Choosing inequality in the schools

"Choice" is an appealing concept, whether used to describe politics, jobs, sexual relations, or, as in the increasingly hot national debate, education. The trouble is that "choice" is an elastic term, with different meanings for different people and different implications in different contexts. In the current education controversies, choice has become the watchword of conservative forces. Their plans for the nation's schools would destroy the few democratic gains that have been made in recent decades, worsen the inequalities that already permeate the system, and block opportunities for further gains.

There are of course serious problems with schools in this country, not the least of which is that they offer highly unequal opportunities to the children of the wealthy and the poor, and this usually means bad schools for people of color. Introducing choice in schools, giving parents options to select for their children, has been in some cases a progressive response to the schools' failings. Within public education, choice is often identified with magnet schools designed to preserve racial balance in urban districts by offering special emphasis in academics or the arts. Choice has also been used to describe teacher-controlled public schools, like the highly publicized Central Park East in Harlem, that attract students on the basis of the philosophy and practices their staffs have collectively developed. Such programs provide some excellent opportunities, but they frequently absorb a disproportionate share of a district's human and fiscal resources, relatively impoverishing the schools of students whose parents did not choose or whose choices were not honored. Thus, the problem with choice programs within the public schools is their tendency to reward the initiative of some at the expense of equity for all.

Yet the choice programs that dominate today's policy agenda involve the privatization of education, and the problems they promise would be far greater. Advocated by the Bush administration and increasingly takne up by state legislatures, the notion of substituting the market for public education is winning support from diverse constituencies.

During the 1980s optimism that public education could promote both excellence and equity seriously deteriorated in a political climate that identified the state as the perpetrator rather than the ameliorator of social and economic ills. A wave of national reports contributed to this climate by maintaining that the United States was losing its competitive edge because schools were inadequately developing students' skills. At the same time, sustained inequities in educational outcomes between white students and students of color seriously undermined faith in the public schools' capacity to provide equal educational opportunity.

Against such a backdrop, Wisconsin State Representative Annette "Polly" Williams, the African-American sponsor of the highly publicized Milwaukee Parent Choice Program, traveled to Washington D.C. in June 1990 as a featured participant in the unveiling of John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990). Rarely do scholarly books become media events, but this one signified the launching of a vigorous campaign to promote educational choice and implied the existence of far broader support for opening schools to the marketplace than the historically conservative constituency for choice would suggest. At the cutting edge of this issue are the choice program in Milwaukee and Chubb and Moe's Politics, Markets, and America's Schools. The former, a modest program that provides public funds for private education, appears to demonstrate in practice that choice expands equality of opportunity. The latter attempts to justify theoretically the abandonment of all public education on the grounds that choice will produce educational excellence.

Taken together, the program and the book suggest that choice will provide both equity and excellence. Yet nothing coulb be further from the truth. While the Milwaukee program--a kind of affirmative action effort--may indeed provide greater opportunity for some of its participants, Chubb and Moe's brief for providing all individuals with vouchers to attend private schools fails to sustain its thesis and has dire implications for equality of educational opportunity.

The Milwaukee Program

The Milwaukee Parent Choice Program has received attention far out of proportion to its immediate impact. In a district that enrolls nearly 100,000 students, the program was originally intended to provide 1,000 low-income students with approximately $2,500 each so that they might attend a non-sectarian private school. Even though more than 1,000 students applied for the 1990-1991 school year, only 341 ultimately enrolled in the seven schools that agreed to participate.

Despite the program's small scale, nationally prominent conservatives vocally endorsed it. Even before the school term began, it won praise from the Bush administration, the Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin's Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, and the head of the powerful Bradley Foundation. And despite the questionable success of the program during its first year, many advocates persist in seeing it as a first step in restoring the nation's educational health. They believe this can only be accomplished by breaking up the public school monopoly.

The program also has evoked vocal opposition. Some antagonists, like Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Herbert Grover, view Polly Williams as the unwitting accomplice of right-wing business interests bent on destroying a public good. Others oppose the program because they fear that it presages an end to a variety of perceived goods, including desegregation, teachers' unions, a common curriculum, and provisions for children with special needs.

