Two years ago, the Gates and Casey foundations made grants to Brookings to host a group called the National Working Commission on School Choice, chaired by the University of Washington's Paul Hill and consisting of 13 other members, mainly academics, deemed to represent a reasonably wide spectrum of the informed school-choice debate. Mercifully lacking in interest-group representatives and strident ideologues, this was not your usual Noah's Ark panel whose inability to agree on even the most basic principles means nothing gets done - at least nothing of any consequence. Its charge was to "explore how choice works and to examine how communities interested in the potential benefits of new school options could obtain them while avoiding choice's potential damage." The Commission organized its work under four headings: benefits to children whose parents choose new schools; benefits to children whose families do not exercise choice; effects on the national commitment to equal opportunity and school desegregation; and advancement of social cohesion and common democratic values.
After two years of labor, the group has just issued its 42-page report, entitled "School Choice: Doing It the Right Way Makes a Difference." (A set of commissioned papers will follow.) On its own terms, this is a lucid, eloquent, fair-minded, insightful, and balanced piece of work. But it isn't apt to end the school-choice wars and may not even yield much of a truce.
That's because the Commission views choice chiefly from a "community" or "public education" perspective, not from the standpoint of parents (or educators). And the guidelines it sets forth, reasonable as they are, seek to balance competing public goods, not to enhance personal freedom or minimize government coercion. Thus a choice program that scrupulously follows the Commission's guidelines will end up looking like a large but fairly heavily regulated charter-school program. It won't look much like vouchers, tax credits, or home schooling and the schools it includes will forfeit some of the most cherished attributes of private schooling. At day's end, this report is about re-engineering public education to include more options.
That's a fine thing to do and we should all be for it. But if this were about, say, choice in clothing, the conclusion it would lead you to is that everybody ought to wear shirts and slacks. Sure, they should be free to choose their colors (so long as top and bottom are coordinated) and style (so long as nobody is offended by excessive baring of skin). Within limits, they could even choose their fabric (so long as its sources are environmentally friendly and no child labor is used in their production). But one may not opt to wear a dress, a tuxedo, a swimsuit-or nothing at all. One mustn't wear slacks on top and shirt on the bottom. Nor don garish prints. And one must keep his garments clean and pressed or some community clothing-choice-cop will haul them to the laundry.
Limited choice, in other words, what some call "controlled choice." Schools would not, for example, be able to select their students. (A lottery would handle admissions decisions where demand outstrips supply.) They may not charge extra tuition. (The government per-pupil payment must suffice.) And they can't avoid state academic standards and the federal accountability regimen established by No Child Left Behind-though many of today's private schools have made plain that this is a deal-breaker in terms of their participation in any sort of voucher program.
I'm being a tad unfair to this insightful report. Its classification of choice plans along the dimensions of spending and government prescriptiveness yields a welcome and clarifying way to sort programs and policies and to picture the benefits and disadvantages of each combination. For example, full funding plus heavy prescription results in relatively little change-but also minimal risk. (The authors say this combination "looks very much like the provisions governing charter schools in New York State.") By contrast, full funding with low prescription leads to many more choices but also to the risk of flaky schools being created and more segregation. (They say this "resembles the Milwaukee voucher program.") The other two quadrants both involve skimpy funding, and there the authors find little benefit resulting from either the high-prescription version (which they analogize to Michigan charter schools) or the low-prescription sort (akin to Arizona's charters).
As an analytic tool and heuristic device, this alone would make the Commission report worth having. So does its clear exposition of numerous issues and trade-offs. When all is said and done, however, the cautions and constraints outnumber the opportunities and freedoms. What's being encouraged is the kind of choice regimen that gives greater weight to society's interest in getting everybody educated than to a family's yearning to get the best possible education for its own children. The authors don't really trust markets to produce the greatest good for the greatest number in the most efficient way. They don't seem to have much interest in Milton Friedman's rationale for school choice. If Friedman were on one side of a seesaw and Horace Mann on the other, they'd be leaning on Mann's end to make sure that Friedman stayed well above the ground on which real children walk.
But by all means get it, read it, ponder it, and debate it.
"School choice: Doing it the right way makes a difference," A report from the National Working Comission on Choice in K-12 Education, The Brookings Institution, November 2003
"Panel says choice benefits worth risk," by Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, November 19, 2003 (registration required)
