EDUCATION BRIEFING

A MATTER OF CHOICE: The battle over Choice goes on. Allowing parents to pick their children’s public schools is a pet idea of the Bush Administration that is appealing to conservatives because it would cost little or nothing and it fits the free-market philosophy. Educators remain skeptical, however.

Choice received its most significant intellectual boost recently when the Brookings Institution published a lengthy report by political scientists John E. Chubb of Brookings and Terry M. Moe of Stanford University. After analyzing 500 public and private schools, Chubb and Moe concluded that the most effective American schools are those most free from the bureaucratic controls of school boards and state departments of education.

Chubb and Moe went on to recommend that any school that meets state standards in areas such as graduation requirements and teacher certification be considered a public school. Parents would shop around and pick a school, and the school district would send money to that school to pay the child’s tuition. Good schools thus would prosper and ineffective ones would go bankrupt in this marketplace of education.

PARENT PARTICIPATION: Regardless of whether they favor the Choice system, critics of public education agree that American schools will not improve unless parents become more involved with them. In a recent survey of eighth-graders throughout the country, the U.S. Department of Education found that 47.5% of parents had never contacted their child’s school about his or her work, and 75% had never taken part in any activity of a parent-teacher organization.

Parents sometimes feel that distance, working hours and cultural unfamiliarity make it difficult for them to have anything to do with a school, and some school districts are trying to unravel this problem. In some Kentucky schools, according to federal officials, phones have been put into every classroom to encourage parents to call teachers at any time. In St. Paul, children are allowed to go to school near where their parents work, to make it easier for a mother or father to take the time for a school visit.

CLASS DIFFERENCES: In a 1988 survey of eighth-graders, the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics interviewed almost 25,000 pupils across the country about all phases of school life. Their answers shed some new light on ethnic differences in achievement.

White students usually score higher than blacks and Latinos on most tests, but the survey found that these differences are reduced by 25% to 30% when socioeconomic status is taken into account. Thus, while only 6% of blacks are proficient in the advanced level of mathematics, 21% of blacks in the highest quarter of socioeconomic status (based on parents’ level of education, occupation and income) are proficient at the advanced level. Economic class is clearly a key factor in racial and ethnic differences.

The federal researchers this year are again interviewing the same children, now that they are in 10th grade, and intend to interview them again in 1992, when they are high school seniors, for one of the most extensive studies ever undertaken by the Department of Education.