Thus, both proponents and opponents rightly see the Williams initiative as an entering wedge in a national battle over the future shape of education in the United States. It is important, however, to see the Milwaukee Choice Program on its own terms. That may conservatives support the plan does not make Polly Williams their agent. Rather, she has responded to the sustained failure of the Milwaukee Public Schools to provide an acceptable education to low-income children of color. During 1989-1990, for instance, Hispanics maintained a mean Grade Point Average of 1.47 and African Americans averaged 1.31 (out of a possible 4.00). Whites, in contrast, averaged 1.95. In three high schools between 36 percent and 40 percent of African Americans were suspended, as opposed to between 13 percent and 17 percent of whites. The previous year, the annual dropout rate was 17.8 percent for African Americans, 17.4 percent for Hispanics, and 10.3 percent for whites.

In the face of miserable average grades and appalling suspension and dropout rates, Williams' initiative has enabled a small number of students to seek an education elsewhere-partly in community-based schools that have long served African Americans and Hispanics. Under the circumstances it makes little sense to berate the program for violating the ideal of the common school or the goal of an integrated society. Such unrealized visions are inadequate justifications for denying a few children a potential opportunity to pursue an education of value. As advocates of choice are quick to point out, the Milwaukee program gives some options to low-income families that the well-to-do have long exercised, and virtually no one challenges the right of the privileged either to move to their schools of choice in the suburbs or to attend private schools.

Yet the program does raise some questions. While the $2,446 each student could bring as tuition to a private school did expand choice during the program's first year, this relatively small voucher meant that parents could not choose, if they desired, elite, overwhelmingly white prep schools. Second, those who applied for the program were probably among the most aggressive about pursuing quality education for their children and, consequently, among the most likely to wring a decent education out of the Milwaukee Public Schools. Third, although more than 1,000 families applied, fewer than 400 students were accepted. Admission was to be based on a lottery system, but without the Department of Public Instruction's monitoring the process, it might have been difficult for participating schools to resist taking the strongest applicants.

Even if the program were an outstanding success, it would not constitute a brief for substituting the marketplace for public schools. Yet the continuing praise of the Bush administration notwithstanding, there were troubling signs during the program's first year. Most importantly, the Juanita Virgil Academy, the one school essentially created in response to the voucher-bearing clientele, suffered inadequate books and supplies from the outset and soon closed, disrupting the lives of the 63 "choice students" who had enrolled. In addition, some 15 students were dismissed for disciplinary reasons or learning problems, so that only 259 completed the first semester in schools of choice. Finally, nearly 100 non-graduating members of that group elected not to participate in the program during its second year. It is not clear whether the general absence of gains on standardized test scores influenced parents' decisions. In any case, problems within the Milwaukee Choice Program, as the following analysis of Chubb and Moe's book will indicate, multiply when choice expands to include everyone.

The Theoretical "Justification"

In Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, Chubb and Moe say little about equality of educational opportunity per se, but hold that education will improve for all through opening schools to the competition of the marketplace. They go so far as to maintain that public schools generally are incapable of providing effective education because the way they are governed limits their capacity to remedy shortcomings.

Chubb and Moe point out numerous problems that afflict public education today. They observe that principals cannot hire or fire teachers. They note that teachers run a gauntlet of irrelevant certification requirements, possess limited autonomy in the classroom, and are isolated from colleagues who share a common purpose. And they recognize that parents have little influence over the schools their children must attend. The authors identify such unsatisfactory conditions as key contributors to what they perceive as the degenerate character of education in the United States.

They further contend that many of the educational reforms mandated in he 1980s--such as longer school terms, more homework, and increased academic requirements for high school graduation--were guaranteed to fail because they were imposed bureaucratically. In fact, they see bureaucracy as the central impediment to effective schools. They believe it strangles the capacity of principals and teachers to fashion schools after their own vision and renders them unresponsive to the interest of parents. The solution to poor education, according to Chubb and Moe, is not the futile effort to impose quality through increased bureaucratic controls but to eliminate such controls. Chubb and Moe hold that public schools are necessarily bureaucratic since in democratically controlled organizations bureaucracy is the means through which competing political interests institutionalize their influence. They argue that private schools, in contrast, tend to be autonomous because accountability does not spring from bureaucratic regulation, but from the market mechanism. If a private schools fails to do an effective job, according to their reasoning, clients will leave it for another. Chubb and Moe consequently look to the marketplace to create excellence in education.

