The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  Although NCLB was surrounded with a great deal of high-flown rhetoric when it was passed, promising a new era of high standards and high accomplishment, an era when “no child would be left behind,” the reality was far different. Its remedies did not work. Its sanctions were ineffective. It did not bring about high standards or high accomplishment. The gains in test scores at the state level were typically the result of teaching students test-taking skills and strategies, rather than broadening and deepening their knowledge of the world and their ability to understand what they have learned.

  NCLB was a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools. It assumed that reporting test scores to the public would be an effective lever for school reform. It assumed that changes in governance would lead to school improvement. It assumed that shaming schools that were unable to lift test scores every year—and the people who work in them—would lead to higher scores. It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals, who need to be threatened with the loss of their jobs. Perhaps most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions were wrong. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Choice: The Story of an Idea

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD in Houston in the 1940s and 1950s, everyone I knew went to the neighborhood public school. Every child on my block and in my neighborhood went to the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school. We car-pooled together; we cheered for the same teams; we went to the same after-school events; we traded stories about our teachers. I went to Montrose Elementary School until fifth grade, when my family moved to a new neighborhood and I enrolled in Sutton Elementary School. Then, along with everyone else who lived nearby, I went to Albert Sidney Johnston Junior High School and San Jacinto High School.

  At that time, there were few private schools in Houston. When I was five years old, my parents tried to enroll me in the Kinkaid School, which was directly across the street from our home. I was interviewed by Mrs. Kinkaid, the school’s founder. She rejected me. My parents said she turned me down because she didn’t like Jews (Kinkaid today has a nondiscriminatory admissions policy). I don’t know if they were right, but I heard the story many times, and my parents became passionate advocates of public education. Ever after, in our home, private education was considered an appropriate alternative only for those kids who failed to behave or succeed in public school. Two of my five brothers were sent away to military school; the experience was supposed to “straighten them out.” If they learned to behave and apply themselves, they were told, they could come back to public school.

  At the end of my sophomore year in high school in May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic decision against school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education. The Houston schools were segregated, and the local school board had no intention of complying with the decision. Anyone who spoke up on behalf of racial integration was likely to be called a communist or a pinko. Over the next decade, political leaders in some Southern states declared that they would never desegregate their schools, that they would hold out forever against the Court’s decision. Some school districts in the South responded to the Court’s pressure to desegregate by adopting “freedom of choice” policies. Under “freedom of choice,” students could enroll in any public school they wanted. Big surprise: White students remained enrolled in all-white schools, and black students remained in all-black schools.

  When the federal government and the federal courts began compelling segregated districts to reassign black and white pupils to integrated schools, public officials in some Southern states embraced a new form of choice. They encouraged the creation of private schools to accommodate white students who did not want to attend an integrated school. These “schools of choice” were also known as “segregation academies.” In Virginia, which had a policy of “massive resistance” to desegregation, the state gave tuition grants to students to enroll in a private school of their choice.

  During the 1950s and 1960s, the term “school choice” was stigmatized as a dodge invented to permit white students to escape to all-white public schools or to all-white segregation academies. For someone like me, raised in the South and opposed to racism and segregation, the word “choice” and the term “freedom of choice” became tainted by their use as a conscious strategy to maintain state-sponsored segregation.

  Given that I was only a junior in high school at the time, I knew nothing about Milton Friedman’s 1955 piece “The Role of Government in Education.” It was only many years later, long after I left college, that I encountered his classic essay. Almost everyone who supports vouchers and school choice is familiar with Friedman’s argument that government should fund schooling but not run the schools. Friedman proposed that government supply vouchers to every family so every student could attend a school of choice.

  A brilliant economist at the University of Chicago, Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his scholarly economic studies. He gained renown as a libertarian who opposed government regulation and championed the private marketplace.

