Features > October 3, 2005

All for One, None for All

School choice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom

By Linda Baker

Portland, Ore.—On any given weekday here, the residential streets are clogged with parents driving their kids away from neighborhood schools. Harboring visions of creative and challenging academics, upwardly mobile mothers and fathers head for one of the district’s 20 special focus and language immersion schools, or other schools deemed superior by virtue of test scores or socio-economic enrollment patterns. As of two years ago, hundreds of Portland kids have also left their neighborhood school under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the national education law under which schools that earn a “failing” designation must give students priority transfer to another district school.

Under the district’s open enrollment policy, over 35 percent of the Portland public school population now attends a school outside of their neighborhood.

NCLB and school choice policies are often touted as effective strategies to improve educational quality and close the achievement gap between low-income/minority and white middle-class students. But school choice in Portland has also exacerbated inequality, favoring savvy middle-class families at the expense of families in struggling communities. Theoretically, NCLB gives low-income students the opportunity to move to higher performing schools. In reality, the law means the kids who are left behind have even fewer resources than before.

“No Child Left Behind gives the illusion of choice, but it’s really about dismantling the schools,” says Elisha Williams, a senior at Jefferson High School, a predominantly African-American institution that lost more than 10 percent of its enrollment to federally mandated NCLB transfers last year. When struggling schools like Jefferson are labeled “nonperforming,” Williams says, families transfer to other schools, taking per capita government dollars with them. Williams also argues that high stakes testing mandated by NCLB fuels negative stereotypes about African American communities and encourages families to pull their kids from low-income minority schools. “That doesn’t seem like choice to me, but fear,” Williams says.

Williams is a member of Sisters in Action, a local nonprofit that develops leadership skills among young women of color. Last year, the Sisters launched a “Support our Schools and Neighborhood” campaign, calling on the school district to resist the NCLB mandate. The Sisters are not alone in their concerns. A growing number of parents, teachers and administrators have sounded the alarm about the impact of school choice on equity issues, as well as the long-term viability of public education itself.

“Most schools are harmed by school choice,” says Terry Olson, a former language arts teacher who ran for the Portland Public School Board in 2003. Designed to retain students who might otherwise attend private schools, the district’s array of special programs “has backfired,” says Olson. “It’s a questions of educational fairness. If families are allowed to transfer, the kids with the most involved parents and the most resources will be skimmed from lower class schools to places with ‘better’ test scores. Those schools lose their appeal, enrollment plummets and the schools become targets for closure.”

This year, Superintendent Vicki Phillips closed five schools and another six may be headed for closure in 2006. Over the past four years, district-wide enrollment in Portland has dropped by 4,500 kids. Although diminishing household size and rising housing costs are partially responsible for declining enrollment, demographic factors alone do not account for the exodus of families from the district.

From integration to liberation

U.S. public schools have always eerily replicated society’s racial and economic stratification, but the segregation caused by school choice is especially disturbing. First, thanks to urban revitalization efforts around the country, many inner-city neighborhoods are no longer defined by race and class. And yet, as these formerly languishing communities attract new—and wealthier—residents, the schools themselves continue to lose money, students and prestige. Second, although you can’t blame parents for wanting to send their child to the best school they can find, politically sanctioned choice policies facilitate, rather than mitigate the decline of urban schools.

“In the 1970s, school choice was considered a peaceful way to integrate the schools and encourage parental involvement,” says Peter Cookson, Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Lewis & Clark College. “The emphasis on school choice is now personal liberty and individual competition.”

Ask some of Portland’s transfer families why they left the neighborhood, and you’ll hear an invocation to academic achievement and freedom of choice. Consider Victoria Guillebeau, a self-described white middle class Portland mom who used the NCLB transfer provision to put her son in a special focus arts school across town. “I have a child who is very bright,” says Guillebeau, who opted out of the predominantly black neighborhood school because she didn’t consider it intellectually challenging.

“I think it’s great we have a transfer system that allows parents to pick schools that fit their kids better so they can grow up in a community of their choosing,” says Craig Williams, another parent who transferred his daughter from a predominantly African American elementary school—with decent test scores—to Hollyrood Elementary, a program rated “exceptional” by the Oregon Department of Education. “It truly gives kids a better opportunity to learn,” he says.

Miguel Salinas, a former principal and an advocate for poor and Latino students, begs to differ. School choice only works, he says, if parents have the ability to make informed decisions, an ingredient in short supply among the families he represents. “If a student is having trouble at Marshall High School [a failing school under NCLB], just picking up and transferring is seldom going to produce a positive result,” Salinas says. “I’d rather take a look at Marshall and say, ‘What is the capacity here? How do we build up the community as a real partner?’”

Vicious cycles

But how do you build up community when educational policies conspire to tear it down? As Olson points out, under Portland’s school choice system, two of the city’s poorest elementary schools, Humboldt and King, have lost 40 percent of their neighborhood student population to other schools. The city’s two richest schools, by contrast, Forest Park and Ainsworth, enroll more than 95 percent of their neighborhood population.

Elisha Williams speaks wistfully of a slate of new families who moved just across the street from Jefferson High School. “The people moving into our neighborhood don’t bring their children to our schools,” she says. “They take the opportunity to be part of this great area, but they’re not helping to benefit our school.” Jefferson, which enrolls fewer than 40 percent of the neighborhood population, is located next to the Mississippi neighborhood, a formerly redlined district that over the last two years has become one of the hottest destinations in the city.

