Choice: Allowing Families to Choose Schools
One prominent - controversial - strategy for achieving equity and excellence is enabling parents to choose the schools their children attend. By opening new options such as providing vouchers that allow students to attend private and parochial schools at public expense, advocates contend, states and school districts can expand opportunities for children who had been denied them and provide a more equitable and uniformly excellent system.
Choice is now a prominent feature of the educational landscape. More than one million students nationwide attend publicly funded charter schools. Some critics maintain that choice systems siphon resources from regular public schools, which most students continue to attend. Others argue that the new options could balkanize the school population and create new inequities. Notable current examples of choice experiments are: Milwaukee's voucher program; Washington, D.C.'s ten-year-old charter school legislation, which resulted in 25 percent of the city's students attending charter schools; and the whispers of a possible emerging all-charter district in post-Katrina New Orleans.
How choice advocates define equity revolves around questions of access to educational quality, or excellence, and the ability of parents, families, and communities to hold professional educators accountable despite disadvantageous power relations. Key questions for those pursuing choice strategies for equity are:
- How will choice options ensure high-quality education for all?
- Under what conditions could choice become an option for creating quality education for a large number of children and families?
- How can choice leverage the market force of competition and fill voids in service not presently available in particular communities?
Interview with Howard Fuller
Howard Fuller Interview
Choice is widespread unless you're poor. In our way of looking at the world, we see choice as one of the elements that ought to be a part of the strategy to make sure our children get access to and actually achieve a high-quality education. People with money are able to make choices for their children because if you have money and schools don't work for your kids, you're either going to put them in a private school or you're going to move to communities where they do work, or you're going to be able to make sure they have access to Sylvan, or whatever.
Read full transcript.
Howard Fuller sits on the board of a small Christian high school of choice in Milwaukee, WS. See what students from the CEO Leadership Academy have to say about making a choice to attend this school. Watch the video.
Worse Than Those Six Days in the Dome
When Katrina hit New Orleans, I was two weeks into my senior year at Frederick Douglass Senior High School. My friends and I were frantically trying to keep the school from closing. Our school was one of the lowest-ranking schools in the district, so the state, using its accountability plan, was trying to shut it down or take it over. We were running a campaign called Quality Education as a Civil Right, doing our part in this one-year-old national campaign by continuing the work we had been doing at Douglass: involving more parents and students and community members in working together to improve the school and to demand all the resources we needed to do that.
Read more.
School Choice as an Urban Reform Strategy
Interview with Kenneth K. Wong
What kind of policies would support school-choice initiatives that promote equity and excellence?
Charter-school admission practices can promote equity and fairness in two ways. First, in most urban charter schools that experience oversubscription, admission decisions are primarily based on a lottery. This random selection, which is designed to reduce "self-selection," offers an equal chance for each student application in the general pool. Research shows that about six out of ten charter schools are oversubscribed.
Second, in almost all urban charter schools, admission policy gives full consideration to racial, ethnic, and income characteristics of the district as a whole. To enroll a student body that reflects the district's racial, ethnic, and income characteristics, the charter lottery is administered on different social categories of student applications.
Among the choice programs, which particular strand has the best chance of improving equity and excellence at scale?
At this juncture of school reform, charter schools are the choice strategy that has the best potential to promote equity and excellence at scale. Charter schools are created by state legislation, which specifies student eligibility, program operation, and accountability standards. In this regard, charter schools are held accountable to state and district academic performance standards. At the same time, they are given substantial autonomy to experiment with staffing variation, instructional strategies, and innovative curriculum. Charter schools are seen as a key component of major reform efforts in several cities, including Chicago's Renaissance 2010, Philadelphia's diverse service initiatives, and New York City.
How does choice address the concerns of other strategies to achieve equity and excellence at scale, such as those focused on socio-cultural context, resources, and the quality of instruction?
School choice provides the opportunity for educators to design and implement programs that are thematically and philosophically unique. In the Netherlands, for example, school choice is grounded in each of the seven religious worldviews. In the U.S., charter schools can focus on an Afro-centric curriculum and civic democracy. Students in Cleveland and Milwaukee who are participating in the state-funded voucher programs can enroll in parochial and independent schools. In other words, school choice, by design, is well suited to address diverse cultural and social perspectives.
Research is limited in the area of instructional quality in choice programs. At issue is whether student learning is connected to the quality of teaching or to "self-selection." It is important for charter and regular public schools to collaborate on projects in which they learn from each other about instruction. For example, regular public school teachers may spend a couple of weeks in charter schools that have comparable student populations. Likewise, charter-school teachers can learn more from regular public schools on how they address specific equity and excellence challenges, such as special education classes. Clearly, state legislation needs to provide more flexibility for regular public school teachers to teach in charter schools for a period of time without losing their seniority and benefit status.
