and more teachers, and that costs more money.

It's clear that vouchers have created a market for entrepreneurial educators, as well as disillusioned public-school teachers. Avis Wright, who has seminary and business-administration training, is on her third school. In 1987 she set up the now-defunct Wright Track, for students who had been kicked out of other public schools. "But the kids had too many problems; some of them were on marijuana and they had bad attitudes," she says. "There's not too much you can do with some children." Then she had another idea: Medgar Evers Academy (minus the Baptist), which nearly closed its doors because of a shortfall under a state-mandated 65 percent cap on voucher students in the early days of choice. The school stayed afloat once the cap was raised to 100 percent, and Wright transformed it into the Christian-infused Medgar Evers Baptist Academy.

Avis Wright's school is not alone in its struggles. Two choice schools that mainly serve Black students have closed because of financial problems. Another was forced to move last year after building inspectors declared its site unsuitable.

Two of six Medgar Evers teachers have certification, but one teacher's aide has only a high-school diploma. Gary Smith, a brother who left the public schools and now teaches 14 first and second graders, is quick to defend his school's shortcomings. "You've got to learn to crawl before you gallop," he says as he highlights the amenities, like the shared Y pool and arts-and-crafts room, and the public park across the street. "We don't have all the trappings of a traditional school. But if traditional schools were so successful, we wouldn't be here."

Milwaukee Debates the Results

Howard Fuller, Ph.D., a Black educator, agrees. He and his wife, Deborah McGriff, Ph.D., are staunch choice supporters. "I can take you to public schools in America that nobody will want to send their kids to--and you can't close them," he says. Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University and Milwaukee's public-school superintendent from 1991 through 1995, is organizing the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national coalition of African-Americans who push for broader educational choices like charter schools, vouchers and homeschooling. His wife heads Edison Teacher Colleges, a subsidiary of Edison Schools, a for-profit educational-management firm, which is scheduled to open two campuses in Milwaukee this fall. "Parental choice is enough to make sure accountability exists," he says.

But "for parents who think choice is better, what criteria do you use to define something that's better?" counters the Reverend Dr. Rolen L. Womack, Jr., pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church. With other Black ministers, Womack has helped organize rallies against the voucher program and is now working to improve public schools. "I'm for every child having an opportunity to learn," he says. "Look, I could get $5,000 a student, pay teachers $10 an hour. But wouldn't I be more effective in championing the rights of 100,000 students, instead of trying to do one school?"

Acknowledging that some public schools aren't up to par, Spence Korte, Ph.D., the current Milwaukee superintendent and the third in five years, says, "the trouble with choice is if you leave a mediocre public school for a mediocre choice school, then you haven't solved the problem." Korte, a former elementary principal, outlines a plan under development to shift $170 million from busing to improving all public schools and building more in overcrowded areas. "But the economic reality is that many families are not stable," adds Korte who is White. "Schools started with a narrow charge, then people added things on like you add balls to a Christmas tree. We're now responsible for hot breakfast, hot lunch, immunization, AIDS education and more. We can do all that if it's mandated, but in fairness we need to be judged on more than test scores."

Nationally, much of the opposition to vouchers comes from People for the American Way (PFAW), a group founded by the television director Norman Lear, which has accepted donations from the National Education Association (NEA), the nation's largest teachers' union. The PFAW has challenged vouchers at every turn, including leading an investigation last year with the local NAACP branch that found that several choice schools violated students' rights by administering entrance exams, encouraging religious teaching and charging students additional fees. These practices violate laws that compel voucher schools to select students at random, to accept vouchers as full payment and to respect students' rights not to participate in religious activities. A major issue, says Elliott Mincberg, vice-president and legal director for PFAW, is that "nobody's monitoring these schools."

In fact, it's difficult to assess whether choice schools are actually better academically: A state-funded audit of the program released in February acknowledged that there was no way to measure how students were performing without uniform testing. The audit also suggested a need for the state education department to monitor the program more closely. And so after ten years of vouchers, with no clear results, more and more parents are still taking the chance on choice.

As the opponents square off, what's most important is that decision makers respond to parents' concerns, says Joanne Williams, a sister who's an anchor and education reporter at Milwaukee's WITI-Fox 6TV with sons in the first and second grades. "I wanted my sons to go to public schools," she says, but because of the schools' race-based selection process, "we didn't get our first picks and we didn't like our neighborhood schools, so we moved to the suburbs. Maybe if they improve the neighborhood schools, I might be enticed to switch back."