Under NCLB, failing schools are required to set aside 20 percent of their federal funding for student transportation costs—to other schools. Federal funding should be used to support instruction, says Courtney Jones, another member of Sisters in Action, “not to give people bus passes so kids can leave our school.”

Two years ago, Portland school officials proposed a minor restriction to the school choice system that would have required parents to re-enter a school choice lottery after elementary and middle school. But those plans were axed after well-organized parents threatened to jump ship for private schools. A similar outcry occurred last spring in Seattle after school officials proposed restructuring of the decade-old school choice system. The idea was to revert to a more equitable neighborhood-based enrollment system. Around the same time, the Eugene, Ore., School Superintendent admitted his district’s choice system had allowed affluent families to create a cadre of “elitist” schools, leaving most neighborhood schools “browner and poorer.”

The long-term problem with choice is that it leads down the slippery slope to the demise of public education itself. (After all, the Bush administration’s initial plan was to support NCLB with school vouchers.) Nor can choice be divorced from the larger funding crisis facing public education. This year alone, the Portland district lost $35 million in local tax revenue and federal funding, leading to a loss of 250 teaching and classroom aide positions. As funding declines, parental shopping for special programs increases, fueling a spiral of decline.

In Portland, the irony is especially bitter. A city that is nationally recognized for its emphasis on community building and sustainability houses an educational system where schools are disengaged from neighborhood, where more kids have to be driven to school and where students are increasingly sorted by race, social class, interest and ability.

If that kind of custom education sounds familiar, it should. It’s called private school.

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• Reader Comments

  Linda Baker contends that “school choice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom”

  Some interesting snippets from the article.

  Under the district’s open enrollment policy, over 35 percent of the Portland public school population now attends a school outside of their neighborhood....

  Most schools are harmed by school choice,…

  Ask some of Portland’s transfer families why they left the neighborhood, and you’ll hear an invocation to academic achievement and freedom of choice...

  Sounds to me that Baker has just proved the point that public schools aren’t delivering quality education.

  And the parents of Portland know it.

  Posted by Jay Cline on Oct 3, 2005 at 8:17 AM

  Jay:

  They do know it, but there is a limit to what can be accomplished by an exodus of students from low performing schools.

  The migration reduces funding for schools that need to make improvements.  Improvements tend to require investment so what we have is a deterministic system where better schools have the ability to improve, while lower performing schools do not.

  Suppose, for a moment that all of the non-native speakers of English from all of your neighboring schools took advantage of the school choice policy and went to your child’s school.  Imagine what that might do to your school’s test scores.  Imagine the additional resources that this might consume to bring them up to par with the rest of the student body.

  Of course, policy makers know that these aren’t the kids who leave the school.  This ultimately increases the proportion of kids who have special academic needs at schools who are already struggling with their average test scores.  How do they chart a course out of such a vortex when the federal response is to lower their funding levels?

  Closing the low-performing schools would be more fair than starving them, but don’t believe for a minute that this is the goal.  The goal is, apparently, to create more disparity rather than to eliminate it.

  Posted by GrayArea on Oct 3, 2005 at 9:21 AM

  So when was school choice implemented in Portland?

  It seems to me that Baker is suggesting that school choice is inherently the problem, not in how school choice was rolled out. The subtitle of the article, School choice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom bears out the impression that choice (personal freedom) is detrimental to universal education. Nowhere does Baker fault merely the implementation.

  I disagree that school choice itself caused the problem. How can giving parents a voice in determining which schools should be rewarded for succeeding and which schools should be put on notice for not performing be a bad thing?

  Certainly, any major change to any system requires a proper implementation, but neither Baker nor GrayArea offer any information on why the implementation was faulty?

  How long was school choice in force, before schools were held accountable for non-performance? Most successful school choice implementations, that I know of, do take that into consideration.

  Posted by Jay Cline on Oct 3, 2005 at 9:38 AM

  rather than improving education over all we encourage people who can afford it to go to alternative schools

  welcome to the dumbing of America

  Posted by cnote on Oct 3, 2005 at 10:48 AM

  My kids are now ages 43 and 40. We began bussing kids to “achieve racial balance” when they were in grade school. We are still spending thousands each year on busing, per student spending and our taxes continue to rise, yet the quality of education continues to fall.

  “Most schools are harmed by school choice,” says the author. Well, judging from reports of the U.S. versus other countries, our educational level is being harmed by our public schools.

  If my kids were still of school age, I would not sacrifice their education to prevent “the demise of public education”.

  Our honors classes have been destroyed due to the need to fill them according to racial quotas. The term “women of color” in this article reminds me of the progression of accepted euphemisms for Negro we have passed through since the 1964 Civil Rights Act was supposed to do away with such categorizing.

  We have been playing racial games in the guise of equality. In Alabama in 1963, I saw all the disgusting “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” labeling, but shifting to Blacks, African Americans, People of Color, Hispanics, Latinos or changing the name of a sports team is all eyewash. (Hmmm, how come they call hurricanes “Katrina” and “Rita” and no one cares?)

  Our neighborhood over the 38 years we have lived here has become integrated with no protests, but none of the kids can walk to school they are assigned to distant ones even though I can see the grade school from my house, middle school is 1/2 mile away and a high school is only a few hundred yards from here. The bussing farce goes on forever.

  It is no wonder parents are choosing to opt out.

  Posted by whattheheck on Oct 3, 2005 at 11:28 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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Also by Linda Baker

• All for One, None for All
  School choice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom