When George Bush was campaigning for the Presidency, he said he wants to be the “Education President.” Nobody knew what that meant, since about 93 percent of public school funding comes from state and local sources over which the President has no control, and federal law bars the Federal Government from developing or dictating curriculum.
The way is now clear for President Bush to be the Education President through his wholehearted endorsement of parental choice in public schools. It’s an idea whose time has come and, if President Bush rides this horse all the way around the schoolyard, he can not only claim his crown as the Education President but achieve real reform in the disaster area of the public schools.
At a White House conference on “Choice in Education” convened in January as one of President Reagan’s last official acts, Bush told educators that parents need to be able to choose the best public schools, not necessarily the ones nearest their home. He said “choice has worked” in “Minnesota, East Harlem, San Francisco, Los Angeles and in a hundred other places in between.”
Parental choice means adopting a policy of allowing enrollment in any public school by any student, rather than the system of mandatory assignment of each child on the basis of his residence or to the school selected by district administrators. What makes parental choice work is a legislation that requires state funding to follow the student to his new school.
Iowa and Arkansas have become the latest states to climb aboard the parental choice train. In March, the legislatures in both states approved open-enrollment measures so that students can attend any public school in the statee.
Both states followed the trail blazed by Minnesota, whose “access to excellence” program passed last year includes open enrollment across district lines, post-secondary options for 11th and 12th graders, and a broad range of choices for at-risk students. It is interesting that the Chaska, Minnesota, school district has begun interviewing students to find out why they chose to leave.
Open enrollment bills have been introduced in at least 15 other states this year. Six other states are considering choice proposals with more limited options for students.
The pioneers in the parental choice concept were Community School District 4 in East Harlem of New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where parents can send their children to any elementary and junior high school within the district. Both districts say the choice program has contributed to higher test scores across the board, more parental involvement, and a general enlivening of the school system.
Other districts that allow parental choice include Irvine California and Montclair, New Jersey. In Buffalo, parents are given the choice of having their children attend neighborhood schools oro one of 22 alternative elementary schools.
One of the best kept secrets in education is that Vermont has had a parental choice plan in public education since the mid-1800s. It has worked well, it has become a way of life in the Green Mountain State, and efforts to change it has been unsuccessful.
The Vermont plan is called “tuitioning.” It gives parents of more than 7,000 secondary-school students the right to choose a school for their children from among a variety of public or private (but not church-affiliated) schools, with tuition paid by the local school board.
When President Reagan keynoted the Choice conference in January, he said, “Choice in education is the wave of the future because it represents a return to some of the most basic American values.” Continuing, Reagan said, “Choice is the most exciting thing that’s going on in America today. We’re talking about reasserting thee right of American parents to play a vital – perhaps the central – part in designing the kind of education they believe their children will need.”
Parental choice in public schools has elements of appeal to both conservatives and liberals. Conservatives see school choice as a way to break up what critics such as Xerox Corporation chairman David Kearns call “a failed monopoly,” and liberals see school choice as a way of letting the poor have the same opportunity as the well-to-do.
Americans admire competition in the most areas of life, why don’t we demand it in public education? We’ve had enough experiments to demonstrate that choice stimulates competition among schools, ensures accountability, and increases parental involvement.
Parental choice is the most significant reform in education today. Yet it is vigorously opposed by most teachers’ unions and many school boards and school administrators. The question about choice in schools ought not to be why, but why not?