Korte is hoping others feel that way. "The current system is a nightmare from the parents' point of view," the superintendent concedes. "We're no longer under an integration order, but our assignment policies reflect a different time." In shaping the $170 million--improvement plan, the Neighborhood Schools Initiative, school officials have conducted town-hall meetings and even interviewed people door-to-door. Parents' top three concerns, he said: Good teachers and strong curricula, school days that coincide with their nine-to-five workdays and the safety of their children as they go and come from school.

"In some ways the initiative has brought the schools full circle," says Korte noting that emphasis is once again on lifting all public schools, not just those specialty schools intended to attract Whites. Choice has "gotten our attention. It's put us on our toes to develop a consciousness about how to treat our customers."

An Urban Oasis

So far Brenda Gordon is a satisfied customer, though she is concerned about her kids' safety. Although Joe and Anastasia have only four blocks to navigate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary--five minutes at most their trip takes them through one of the most perilous neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The school playground and building are neutral territory, but the blocks leading there can be a gauntlet. Walking home from school recently, Joe broke his glasses defending his sister in a fight with a schoolmate; without money to fix them, he's doing without. Located in an area so solidly Black that it was exempt from the city's court-ordered desegregation, King Elementary, with its colorful kente border around the top, sits like a lighthouse beacon in the early-morning fog.

Tidy rentals and owner-occupied homes surrounding the school belie the devastation of joblessness, drugs and crime. As Milwaukee lost many of its manufacturing businesses to southern and foreign enterprises--along with 20 percent of its White population to the suburbs--in the 1970's and 1980's, many Blacks in the area lost their tenuous grip on stable lives. In 1990 the proportion of African-American Milwaukeeans living in poverty was, at nearly 42 percent, one of the highest among all U.S. industrialized cities. And in a haze of crack cocaine in the late eighties and early nineties, drug-related shootings fueled a 253 percent increase in the city's homicide rate. Brenda Gordon tells of the neighborhood's drag dens and disappearing bodies. Crime has declined as it has elsewhere recently, but save an occasional fast-food place, corner grocery or liquor store, there are few businesses to provide economic relief for this community. So in 1997, when Wisconsin's infamous end to welfare pushed thousands of people off the rolls, it also pushed them into typically low-paying jobs.

To Josephine Mosley, principal of King Elementary, those facts are mere facts--not obstacles and certainly not excuses for her kids' performance. She knows that nearly all her 500 students come from households poor enough for them to receive free lunch. She also knows that many of her students are being raised by single moms or foster moms or grandmoms and that many of their lives at home are far from the calm that school provides. So while she has them from 8:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., she infuses them with a sense of purpose through the next school day. This morning it starts with Boyz II Men's inspirational "I Will Get There" over the PA system, followed by fifth-grader Jerrica Turner sharing the word for the day ("Possible. If I study it is possible to pass the reading test"), as well as school events and African-American history.

It's clear that King is no ordinary public school. But it is an example of what a public school should be. When Mosley became principal in 1988, "we were struggling, at the bottom of the heap," she says. She started a reading program for slower students, weekly merit recognition, a free period for teachers to meet and share concerns, and a system in which some students remain with the same teachers as they advance each grade. The King staff is 50 percent Black, while districtwide fewer than 20 percent of teachers are Black, 74 percent are White. And administrators, teachers and students alike at King wear lively kente vests and ties. Even changing the school name (it was previously named for Victor Berger, a White socialist) reflects Mosley's holistic approach to education. In 1991 King became a pilot program: It received the designation African-American immersion and $125,000 in state funds over three years to build a curriculum that emphasizes Black culture--primarily to combat the alarming rate of failure among Black boys.

Today a walk down the halls of polished wood floors in this graceful 103-year-old building reveals a success story achieved "by any means necessary," as Mosley often says. Affirmations ("If you think you can, you can") and pictures of intact families, tender men and Black icons line the walls. Books like Les Brown's Live Your Dreams and Toni Morrison's The Big Box fill library shelves. Each classroom has at least seven computers. For a break, Ms. Butler's second graders dance and sing along with James Brown: "Say it loud! I'm Black and I'm proud!" King student scores on statewide tests have gradually increased since Mosley took over. Once ranked among the lowest-scoring schools in reading tests, King saw 98 percent of its third graders scoring at or above average last year. Fifty-seven percent of fourth graders were at or above average in math tests, compared with the districtwide 49 percent. The attendance rate is 93 percent and the suspension rate a low 1 percent. With a social worker, speech teacher, psychologist and visiting nurses from a nearby hospital, along with community involvement from partners like Carroll College and Andersen Consulting, and an active Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO), King has improved enough to earn a spot on the school board's "honor roll" of schools in low-income areas that have high achievement.

