Choice is currently being talked up as the solution for all our educational problems. But anyone applauding the $200 million for choice in the President's new budget -- or getting ready to jump on the choice bandwagon -- should look at the analysis of choice offered by Edward Wynne, a conservative writing in a conservative magazine. Wynne says, in effect, "We've been there before and it didn't work" and he tells us why.
Choice comes in many different forms, but it makes two basic assumptions. The first is that letting parents and children choose where the kids go to school means kids will learn more. The second is that good schools will flourish and poor ones will lose students and have to shape up or go under. Wynne, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writing in Academic Questions (Winter, 1989-90), challenges these assumptions. He says that our comprehensive high schools were supposed to do exactly what is now expected of choice -- give students a chance to choose their course of study. But, instead of encouraging achievement, the system led to the dismal mediocrity of our "shopping mall" high schools, where students gets lots of choices but little quality.
In other industrialized countries, students are typically tracked into programs for which they are considered suited. Our comprehensive high schools were invented to allow students of differing interests and abilities to select their own programs. The fact that students could choose -- and move from program to program if they decided they were misplaced -- was supposed to make students more serious and committed to their work. (This is an important argument in choice plans, too.) The system was also supposed to have important implications for teaching. Because students had chosen their programs, teachers would be able to take for granted students' seriousness and so would be under no pressure to give out passing or inflated grades.
We know what really happened. Students wanted and chose easier and easier courses that asked less and less of them. As time went on, the standards got more and more lax and grades less and less meaningful. Why wasn't there a national outcry? Eventually there was -- it's called the school reform movement. The real question is how things got that bad in the first place.
In the U.S., says Wynne, we've always had a hard time accepting the fact that some people are more gifted than others. It's different in other industrialized countries. Being a technician is not as prestigious or well-paid as being a brain surgeon in Germany, either, but the Germans live with the difference. And they have education standards that reflect this acceptance. Here, though, there has always been pressure to pass almost everyone because we believe that people who don't pass will be stigmatized. This pressure makes it hard to set real standards and even harder to maintain them. Standards in comprehensive high schools succumbed to this pressure, which was exerted largely by parents.
So there's little reason to believe that choice is going to lead most parents to select schools with rigorous standards instead of schools that have easier programs and give better grades. However, that is what parents seem to believe. Wynne cites a national survey in which 85 percent of parents questioned said they would favor a high-school graduation exam, even if their own kid failed. But Wynne is skeptical about how this would work out in real life, and he offers, as a case in point, the story of parents' reaction to an attempt to raise standards in Chicago.
When the school board there adopted a policy requiring all students to read at grade level, "there was," Wynne says, "much support for the proposal, and everybody supposedly understood that, in the long run, it would be better for the pupils." But when a principal actually followed the policy and flunked 50 percent of the kids in an elementary school, the kids parents raised the roof Apparently the standards were for other people's children. And, Wynne says, "The new policy was quietly subverted."
This is a story that teachers at every level and in every kind of school would recognize. And this attitude toward standards makes it very unlikely that choice will lead to an upsurge of excellence in our schools -- huge numbers of kids taking Mickey Mouse programs is more like it. The attitude also has implications for our current attempts to set demanding national standards for what all our students should know and be able to do. Standards like these are important. Other countries have them, and we cannot hope to compete without them. But if they have to be watered down so that everybody can pass, they will be worthless.
Critics often accuse the education establishment of standing in the way of change. And conservative critics in particular have made attitudes toward choice a test of good faith. But Wynne, a conservative himself, brings the whole issue home to the parents. Do most of them -- rich, poor, or in the middle -- really want rigorous standards for their children? And if they don't would they choose rigorous schools? His answer is no.