Despite Risks, We Must Try New Things

I recently declared myself a reluctant convert to school “choice,” a declaration that has dismayed some supporters of public education and cheered some opponents of what they are pleased to call “government schools.”

At the risk dismaying both these camps - and perhaps some others as well - let me try to express more clearly the sad conclusion I’ve reached:

It’s time to try something new and different. It’s time for some serious experimentation.

My specific concern is for those youngsters most in need of educational transformation. Tell me American public education needs improvement across the board and you’ll get no argument from me. But the fact is, public education works fairly well - and frequently much better than fairly well - for most of our children: the children of the middle class, of the suburbs, of stable families where parents take an active interest in the schools.

For children of poor families in the central cities (and in many rural areas as well) they are a disaster.

What to do about it? I’m not sure anyone knows enough to answer the question with any confidence. Hence, the call for experimentation.

One such experiment (I intend to explore others in subsequent columns) might be the one proposed a few months ago by William Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and now a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland, and Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under President Bush and now at New York University and the Brookings Institution.

These two have called for a national demonstration program of means-tested tuition grants - a carefully monitored experiment involving at least 10 urban school districts and running for a minimum of five years. They would, in effect, have the school districts make available scholarships equal to the per-pupil outlays in the district plus a pro rata share of whatever federal money the student would ordinarily get. The money would come directly out of the budget for the school the child was leaving.

In a city like Washington, that might mean a scholarship of $7,000 a year that a student could use at any school - public, private or parochial - that would take him.

The scholarships would be available only to students whose household incomes qualify them for the federal free lunch program and who are currently enrolled in Washington’s public schools.

What could come of such an experiment? Some parents who already have given up on the public schools would have the means to get their children out of them - an obvious plus for those families. If enough parents opted out of particular public schools, taking with them their share of the school’s budget, the principals of the abandoned schools might change their own way of doing business - or be replaced by the school board.

And what might go wrong? Plenty. The whole scheme presupposes two things that may not be true: First, that principals and teachers of unsuccessful public schools know why they are unsuccessful and would change, given sufficient incentive to do so. And secondly, that any improvement resulting from the experiment could reasonably be attributed to the receiving school, rather than, say, to the active involvement of the parents. If some of these inner city schools are dreadful now, imagine what they’d be like if their most active parents left.

In addition, the academically worst-off youngsters might be least likely to take advantage of the scheme. (Don’t their parents still shop at the more-expensive, less well-stocked convenience stores in the neighborhood despite the theoretical availability of better-buy supermarkets across town?)

The experiment, if launched, would almost certainly migrate upscale, to include not just the poorest families but others as well. The result could be the demise of the public schools, which have to take all applicants, without regard to handicap, in favor of private schools, which would retain their right to skim.

Ravitch and Galston understand these risks and dozens more, and still think it makes sense to go forward. “My position,” Galston told me last week, “is: I don’t know it’s going to work. And the people who say it won’t don’t know either.”

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt commented on his battle to address America’s economic crisis. Galston finds FDR’s quotation just as appropriate for our present educational crisis:

“The country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = William Raspberry Washington Post