So what makes this school work? DeLisa A. Turner--president of King's PTO, as her mother once was--credits Mosley's hands-on management. "She won't hesitate to call you" about a wayward son or daughter, Turner says. "And she allows parent input. If it's doable, with Mrs. Mosley, it's done." Turner, who was once on welfare and now works at a Head Start school, says, "We know many parents can't take time off to come to things like PTO meetings," she says. "But we encourage them to double-check homework, to contribute whatever they can to buy merit awards." The PTO also sponsors workshops for parents on issues like clearing up bad credit and applying for a mortgage.

The Right Path for Brenda's Kids

Before Brenda Gordon got her second job ("To buy me a house," she says), she would often volunteer at King as well as DLH Academy, spending time in her children's classes. She doesn't do as much these days, but she found time one recent morning to speak as part of a Women's Career Day at King, telling students about her two jobs. As DLH Academy expands to include older children, she says, she will consider sending hers across town. "A school with a Christ foundation is better than any school in this world, but I like King because it gives the kids a good sense of their heritage," she says. "I wanted them to have an education like I knew of--Booker T. and George Washington Carver. I read their stories when I was growing up picking cotton in Gold Dust, Tennessee, and we didn't have this diversity, this trying to be somebody you wasn't."

And as always, she's trying to find the right paths for her kids. Anastasia graduates from King Elementary this spring. Brenda is searching for the best middle school. Fransau 18, a quiet artist with so-so grades, also graduates this year, from Bay View, a multicultural public high school in the southern part of town. His mother is nudging him toward a technical college. ZsaZsa, 16, a junior at Bay View with a bent for music, shocked everyone recently when she announced she was pregnant. "She's still going to college," Brenda says emphatically, quickly explaining that the father, a Bay View student, was saving money for the baby, who will go to DLH's day-care program while ZsaZsa continues school. Brenda sighs. "I had hoped they'd learn from my mistakes. I tell them don't do like me. There's a better life. For me it was my education or my children's. I don't want them to have to make that choice." By the grace of God, as she often says, they won't. That's why Brenda is up at 5:00 A.M. each weekday, getting the last of her charges off to school, like Noah, saving them two by two.

Public Schools: What You Can Do

Despite the growing popularity of school choice, most Black children attend public schools. Josephine Mosley, principal of Milwaukee's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary, suggests a few ways each of us can help a local public school improve its performance:

1. Advocate. Be aware of school-related issues. Vote for school boards and initiatives to increase funding.

2. Give. Gifts can range from sponsoring a class field trip to providing a uniform for one child. "A year's supply of tissue boxes" helps keep kids in school, Mosley says.

3. Build partnerships. Join colleagues and adopt a class. Send speakers; give supplies. Ask the teacher for a wish list.

4. Become a mentor. Help guide at least one young person who is not your child.

5. See for yourself. Visit a neighborhood school. Volunteer as an education assistant. Be a principal for a day. "Walk a mile in my moccasins," Mosley says, "and you'll understand what teachers and principals are dealing with."

-- R.S.

A Guide to the School-Choice Debate

By Julianne Malveaux

Magnet schools or homeschooling? Vouchers or public education? How did educational options become so complicated, and so political, with eight state legislatures considering variations on Milwaukee's voucher program? Since the Department of Education produced A Nation at Risk in 1983, issues of education quality and school reform have been high on the political agenda. Says Mary Hatwood Futrell, Ed.D., dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University, "Governors, legislators, business and foundation leaders and educators have been involved in the movement to change the ways that schools are set up." Now parents and children have more educational alternatives than ever before:

PUBLIC SCHOOLS Ninety-four percent of our nation's Black children attend public schools. Our nation's public schools are typically portrayed as overcrowded and crumbling physical plants with safety issues and students' scoring poorly on standardized tests. Despite this bad rap, there are state-of-the-art public schools that have science and computer labs and radio-production facilities. Because public schools are mainly funded by property taxes, there is less money available to support schools in poor neighborhoods. "In some states, schools in a rich community may receive more than five times as much per-student funding as schools in poor, inner-city or rural districts," write David Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Addison-Wesley).

Says Futrell: "We should revisit tracking systems, improve facilities, move toward national certification of teachers and smaller classes. We can make public schools better."

MAGNET SCHOOLS These institutions are a subset of public schools. They are frequently organized along thematic lines (like Washington, D.C.'s Duke Ellington School of the Arts or New York City's Bronx High School of Science), though they may also be organized around learning styles. Some magnet schools were developed to facilitate school desegregation by offering academic incentives for youngsters in predominantly White neighborhoods to attend thematic schools in the Black community. Others were developed simply to embrace the principle that interest, aptitude and learning style vary.