  In his essay, Friedman maintained that the ultimate objective of society should be to maximize the freedom of the individual or the family. Toward that end, government should provide a voucher to parents to subsidize the cost of their children’s schooling, which they could spend in any school—whether run by a religious order, a for-profit business, a nonprofit agency, or public authorities—so long as the school met “specified minimum standards.” He predicted that “a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand” and that competitive private enterprise was “likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands” than any government agency. The introduction of competition, he believed, would “meet the just complaints of parents” who were sending their children to religious schools and paying twice for education, once in taxes and again in tuition fees. Friedman expected that vouchers would “stimulate the development and improvement” of nonpublic schools, as well as “promote a healthy variety of schools.” Not only would public school systems become more flexible in response to competition, but the competition would “make the salaries of school teachers responsive to market forces.”1

  When Milton Friedman was writing his essay about vouchers in the early 1950s, the hot-button issue in education was whether Catholic schools should be allowed to receive federal aid. Congress was stymied in its efforts to legislate any federal aid to education, because of deep divisions about whether to include Catholic schools. Catholics and their allies in Congress insisted that Catholic schools should participate in any program that was enacted. Public school organizations, such as the National Education Association, and advocates of the separation of church and state adamantly opposed any federal aid to religious schools. Catholics complained that to exclude their children would be religious discrimination, denying them benefits for which they were already taxed.

  State and federal courts issued several highly contested (and inconsistent) decisions in the late 1940s about whether states could reimburse Catholic schools for textbooks, school transportation, tuition, and other expenses. The dispute reached a fever pitch when former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York City’s Cardinal Francis Spellman engaged in a vitriolic public exchange about the issue. Protestant and Jewish groups waded in to oppose any aid to religious schools. One noted polemicist, Paul Blanshard, warned that the rise of Catholic power threatened American freedom.2 To resolve this contentious issue, Friedman recommended vouchers, which parents could use for tuition at any approved school, including religious ones.

  In a footnote, Friedman acknowledged that he discovered only after he had finished writing his essay that Southern states were adopting his proposal (“public financing but private operation of education�
�) to evade complying with the Brown decision against segregation. He recognized that this was a problem for his proposition, but this did not deter him. While he deplored segregation and racial prejudice, he simply did not like government compulsion, even in a good cause. In a true choice system, he insisted, where all schools were privately operated, all students would be enrolled in schools their parents had chosen. There would be all-white schools, all-black schools, and mixed schools. Those who opposed segregation, he suggested, should try to persuade others to adopt their views, and in time the segregated schools would disappear.

  When Congress passed the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, it decided to permit needy students in religious schools to receive federal aid for remedial services.3 Extending federal funding to poor children in parochial schools was not an act of benevolence, but a necessary political compromise to garner votes from urban Democrats who represented large numbers of Catholic constituents. Nor was it a concession to Friedman’s voucher proposal. In fact, the federal government used the funding from the 1965 act to force Southern districts to dismantle segregated public schools, threatening to withhold federal dollars if they did not desegregate. This approach was the very opposite of Friedman’s goal of maximizing individual freedom through school choice.

  As the federal government kept up the pressure for desegregation and as resistance to mandatory busing increased, some school districts attempted to encourage voluntary desegregation through choice. They opened magnet schools—schools with specialized offerings in the arts or sciences or other fields—to encourage white students to attend urban schools that would otherwise be heavily nonwhite. But until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the issue of school choice remained far outside the mainstream, mainly because it was viewed by the media and elected officials as a means to permit white students to escape court-ordered racial desegregation.

  After Reagan was elected, he advocated school choice, specifically vouchers. Reagan was directly influenced by Friedman’s ideas. When Friedman retired from the University of Chicago in 1977, he moved to California and affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He and his wife, Rose, wrote a best-selling book, Free to Choose, which was the basis for a ten-part documentary on public television. Reagan agreed with Friedman’s advocacy of freedom, deregulation, market-based solutions, and privatization, and Friedman became one of Reagan’s advisers.

  President Reagan’s legislative proposals for vouchers were not intended for all children—as Friedman had urged—but for low-performing students, to make the voucher idea politically palatable. In his second term, Reagan backed away from vouchers and promoted public school choice, making the choice idea even less threatening. Reagan’s first secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, who had been a public school administrator in Utah, did not join in Reagan’s advocacy of vouchers and school prayer. Nor was Bell thrilled with Reagan’s desire to disestablish the U.S. Department of Education, which had been elevated to cabinet-level status in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s administration.4 After Bell resigned in 1985, he was succeeded by William J. Bennett as secretary of education. Bennett enthusiastically embraced school choice and included it as one of his “three C’s” of education: content, character, and choice.