To summarize their argument, Chubb and Moe assert that public schools provide inadequate instruction because they lack the autonomy necessary to create effective education; they lack autonomy because they bureaucratic; and they are bureaucratic because democratic politics shapes them. Thus, they claim the way to create effective schools is to substitute the market for democratic politics. The clarity of their argument and the simplicity of their solution, apparently buttressed by the analysis of massive data bases, may seem persuasive. But problems with their formulations abound.

To begin with, Chubb and Moe present a misleading description of the state of public schools, drawing a picture of universal disaster that they then use to justify jettisoning the entire system. They approach the problem by using the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education's A Nationa t Risk and other reports of the 1980s to show declining test scores of U.S. students. It is of course questionable whether standardized test scores can accurately gauge the nation's educational health, a point Chubb and Moe themselves make in another context. Even assuming such scores have value, the strategy of A Nation at Risk to document both declining scores within the United States and unfavorable comparisons of scores with other countries hardly withstands close scrutiny. Its authors fail to note that their data suggest only a modest decline in scores since the 1960s. They do not acknowledge the upward trajectory of scores on several tests in the 1970s and 1980s, and they also ignore tests that showed no decline. Furthermore, the report inappropriately contrasts the achievement of twelfth graders in the United States with those of other countries since the groups are not comparable. Most students in the United States reach the twelfth grade and a high percentage progresses beyond. In many other countries only an elite group completes high school. Thus international comparisons beneath the collegiate level have limited utility.

Lack of evidence indicating "a rising tide of mediocrity," to use the unfortunate phrasing of A Nation at Risk, in no way suggests that children of color are receiving an adequate education. But it undercuts the assumption that nothing could be lost by dismantling public schools.

More importantly, however bad a job is done by the public schools, Chubb and Moe, for all their data, fail to establish that private schools do a better job. There are a number of questions about their statistical argument, including whether a brief multiple choice test adequately documented student performance and whether the private school sample employed over-represented elite preparatory schools. Although many African-American and Latino families have avoided the degradations of miserable public schools by enrolling their children in Catholic institutions, the mere fact of private status obviously does not confer excellence on schools. Thus it is hardly surprising that recent data on achievement in Milwaukee's Catholic schools point out a vast chasm in student achievement between those serving high-income and low-income neighborhoods, and they suggest racial differences in performance that closely parallel those of the Milwaukee public schools.

Moreover, despite Chubb and Moe's argument that the autonomy they associate with private schools profoundly affects student performance, in their statistical analysis differences in school autonomy account for a tiny percentage of differences in achievement. In addition, they do not demonstrate that higher achievement in private schools stems from the way they are organized rather than from the select group of students who attend them. Furthermore, they fail to consider the hypothesis that the real issue is not autonomy but wider reliance on an academic curriculum in private schools--an emphasis public institutions can replicate.

Chubb and Moe also overstate the advantages of private schools in supporting teacher professionalism. Principals tend to have greater power in private schools, but it scarcely follows that teachers are more able to act as professionals. Unprotected by unions, the jobs of private school teachers are precarious. This vulnerability can exert greater constraints on teachers' autonomy than the bureaucratic regulations common to public schools. In addition, there is nothing professional about most private school teachers' salaries. Compensation typically too meager to support a family has meant that private school positions have been most acceptable to the independently wealthy, to members of religious orders, and to members of families with more than one wage earner.

Overblown bureaucracies, of course, do limit institutional change and absorb huge financial resources for little direct educational service. Chubb and Moe correctly argue that many private schools are relatively free of bureaucracy, yet Catholic schools, which are not public institutions, are certainly bureaucracy characterizes public rather than private institutions. Intricately bureaucratized corporations produce a high percentage of the nation's wealth. Business influence, in fact, had much to do with the development of bureaucratic, centralized systems of public education. Recent developments, however, hold out the possibility that public schools, like innovative corporations, can balance bureaucracy with autonomy. Chubb and Moe offer scant attention to reform efforts in many communities that have moved toward various forms of school-based management.

