Ignoring the Market: A Nation at Risk Virtually Overlooked School Choice, Education's Most Promising Reform Strategy. (Feature)

NATION AT RISK'S MOST FATAL FLAW WAS ITS faith in the American education system's ability to act on its recommendations. The authors of Risk believed that the system was mainly in need of internal reforms: tougher coursework and graduation requirements, higher and more flexible salaries for teachers, a longer day and year. Despite its origins within the Reagan administration, the National Commission on Excellence in Education didn't even regard market-based reforms as sufficiently important to include them among the scores of topics on which it contracted for background research. This thinking quickly proved to be shortsighted. In 1982, James S. Coleman, perhaps the most significant academic figure in education policymaking of the past 50 years, produced a study, with Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore, demonstrating that students perform better in private schools, and particularly Catholic schools, than in public schools, all else being equal. Coleman and his colleagues also showed that Catholic schools, more than public schools, approached the common school ideal of serving all children equally. A follow-up study in 1987 reinforced these findings, showing that private attendees fared better after high than their public counterparts. Coleman attributed this to the greater sense of community in private schools, a feature he labeled social capital. Taken together, the findings suggested that policymakers ought to consider providing public support for education in private schools. Coleman's research focused on the attributes that made private schools more effective. The question was, What caused private schools to develop such attributes more successfully than public schools? A 1990 study, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, performed by this author and Terry M. Moe, attempted to answer that question. We concluded that private schools tend to outperform public schools because the market environment in which private schools operate is far more conducive to success than the political environment in which public schools function. The study found that market forces systematically promote the very attributes that, according to Coleman, are characteristic of effective schools. The competitive pressures of the marketplace, where families can take or leave a school, lead schools to organize in ways that please families. Schools subject to market pressures tend to develop clear missions (parents know what the stands for), focus on academics (parents want to see their children learn), encourage strong site-based leadership (great schools are headed by principals who take charge of student achievement), and build collaborative faculties (great schools make achievement a team effort). By contrast, the political forces that surround public schools--particularly schools in troubled urban systems--tend to promote excessive bureaucracy and to impede the development of the qualities that schools need to succeed. School missions get diluted by repeated rounds of reform; academics get crowded out by new policy goals; principals become middle-managers carrying out the programs chosen by district administrators; and teachers become labor, fulfilling contractual obligations instead of doing whatever is necessary to succeed. These are only central tendencies, to be sure. Markets tolerate a certain number of terrible private schools, and politics produce many exemplary public schools. However, to the extent that politics and markets cause schools to tend sharply in different directions, the central tendencies are extremely important. Creating Movements These studies gave intellectual inspiration and firepower to a generation of political leaders, scholars, and activists who committed themselves to market-based reforms as a strategy for improvement. They succeeded in creating small publicly funded voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland and a network of privately financed scholarship programs in other cities nationwide. …