As the battle over reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act
rages on, school reformers are spending as much time arguing
against one another as they have combating the teachers’ unions and
suburban school districts vehemently opposing it. Advocates of
standards and accountability, who have shaped the six-year-old law,
rightly argue that it is forcing public schools to confront their
longstanding problems. Conservative and libertarian reformers such
as the Cato Institute, who have long compared No Child to
Soviet-style central planning, would rather expand voucher programs
and other forms of school choice.
Reformers, however, fail to consider two questions: Are parents
even convinced that the nation’s public school system is broken?
And do they really want school reform? There are no clear answers
to either one.
Parents seem to agree that schools are a mess. In a 2007 survey
of parents by the Gallup Organization and Phi Delta Kappa, 84
percent gave public schools overall grades of C or lower; only 63
percent of parents rated the schools so woefully three years ago.
But the fact 89 percent of the nation’s students still attend
traditional public schools suggests that most parents aren’t
dissatisfied with the status quo.
Charter schools have blossomed, with 4,000 of them operating in
about 40 states, according to the National Alliance for Public
Charter Schools. But they attract just 1 million students, or two
percent of all students attending school. As seen last week in Utah, voucher programs also haven’t gained
much ground.
Meanwhile battles in Pennsylvania and Maryland over proposed
exit exams, which would require high school students to pass the
tests in order to graduate, show that standards aren’t also fully
embraced. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Hess
points out, standards provoke opposition among parents because it
is their families that suffer the costs, including extra homework
and failing grades. The pressure they apply, along with that from
elements of the education establishment, forces state officials to
water down the requirements to the point where they’re almost
meaningless.
So school reformers must win over parents to make gains. Not an
easy task.
The proliferation of charters in cities proves that urban
parents have some appreciation of choice. But their vision is
limited because living in poor neighborhoods means higher prices
for goods and services, limited product choices, and fewer shopping
options. Given such an environment, the average black parent can’t
fully imagine a functioning marketplace in education featuring
choices such as the KIPP brand of back-to-basics charter schools
and so-called “international baccalaureate” or global schools.
As for middle-class parents? Consider a story reported in the
Wall Street Journal last year: White families are fleeing
the school district in Cupertino, California, so their children can
avoid competition against better-performing Asians. Clearly, those
parents are not chiefly concerned with rigor. And parents may worry
less about their kids’ scores than they do about the timing of the
tests: In states such as Vermont and Indiana, parents complain that
fall testing schedules lead to earlier opening school days, cutting
into vacation time.
This lack of concern extends to teacher quality. In low-poverty
schools, there is a 65 percent probability that the parents would
pick a teacher more concerned with satisfying students over the one
who got kids to hit the books, according to a study by University
of Michigan researcher Brian Jacob and Lars Lefgren of Brigham
Young University.
Academics are not necessarily the main concern even within the
homeschooling movement, one of the few areas of school reform
that’s arguably been a success. Despite breathless stories about
homeschooled children winning the National Spelling Bee, just 16.5
percent of parents surveyed by the Education Department cited
academic dissatisfaction as a reason for keeping their kids out of
traditional schools. Most parents home-school out of concerns about
school environment and to provide religious instruction.
For middle-class parents, vouchers and charters are unappealing
because they have already exercised choice — in the form of buying
pricey homes in suburban neighborhoods. The idea of poor students
flooding their schools is therefore unappealing. If they are
looking to add academic rigor to their children’s education, they
can already do so, from the tutoring services offered by firms such
as the Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan division, to educational toys,
trips to museums, and learning software.
For many, maybe most parents — especially those with money —
academics take a back seat to lifestyle and aspirations: social
climbing, career boosting, exposing their children to diverse
cultures. School reformers will succeed on a broad scale only when
they offer proposals that address such considerations along with
academics. One idea: Teaming up with real estate developers to
create “educational villages” in which young middle-class parents
can send their children to school in the daytime, drop them off for
babysitting at a child care center in the afternoon, and take them
to the park on weekends. Matching school reform to lifestyle may
actually help activists achieve their ultimate goal.
