ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 10, 1996 TAG: 9612100084
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN AND THOMAS VITULLO-MARTIN
This year's 28th annual Gallup Poll of American attitudes toward public schools found that 66 percent of parents gave ``high honors'' (Gallup's term) to the public schools their children attended.
``High honors'' meant that parents bestowed either an A or B grade. Newspaper editorial boards, elected officials and union leaders rejoiced.
It's true that this approval rating was down almost 10 percent from 1990, when 72 percent of parents were happy, but Gallup - everyone agreed - showed once again that American public education was not in trouble. After all, most parents were content.
Far from taking comfort in these Gallup results, however, public-school supporters should be sobered.
First, the proportion of malcontent parents (34 percent) is huge. One-third of all public school parents equals some 14 million families.
To this number should be added the 3.5 million families using private schools, who have expressed their opinion with their feet.
In other words, the parents of 30 million students are happy with what they are getting in public schools, and those of 21 million other students are not.
Second, these discontented parents are almost surely disproportionately minority and poor.
Commentary on the report assumed that the malcontents were uniformly distributed, as if one-third of parents were unhappy in every school across the country.
But the suburbs are full of families that moved out of cities, often reluctantly, because of the schools.
It's the families left behind - in deeply troubled schools overseen by deeply troubled districts, disproportionately in nonwhite neighborhoods - that are the most unhappy.
How many parents would give ``high honors'' to the public schools of New York City, for example, where only some 40 percent of incoming ninth-graders graduate four years later?
Nearly 40 percent of New York City's schools have been identified by the state commissioner of education as among the lowest-performing schools in the state.
Third, public-school supporters should be further sobered by the reality of standardized test results.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly half of the country's 17-year-olds in 1992 could not recognize geometric figures, solve simple equations or compute with fractions, decimals and percentages. (1992 is the latest year for which results are available.) Reading skills were similarly deplorable.
In other words, some large chunk of parents giving their children's schools an A or B have children who are not doing A or B level work. What are we to make of all of this?
Clearly, the traditional American faith in a common public education is crashing on the shoals of ever weaker public schools. And it's crashing even as public education consumes a hefty bite of the gross national product (some 7 percent).
After years of trying all sorts of tricks and panaceas, we should face facts. The only way to promote a good and common education for all is to introduce choice in all its forms - charter schools, vouchers, tax credits - to public education.
Remove the restrictions on the education marketplace and let all schools compete.
After all, we do have a system of choice for affluent families - it's called moving into the best district.
Real-estate agents regularly advertise the location of houses in renowned school districts - Beverly Hills, New Trier, Great Neck - and such houses command a premium.
You pay a premium of 20 percent or more to move into the superb district in the expectation that your children will receive the equivalent of a prep-school education costing $20,000 in annual tuition.
But just as prep-school tuition is affordable only to the upper middle class, so are the prices of most houses in top districts.
(Ironically, prep schools are more available to poor families than are the public schools in wealthy districts. Most prep schools set aside scholarships for 10 percent or more of their seats, while no wealthy public school does any such thing.)
We also know that competition, even when it takes the form of government-funded vouchers and loans, works in education. Indeed, it has been flourishing in higher education since World War II.
Colleges and universities compete in an aggressive marketplace in which some fail and others open their doors for the first time.
Both private dollars via tuition and tax dollars via government loans and scholarships move with students to their chosen colleges.
This is the opposite of the funding system for public elementary and high schools under which government funds schools, not students.
For years, public-school educators simply denied the existence of inadequate public schools.
Few today would even try to defend all public schools, though some, such as New York's Chancellor Rudy Crew, insist we should be patient because eventually the schools will be good.
Chancellor Crew rejected - on the behalf of the students - Cardinal John O'Connor's offer to accept into the Catholic schools 1,000 of the worst public-school students. Doesn't justice require that these students be allowed to choose for themselves?
We need a system, modeled on higher education, that would fund the student directly and permit the student to take the assigned education dollars to a freely chosen school.
Under the current system, poor parents are captive markets. They have little economic ability to choose their housing, and their housing commands their schools.
There's no money to upgrade housing, and therefore no money to upgrade schooling. The result is the catastrophe we see in every big city: hundreds of thousands of failing children.
Those who attack choice argue that it will worsen exactly the situation it's trying to improve by permitting the most aggressive and ambitious parents to transfer their children into the best schools.
Those schools will quickly close their doors to new admissions, the critics argue, leaving the poorest students behind in the poorest schools.
But this argument is also based on the assumption, which many public-school advocates now push, that no new schools will be permitted to compete within this system.
Rather, school choice will work best in an open system in which all schools are allowed to compete, and in which successful principals and teachers are allowed to replicate their successes by opening yet another school.
Jane Jacobs, the urban affairs and architectural critic, once said of public housing that, ``to unslum,'' the ``projects must be capable of holding people by choice when they develop choice.''
To ``unslum'' the worst public schools, they must become capable of holding people by choice.
The presumption behind so much public-school policy is that the schools would never be able to hold people by choice and therefore they must be held through coercion.
How can this tax-financed disdain for the American promise of freedom and equality be justified?
Julia Vitullo-Martin edited "Breaking Away: The Future of Cities'' for the Twentieth Century Fund. Thomas Vitullo-Martin is an education-policy consultant working in the charter-school movement.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
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