CHARTER SCHOOLS These are autonomous public schools run by teachers, parents and community groups. Often they are comprised of higher percentages of Black students than other public schools, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In 1999 there were 1,700 charter schools serving 350,000 students in 32 states. Sometimes these schools are founded for a specific purpose or have specific educational goals; some focus on a particular ethnic group, others focus on curriculum. They are also regulated by state or local boards of education.

Charter schools can provide some educational flexibility for public-school students. But some educational researchers, like Thomas L. Good and Jennifer S. Braden, authors of The Great School Debate: Choice, Vouchers and Charters (Erlbaum), have suggested that the innovation charter-school proponents have sought has had precious little effect on education.

VOUCHERS The school-choice movement has gained momentum from dissatisfaction about the quality of public education. Proponents would privatize public education with a universal voucher program available in every school district for every student, usable in public, private and religious schools. While choice sounds good, the voucher system has only been tested in two cities and three states on a limited basis--and it is not clear if it will pass judicial muster on the separation-of-church-and-state issue. Instead of funding public schools, these programs provide parents with a voucher that could be used toward tuition in a private or parochial institution. Few voucher proponents have dealt with issues of allocation and choice: What happens when there are more people who want to go to a "good" school than there are available spaces? Which schools will educate students with physical or learning disabilities who require more resources than average? How will students with indifferent parents gain access to quality education?

While proponents of voucher programs say they promote choice and competition, opponents say vouchers would decimate public education. Veronica Thomas, professor of education at Howard University, says, "Vouchers are a distraction to prevent us from focusing on the larger problem, which is how to provide a good education and learning climate for most children in the country who go to public schools."

PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS These are religious schools organized and administered by individual churches or denominational groups, such as Catholics or Protestants. African-American families give rave reviews to Catholic schools for their discipline, reasonable cost and educational quality. Public funds do not currently support parochial facilities (though some resources, such as books, may be shared in some localities), but voucher holders can use them at parochial schools.

Despite their seeming popularity in the Black community, only 8.1 percent of all Black students in private school attend a Catholic one, Many attend non-Catholic Black church schools. Prominent examples include the 500-student private Allen Christian School, sponsored by the Cathedral of the Allen A.M.E. Church in Queens, New York, and the 100-student Metropolitan Day School, developed and supported by Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. Some of these schools, founded by activist Black ministers and their congregations, are popular because they combine faith-based education with an Afrocentric consciousness. These schools can cost as much as $6,000 a year, often more than comparable Catholic schools. (Tuition at Allen and Metropolitan, however, is around $4,000 a year or less.) But financial aid and discounts for families who enroll more than one child are often available.

PRIVATE SCHOOLS Of the nation's nearly 111,000 elementary and secondary institutions, about 6,000 are nonsectarian. They can be some of the most expensive alternatives to traditional public education: The price of an independent day school can range from a few thousand dollars to more than $10,000 annually, according to the National Association of Independent Schools.

Only 9.9 percent of schoolchildren nationwide attend private schools and only 9 percent of these students are African-American, according to the 1997-98 Private School Universe Survey. With only 87,666 African-American students in non-religious private schools, it's clear that nonsectarian schools are an educational alternative out of reach for many families, regardless of race.

FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS The school-reform movement has created profit possibilities for private corporations like the Edison Project, recently renamed Edison Schools, a publicly traded corporation that manages 79 public schools enrolling more than 57,000 students. Edison says it combines efficiency with technology to do more with public-school budgets, but evaluations have been mixed since Edison launched in 1992. Edison Schools, however, bear watching, especially since former congressman and Allen A.M.E. pastor Floyd H. Flake joined the project in May as president of Edison Charter Schools, a subsidiary of the organization. He will have a leading role in Edison's expansion.

HOMESCHOOLING Approximately 1.7 million American children are being privately schooled in their own home or that of another individual. An increasing number of parents are choosing to educate their children at home on their own in this way, which is virtually a full-time endeavor for any parent who takes it on, says Helen Hegener, managing editor of Home Education magazine. In some states, local boards of education have curricular requirements and homeschooled children may face periodic testing.

African-American parents don't often pursue this option, with statistics (when available) varying widely. Brian D. Ray, Ph.D., of the National Home Education Research Institute estimates the number of homeschooled African-American children at 0.4 percent.

Julianne Malveaux, Ph.D., economist, columnist and TV and radio commentator, is an ESSENCE contributing writer.

Robin D. Stone is the executive editor of ESSENCE and mother of 3-year-old Zachary, who will attend nursery school this fall.

ESSENCE executive editor Robin D. Stone explores school vouchers in Milwaukee in "Reading, Writing, Roulette" (page 153). "Education is a critical concern," she notes.

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