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 F’s 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, and both parents and school officials say that it 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 say.

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.

In Orange County, students are not permitted to transfer out of a district. But at least two school districts--Irvine and Santa Ana--allow intradistrict transfers when space at each school permits.

“Right now, there is not a whole lot of action on open enrollments going on here,” said Mike Kilbourn, director of special services for the county Department of Education. “Everybody is waiting to see what happens in the Legislature next year.”

Assemblywoman Doris Allen (R-Cypress) has a bill pending that would extend an existing law, scheduled to expire next June, that allows students to seek enrollment in districts where their parents are employed.

A spokesman for Allen said the bill is intended to be a “pro-family statute” that will allow parents to be close to their children in the event of an emergency. It will also ease the burden of child care and lets parents and children share “quality time during commutes,” the spokesman added.

According to a poll conducted last August for The Times Orange County Edition, 62% of county residents favored the open-enrollment concept and 31% opposed it. School administrators, however, said they disapprove of such a practice.

But in Richmond, attitudes are different. “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 will host 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.

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

Others, such as Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s teachers union, question 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.

“A lot of kids realistically have no choice” if transportation and other problems inhibit their movement to other schools, said Johnson, who believes choice “is not a bad concept, but it won’t resolve the basic problems in education.”

But 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.”