Walcott and Bloomberg push for school 'choice,' whatever that means
Dennis Walcott. Azi Paybarah, via flickr
1:46 pm May. 2, 2011
Dennis Walcott, the new chancellor of the New York City public schools, said recently that he would push to open more single-sex schools in the city. He’s a “big believer” in these schools he told the New York Post, and, more importantly, he’s “a big believer in options.” He thinks “people should have that choice.”
Choice, of course, has been the force behind an education reform movement here and nationally. Its proponents, including Mayor Bloomberg and his former chancellor, Joel Klein, advocate more charter schools and other “schools of choice,” like small high schools. It sounds good—who wouldn’t want to have a choice? But does giving parents and students choices in the schools they attend actually work to improve education quality?
This has been the persistent question among critics of the new education reform movement over the past decade, ever since the No Child Left Behind Act gave students at failing schools the right to transfer to better-performing ones. Now, after a decade of expanding school options, we have more evidence to judge whether choice, in and of itself, makes public education better.
School choice is often framed as a civil rights issue. Middle– and upper-class parents tend to choose the neighborhoods or suburbs where they live based on the school quality. In New York, better-off parents know which public schools are the good ones—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, P.S. 321 in Brooklyn, NEST+M in Manhattan, etc.—and have the resources to get their children into them. Low-income families have traditionally been stuck with their neighborhood schools, good or (more likely) bad.
The education reformers argue that to make up for this discrepancy, districts should create more options for the students who are excluded, specifically low-income blacks and Hispanics. (Only 23 black and Hispanic students were accepted to Stuyvesant last year, out of 748 total acceptances.)
Since Bloomberg became mayor, a lot of good new schools have been opened for these students. Research has found that the charters in New York City appear to provide a better education to students than the regular public schools in their neighborhoods. (Nationally, this is not the case; on average charters do about the same or worse than regular public schools.) A report by the nonpartisan research group, MDRC, found that on average, the more than 200 small schools opened by former schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have a higher graduation rate than their big counterparts—58.5 percent versus 48.5 percent. The population of students in these “schools of choice” is overwhelmingly low-income and minority.
Not all of the schools opened have been good, however; many have been just as low-performing as the old neighborhood schools they were meant to supplement, and some were so bad they were eventually closed. The extent of choice offered to students has also been more limited than advertised. A new study by researchers at NYU and Teachers College, reported by Gotham Schools last week, shows that black and Hispanic students applying to high schools tend to make informed choices: they pick high schools that are higher performing and more diverse than their middle schools. But the high schools they end up in tend to be just as low-performing and racially homogenous as their middle schools. At the same time, low-performing students are more likely to pick low-performing schools as their first choice for high school.
There is also a free-market argument frequently used to support “schools of choice,” which maintains that opening new schools will force the old schools to compete, leading to an improvement in the quality of all schools. In New York, this hasn’t always worked as envisioned. When large high schools had to compete with the new slate of small schools, research has found they got worse.
One of the underlying assumptions driving Mayor Bloomberg’s reforms, and Walcott’s announced desire to open more single-sex schools, is that parents are scrambling for more choice. Yet many times over the last decade, Department of Education officials have encountered vehement resistance to the opening of new schools. Why would people get upset about the prospect of more schools moving into their neighborhoods? Ask a parent in a poor neighborhood what changes they hope for in public education, and a lot of times they’ll say they simply want a good school nearby, as opposed to a menu of new alternatives.
It may be that only 8 percent of black students list the school closest to their house as the one they want attend in the NYU/TC study because minority students have embraced the idea of choice. But it’s also surely because many of these students, who naturally prefer schools that are high-performing and diverse, aren’t finding any such institutions nearby.
Opening up more single-sex schools in New York will certainly create more options. But will they be good ones? As with charter schools, we have data showing that single-sex schools have had mixed results when it comes to improving student achievement. (Here’s a breakdown of the research on single-sex versus co-ed education published by the U.S. Department of Education.)
Increasingly, school choice advocates recognize that to convince critics that choice works, they need to couple it with quality— the U.S. D.O.E. now talks about replicating “high-quality” charter schools, rather than expanding the overall number of charter schools. In New York, the frustration with the Bloomberg administration among many parents boils down to this issue, too: Choice by itself isn’t enough. The choices have to be good.
Sarah Garland is a staff writer at the Hechinger Report, and the author of Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation and Youth Violence Are Changing America’s Suburbs.