  For most of Reagan’s two terms, the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress, and the party was closely allied with the two national teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The unions opposed school choice, which they saw as a threat to public education and a step toward privatization. Congress rebuffed Reagan’s proposals for school choice, as well as his plan to eliminate the Department of Education. However, the concept of school choice found a home among free-market-oriented foundations and think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The foundations and think tanks incubated a generation of scholars and journalists who advocated school choice long after the end of the Reagan administration. State and local think tanks devoted to free-market principles sprouted up across the nation, inspired in large measure by Friedman’s writings, to continue the battle for school choice.5

  Although Friedman’s idea of a market-driven approach to schooling made no headway in Congress, its partisans campaigned for referenda in several states. But whenever vouchers were put to a statewide vote, they were rejected by large margins. Voucher advocates blamed the political clout of the teachers’ unions for these losses, but it was clear nonetheless that most voters turned down the chance to implement vouchers. Public school choice programs, however, began to gain ground at the same time that vouchers were soundly rejected. In the 1980s, a few local school districts adopted public school choice plans, including Cambridge, Massachusetts, Montclair, New Jersey, and District 4 in East Harlem, New York City. In the late 1980s, Minnesota became the first to adopt a statewide program of “open enrollment,” permitting students to transfer to public schools in districts other than their own, and high school juniors and seniors to enroll in a public or private institution of higher education.

  As the 1990s opened, the choice movement gained new momentum. First, John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools restarted the campaign for school choice with powerful and contemporary arguments; second, the nation’s first voucher program was established in Milwaukee by Wisconsin’s state legislature in 1990; and third, the charter school movement was born.

  In their widely noted book, Chubb and Moe contended that public education was incapable of ever reforming itself, because the institution was “owned” by vested interests, including “teachers’ unions and myriad associations of principals, school boards, superintendents, administrators, and professionals—not to mention education schools, book publishers, testing services, and many other beneficiaries of the institutional status quo.” So long as the public schools were subject to democratic control, they argued, the interest groups would protect the status quo, and the schools could never be fundamentally changed. Poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.”6

  The only way to bring about fundamental change in schooling, they asserted, was through a system of school choice. School choice would make it possible to break the iron grip of the adult interest groups, unleash the positive power of competition, and achieve academic excellence. They boldly claimed that “reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea.” Choice “has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways.”7

  Chubb and Moe wanted to sweep away “the old institutions” and replace them with a new system in which almost all “higher-level authority” outside the school was eliminated. In their new system, the state would set certain minimum requirements (related, for example, to graduation, health and safety, and teacher certification); any group or organization or nonpublic school could apply to the state and receive a charter to run a school. Local districts could continue to run their own schools but would have no authority over schools with state charters. Each state would decide on a formula for scholarships for every child, depending on need, and every student would be free to enroll in any school in the state. Every school would be free to set its own admissions policy, subject to nondiscrimination law, and to expel students who did not follow its rules. The state would hold schools accountable for meeting certain procedural requirements (such as providing full and accurate information to the public) but not for academic achievement. Chubb and Moe wrote: “When it comes to performance, schools are held accountable from below, by parents and students who directly experience their services and are free to choose.”8 Chubb and Moe’s proposal set off a firestorm in educational journals, where it was denounced as advocacy for vouchers. Of course, it was advocacy for vouchers, b
ut in retrospect, it is clear that Chubb and Moe forecast the rise of the charter movement.

  Chubb and Moe’s controversial book kept the voucher movement in the forefront of discussion, if not implementation. Although Congress consistently rejected vouchers, and voters consistently turned them down in state referenda, two urban districts—Milwaukee and Cleveland—saw vouchers as a way to raise student achievement. Voucher proponents confidently predicted that vouchers would empower low-income parents, expand the educational opportunities available to African American families, and improve the regular public schools, which would be compelled to compete for students. It seemed like a win-win situation: gains for the kids who left public schools and gains for the public schools, which would get better when they competed for students.

  In Milwaukee, African American activists—led by former Milwaukee school superintendent Howard Fuller and state legislator Polly Williams—allied themselves with the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation to seek vouchers for low-income children. With the support of Republican Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, Democratic Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, and the city’s business leadership, the Wisconsin legislature approved a voucher program for Milwaukee in 1990. At first, the Milwaukee voucher program enabled low-income students to attend only nonreligious private schools. Even this limited option encountered stiff opposition. Opponents of vouchers included the elected state superintendent of education, unions representing teachers and administrators, the local branch of the NAACP, People for the American Way, and the American Civil Liberties Union.