Free-Choice Schooling Gets an ‘A’ in Richmond

Until a year and a half ago, Myron Ho attended a private school. Now he is a seventh-grader at Adams Middle School in the once-declining Richmond Unified School District, and his parents couldn’t be happier.

“He has a lot more choices here; there are always new challenges,” said Myron’s mother, Patti Ho, who turned to the public school system because she and her husband were allowed to choose which of the district’s schools they felt would be best for their son.

Yvonne Smith pulled her son, Tashyia, 13, out of his neighborhood school, where he was getting Fs and “hanging around certain elements. Now he’s earning A’s at Adams.

Since reopening two years ago as a school for gifted and talented sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, Adams has become a showcase for proponents of an increasingly popular movement to let parents choose among public schools.

Richmond Unified is the only district in California to have fully embraced the much-debated parental choice concept. While the program has its critics, both parents and school officials say choice has produced dramatic improvements. In the two years since the choice system began, enrollment has been climbing, unexcused absences have dropped by 50%, suspensions are down by 60% and achievement scores have been rising dramatically, district officials said.

In California Assessment Program standardized test results for eighth-graders released earlier this month, Richmond’s students scored a combined average of 241 points. That is still below the statewide average of 263. But the district’s three-year improvement of 29 points is well ahead of the state average growth of 16 points. Results for other grade levels were similar.

“Choice brought students back into school district,” said Adams Principal Myra Silverman, who has a long waiting list for the school’s program of basic academics bolstered by about 300 electives.

This week Richmond is host to the last of five meetings held by U.S. Education Secretary Lauro F. Cavazos, who has called parental choice the “cornerstone to restructuring” public education.

Attended by about 1,000 parents, educators and policy-makers, the three-day conference that began Tuesday in this East San Francisco Bay Area city provides a way for the Bush Administration to stump for open enrollment as the premier means of improving public schools.

The free-market, low-cost aspects of the choice system of educational reform have drawn support from conservatives and from parents frustrated with having little or no say over where their children go to school. Some liberals have also embraced it as an avenue for improving educational opportunities for children of the poor, who often are stuck at problem-riddled inner-city campuses.

Still others see choice as a means of improving parental involvement in their children’s education. As parents become more knowledgeable about schools and begin choosing among them, schools will be forced to improve in order to compete for students, proponents of choice believe.

The choice system is not admired by all, however, and debate over it continues up and down California, much as it does in the rest of the nation.

Gabrielle Moore, president of United Teachers of Richmond, the teachers union, said she is not opposed to the concept, but she strenuously takes issue with the way choice was implemented in the district.

“This program was imposed on the district by the superintendent,” she said. “Neither teachers nor parents had any input.”

The plan is also severely limited, she said, because the district provides transportation only at Adams. Without transportation, which can be costly, moving out of a neighborhood school is not a realistic choice for many of the district’s children, she said.

Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, echoed that sentiment, saying that “a lot of kids realistically have no choice” if transportation and other problems inhibit their movement to other schools.

U.S. Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles) raises the same objection, saying the program abandons, for the most part, the children who are most in need. The poorest, minority inner-city students are most often left behind, he said.

An outspoken critic of choice, Hawkins dispatched aides to the Richmond conference to distribute leaflets spelling out his objections.

“The congressman felt it was important that the other side of this issue be heard here tonight,” said one Hawkins aide who was passing out pamphlets.

Other critics, such as Supt. Leonard Britton of the Los Angeles Unified School District, suspect that choice is a vehicle for parents to avoid integration or to abandon average or troubled schools, leaving the students who remain in even worse straits.

Johnson also questions whether it can work in a system as vast as the 600,000-student, 708-square-mile Los Angeles system. The district must also grapple with overcrowding and desegregation problems, which could be aggravated if parents, who long have had some limited choices through the district’s system of specialized magnet schools, are given free rein.

Richmond’s relatively new experiment with open enrollment has already sparked enthusiasm and positive results, proponents say.

The East Bay district, which includes El Cerrito, Pinole and San Pablo as well as Richmond, began its experiment with choice in 1987 shortly after Walter L. Marks took over as superintendent and sold the concept to his school board.

Having implemented open enrollment programs in Montclair, N.J., and Raleigh, N.C., Marks saw choice as a way to improve the district’s troubled schools.

District scores on state achievement tests had been declining for years and were well below state averages. The financially troubled district, with an ethnic composition of 37% black, 33% Anglo, 16% Asian and 13% Latino, was also plagued by low attendance and a high rate of student suspensions.

Today, 48 of the Richmond district’s 50 schools are on open enrollment. Besides schools for the gifted and talented, there are campuses offering classical studies, future studies, applied arts, international studies, language, visual and performing arts, mathematics, science and technology, and Montessori and university laboratory programs.

There are also several “alternative education” programs aimed at dropouts, students with academic and disciplinary problems and house-bound pupils. All schools offer a core program of reading and language arts, math, sciences and history and social studies.

Despite the explosion of options to choose from, only about 4,000 of the district’s 30,000 students have taken advantage of the open enrollment program. District officials expect that number to rise dramatically in the next couple of years as students move from one school level to another and parents become more familiar with the system.

State laws allow districts to have open enrollment programs and provide for transfers between districts based on such factors as child-care needs, parents’ job sites and a need for specialized schools not available in a student’s own district.

Some districts have begun limited programs of choice, including the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento County, which has 11 of its 51 schools operating under open enrollment, and the San Jose Unified School District, which has allowed open enrollment and magnet schools to help it comply with a court-ordered desegregation plan.

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig praises choice as a way of offering “black, Asian and Hispanic Californians an entirely new dimension in educational opportunity within our public school system.”

The Bush Administration frequently cites an August Gallup Poll that found a 2-1 margin of support for allowing parents to choose which public schools their children will attend. But the poll also found that only 21% of those surveyed believed open enrollment would help all schools. About half felt parental choice would help some schools while hurting others.

Despite dramatic gains in student performance, school officials acknowledge that the district still has a long way to go.

“The important fact here is that (district test) scores had been on a steady decline for several years, and we have turned that downward trend around,” Richmond Supt. Marks said. “We have a lot of work to do, but we are heading in the right direction now.”