Furthermore, by ignoring the history of the development of school bureaucracies, Chubb and Moe are able to exaggerate the extent to which schools are rendered incoherent by the variety of political influences that shape them. Through most of the twentieth century, public schools were elite-dominated. Bureaucratic structures were designed in part by elites at the turn of the century to remove schools from popular political control. Thus, contrary to Chubb and Moe, bureaucracy owes its origins, at least in part, to a removal from politics, not to too much politics.

More recently, new power relations have inspired bureaucratic measures that protect the rights of minorities, women, and the poor. These measures, engendered by the civil rights movement and other popular social forces, are the real objects of conservative complaints about bureaucracy in the schools. These measures have promoted desegregation, bilingual education, educational rights for the handicapped, and rights for female students, institutionalizing a modicum of equity in public schools as a response to the demands of those traditionally denied power. That such regulations cannot adequately secure equality of educational opportunity does not mean that the market can do any better.

Chubb and Moe assume that the market will create quality education for everyone through the mechanism of choice. Yet choice certainly has not accomplished this in the private sector of the economy. If the affluent can choose health spas in the Caribbean and garcious homes, the poor must choose inadequate health care and dilapidated housing. To the extent that those with limited resources have won forms of protection it has not been guaranteed by the play of the market, but from governmental regulation. The conservative agenda of deregulation over the past decade has eroded those protections and greatly increased the disparity between the wealthy and the poor in the United States. A market system of education is merely an extension of deregulation that promises to compound social inequities.

In the market system promoted by Chubb and Moe, as well as by conservative political and corporate leaders, public taxation would guarantee relatively modest vouchers worth the same amount for every student in each state. Families, acting as consumers, would then choose the schools their children would attend. But unlike the Milwaukee program where a lottery determines admission, schools choose as well. Chubb and Moe are adamant about this: "Schools must be able to define their own missions and build their own programs in their own ways, and they cannot do this if their student population is thrust on them by outsiders." It is in their interest to choose those students who are already high achievers, and it is in their interest--especially for smaller schools--to accept those whose families can supplement the amount of the voucher they are given. Some versions of the plan would allow individual families the right to add their own cash to a voucher. Chubb and Moe would allow local districts to augment the value of vouchers through increased local taxation. This would be a trivial exercise for property-rich districts, since they would be free of federal and state taxation meant to redistribute resources to less affluent areas. Either plan would grant the wealthy greater choice than the poor.

For citizens from poor districts, the baseline vouchers would be difficult to add on to, creating a situation reminiscent of Southern Jim Crow education where vast differences existed between per-pupil expenditures for African-American and white schools. Well into the twentieth century African Americans frequently supplemented meager public funding by constructing schoolhouses with their own donated labor and paying teachers out of their inadequate incomes. But African Americans could not rectify these inequities despite extraordinary sacrifices. As W.E.B. DuBois maintained, if some of these starved schools managed to achieve excellence through unusual efforts, greater funding would have made such excellence far more widespread.

A voucher system of education can provide support for long established community-based education programs that have effectively served children of color on shoestring budgets. But as the failure of the Juanita Virgil Academy in Milwaukee suggests, the notion that choice would create a nation of small, effective schools is a construction as mythical as the notion that the market can maintain a nation of shopkeepers. A high level of capitalization and economies of scale would be necessary to construct buildings, to conduct advertising campaigns, to maintain staffing with an unpredictable number of students, and to make do with the unsupplemented vouchers those without wealth would bring. A likely result would be educational versions of fast-food conglomerates with scripted teacher behaviors similar to the standardized pattern of McDonalds' order clerks. Like nineteenth-century charity schools, these institutions would compose the bottom tier of an educational hierarchy based on privilege.

