Choice is a word with great resonance for Americans because we consider it basic to our definition of freedom. Being free means being able to choose what you believe, what job you want to do, where you want to live and work, what you buy, etc. It's no wonder that the idea of school choice has caught on with a lot of people.
Supporters of school choice are confident that it will create a chain reaction of important changes in our education system. Students will stop patronizing poor schools, and lots of new schools of all different kinds will spring up in response to consumer demand. All this will lead, choice supporters say, to great satisfactions with the schools and a dramatic rise in student achievement.
But these results are almost entirely speculative. In fact, we have very little experience with public school choice, which allows parents to choose the public school their children go to, and virtually none with private school choice, which would use public money to send children to private schools. And even if choice results in offering education consumers an enormous number of different schools to choose from, is being different the same thing as being better?
In "The Private Hell of Public Education" (Lear's, April 1992), writer Bonnie Blodgett talks about what it's like to shop for a school. Blodgett is not an administrator or teacher or member of a union. She's a parent who got to choose where her child would go to school -- and decided that there were big problems with the choice process and the assumptions behind it.
Blodgett and her husband are the kind of parents choice was created to satisfy -- serious and responsible consumers -- and St. Paul, where they live, has public school choice. In St. Paul, it is accomplished mostly through an array of magnet schools that were designed to give parents and children lots to choose from. But being a good shopper depends on having good information, and that was the Blodgett' s first problem.
The magnet program guide didn't give them much help: "Every school promised to bring out the particular interests and strengths of our child, to build her confidence, character, and social skills. Every school differed in the methods deployed ... , but evaluating that difference, whether it was an experimental teaching method or immersion in a particular subject, was difficult." Blodgett's husband observed that the information they got was "about as helpful as the nutrition information you find on the side of a cereal box." But they weren't buying cereal; they were deciding which program out of over two dozen would be best for their child -- without really understanding any of them.
For a while they considered a Spanish-language immersion program. It was based on the theory that bilingual children learn better than kids with only one language. But they discarded this idea when they met a parent with a first grader in the program who complained that his kid was having a tough time reading in any language.
Their next choice was a new school that billed itself as a "world model of excellence in curriculum design" and promised "teaching teams thoroughly trained in methodologies that incorporate the very best and latest research and practice in human learning and development." They weren't sure they understood what all this meant, but the enthusiasm of the principal and the teachers sold them. Unfortunately, the reality bore little relation to the hype. There didn't seem to be any curriculum, and there were few books. The cross-age groupings, a central feature of the school's philosophy, fell apart and were replaced by groupings according to achievement level. When Blodgett visited her daughter's class one day, it looked like an unsuccessful first grade in an ordinary school: Her kid was asleep at her desk; most of the others were talking and horsing around; a few were listening to the teacher.
The story had a happy ending when their daughter was finally admitted to a school for which she had been wait-listed, but that's not the point. The point, Blodgett believes, is that the consumer model for education is seriously flawed. What does it mean, she asks, to tell parents they can choose from among things they don't understand? And what do all these choices mean anyway? Do they reflect what people know about education? Or are they just strategies for attracting customers?
"The agonizing choice process," Blodgett says, " ... left me wondering why I should know. I find it inconceivable that nobody out there really knows better than I do what sort of elementary education will work for my child. Why don't they know whether ( or under what conditions) it's good to group kids by age or skill levels? Why don't they know whether having one's own desk is a good thing, an indifferent thing or a bad thing?"
Some people think that Americans want a lot of choice in schools; President Bush and Secretary of Education Alexander are calling for 535 "break-the-mold" schools, no two alike. But maybe people don't want all that choice -- and confusion. Maybe they want schools that are not all that different but that achieve the things they think are important: graduates who are prepared for work or college and prepared to live and work together in a multicultural democracy.
This is no defense of our current schools; they aren't working well enough and we must find out what will make them work much better. But when GM wanted to design the Saturn car to beat the Japanese, the company didn't design 535 different Saturn cars; it concentrated on designing one. Perhaps we should take a page from GM' s book.