Aside from the inequities associated with a market-based approach to schooling, such a strategy raises fundamental issues of educational purpose. Should taxpayers contribute to financing schools that have no public accountability no matter how objectionable many might find their goals? Should the public subsidize elite prep schools, schools run for profit, schools with racist ideologies, and schools run by corporations to train future workers? Should families be regarded as entrepreneurial units charged with maximizing their children's educational opportunities? This market ethos ignores any sense of responsibility for other children's education, any obligation for community control of education, any commitment to schools as sites of democratic discourse, any need for the new common curriculum some educators are forging out of the cultural works and political struggles of the diverse peoples who have shaped the United States.

In the conservative imagination, eliminating the state's redistributive functions does not eliminate social responsibility for the less fortunate. Rather, such responsibility becomes voluntary, an act of private choice. Much, in fact, is made of the public spiritedness of the affluent who voluntarily participate in contributing to the common good. Enormous publicity, for instance, has attended the offer of businessman Eugene Lange and several other philanthropists to guarantee college scholarships to low-income school children, as well as to provide various supportive academic and counseling services to see them through high school. Oddly, we hear little about the federally funded TRIO programs that recognized the effectiveness of such practices decades ago. They have a long record of demonstrated success limited only by funding that is inadequate to reach more than a small percentage of the eligible population. Massive federal support of such initiatives, in fact, is crucial because Lange and a few other philanthorpists devoted to equity are exceptions. As Robert Reich has pointed out, the wealthy contribute a lower percentage of their incomes to charitable purposes than the poor, and what they do give is disproportionately dispensed on elite cultural activities and institutions that serve them. Furthermore, Reich notes that the much ballyhooed support of corporations for public schools is less than what they receive in the tax breaks they have successfully won. Choice in giving, like choice in selecting private schools, provides a poor case that private spending will support public goods.

Inadequate Schools, Inadequate Choices

None of this is to say that public schools are beyond reproach. If they adequately served children of color, interest in choice would be limited and efforts to secure multicultural education unnecessary. Typically students in public schools have suffered from curricula that are ethnocentric and unquestioningly nationalistic. They also have experienced wide variation in academic quality based on their race and class. In his book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol poignantly describes such grave inequities between public schools, underscoring the obvious unfairness of favoring the already advantaged with disproportionate resources. Thus it might make sense to restrict choice programs to the under-served. This clearly is not what the Bush administration has in mind, however, since it has steadfastly opposed affirmative action. The Republican administration and conservative groups like the Landmark Legal Center for Civil Rights, which defended the Milwaukee Choice Program in the courts while it opposed the 1990 Civil Rights Act, merely view the Milwaukee Program as an opening gambit in an effort to institute vouchers for everyone. This agenda is explicit in a proposal for California initiated by the Excellence through Choice in Education League. According to Education Week, "Although the proposal would initially be limited to low-income students, it would become available to all children no later than 1997-1998."

While inadequate schools have failed to fulfill society's responsibility to educate all, the inadequate choices of a market-driven educational system provide no solution. At best the popularity of choice among those with the least privilege shoudl send a powerful message to public school educators that the common school for many remains a myth. It highlights the need to support a multicultural agenda that widens public discourse on equity issues and transforms public education in ways that enable people of color to exercise co-ownership of society. Yet the very idea of schools that educate people in common--drawing on the richness of diversity--is antithetical to the intent of the conservative leaders and foundations advocating choice.

Early in the twentieth century, corporate elites claimed to take the schools out of politics by creating expert-run centralized and bureaucratic public schools. Their demand for efficiency and impartial expertise masked a politically motivated effort to replace working-class influence over education with their own. Today Chubb and Moe articulate the position of corporate elites who rail against the bureaucratic schools their predecessors were so influential in creating, once more claiming they want to take schools out of politics. Yet their desire to open them up to the marketplace is also an inherently political strategy. It would enable the more affluent to free themselves from the yoke of all the legislative and legal safeguards people have won through the freedom struggles of the 1960s. It furthermore would free the rich from all public education responsibility, striking a major blow against the current multicultural effort that seeks a radical expansion of democracy and a reinvigorated vision of community. The implementation of choice would be a victory for narrow class interest over community, accelerating the drastic maldistribution of opportunity that exists today.

Robert Lowe teaches at National-Louis University in Evanston, Illinois and is an editor of Rethinking Schools.

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