COLUMN ONE : Survival of the Fittest Schools : Programs enabling parents to pick where their children go are a catalyst for change. But the reforms, backed by the President, haven’t always lived up to expectations.

The M.E. Fitzgerald public school had struggled with a bad image for years before the change finally came: Parents complained it had an old-fashioned teaching style. Weak leadership. Poor community relations.

Not surprisingly, in late 1989, after this liberal-dominated college town of 98,000 began permitting parents to choose which school their youngsters would attend, Fitzgerald felt the impact. Enrollment applications fell by almost half, threatening to force layoffs of teachers--and mobilizing parents and educators to install a new curriculum and principal. Now, “the school’s direction is definitely up,” says Janet Hobbs, who enrolled her daughter, Elizabeth, in the school last year.

That kind of change is just what President Bush is hoping to achieve with “school choice,” the educational reform concept that has been thrust to the center of the national debate under the new education agenda that the President and his new education secretary, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, have proposed.

Supporters of the Administration’s approach argue that by enabling parents to choose among public schools--or to send their children to private schools using public funds to pay for them--districts can unleash “market forces” that will shake out the bad schools and prod the good ones to peak performance.

But despite Fitzgerald’s success, it isn’t clear yet that the concept always works as well as Bush and Alexander may hope. While experiments undertaken so far show that these programs can provide a badly needed catalyst for change--helping to motivate educators and parents--experts say there is no empirical evidence yet that choice programs actually improve academic performance.

What is more, after an array of experiments, other questions remain, particularly about the notion of using public money to send youngsters to private schools--the controversial centerpiece of the Bush program. Critics question whether the choice concept won’t primarily help better-off parents flee the public schools, while turning the schools into holding pens for the poorer, more-troubled students.

They also ask whether the idea can really work financially. And would it mean abandoning U.S. education’s melting-pot culture for a smorgasbord of schools with a narrower cultural outlook and curriculum?

Robert Hochstein, analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching in Washington, is one of the skeptics. “We’re rushing headlong to choice,” Hochstein says, “but the fact is we really don’t know that much about what these programs will do.”

Indeed, the momentum for broader choice continues to grow as frustration with public education deepens. Although educators and other critics have repeatedly gone to court to block plans that funnel public money to private schools, nine states have major choice programs, and about 30 more are considering some kind of school choice legislation.

With the federal government offering $200 million next year to help school districts develop choice programs, it is likely that--court battles or not--hundreds more communities will soon begin experimenting with this idea.

Focus of the Debate

Choice means many things. It embraces both the so-called “magnet” programs that have been set up to draw students to specialized or advanced offerings, as well as plans that permit students to choose any public school in their district or state.

But the focus of the debate today is the sweeping program, favored by Bush and an unlikely coalition of conservatives and liberals, that would subsidize private school selection. It is largely based on a theory framed last summer by John E. Chubb of the Brookings Institution, who is co-author with Terry M. Moe of “Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.”

What Chubb wants to do essentially is to use tax dollars to help create a system of privately administered schools that would function alongside public schools, much as private universities exist beside public ones. Education spending would be restructured to give all children access to scholarships to go to private schools; the authorities would make sure all parents--rich and poor--were aware of all their options.

Private schools would be required to teach a basic “core” curriculum and to comply with regulations on equal opportunity, health, safety and due process for students. But beyond such basic rules, they would be free to manage their own affairs in a way that advocates say would encourage innovation and cut costly public school bureaucracy.

Educational innovation wasn’t the first goal of the Cambridge choice program, which initially was implemented as part of a voluntary desegregation plan in 1978. But when parental unhappiness with Fitzgerald began to build in the mid-1980s enrollment applications began to drop off sharply.

Although the school’s longtime principal had kept basic skill-test scores high, innovative programs were flowering at other Cambridge schools, and his administration was seen as hidebound and uninterested in parental involvement.

As a result, whenever Margaret Gallagher, who heads a district school information office, would suggest the Fitzgerald school to middle-class parents, they would shake their heads no.

In 1988, pressure from a rapid drop in enrollment applications was threatening to force the school to drop two teachers, setting off an uproar in their ranks. Central-office administrators and parents became more involved, and a consultant was chosen to pick a new principal when the old one retired.

For more than a year now, Fitzgerald school has had a new principal, a home-grown reading curriculum and an innovative learning program for kindergarten through third grade. For the first time in years, it has an active parent-teacher association.

“Parents voted with their feet,” Gallagher says.

Although she opposes public funding of private schools, she sees benefits in what the choice program did at Fitzgerald. “It’s too easy to bury problems in public education,” she says. “People all over a school may realize that things just aren’t right in some classroom. But it’s too easy to let it continue.”

Other Experiments

Choice has also sparked reform in Milwaukee, which is now the site of the nation’s first real experiment of the kind envisioned in the Bush plan. Last year, a coalition of inner-city parents and suburban conservatives spearheaded enactment of a state law to enable inner-city students to go to private schools with a $2,500-a-pupil public subsidy. In September, 317 enrolled in seven private schools.

The experiment faces fervent opposition from teachers’ groups and the state superintendent of instruction, and is now being challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. But it has also forced the school district to make some adjustments. For the first time, the schools have begun calling parents when their children don’t show up for class. And the system has begun asking parents what they would like to see in the school program.

“They’ve responded very dramatically to the slightest amount of choice,” says former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont, who has become a schools “choice” crusader in his home state.

Minnesota, long a laboratory of school innovation, also has offered public school students various choices within their districts for several years, and since last September has permitted them to enroll at any school in the state. But the program has been a disappointment: Only 6,200 of the state’s 700,000 public school students currently take advantage of it.

Even so, the Minnesota program has prompted many schools to try to enrich their curriculums with more course offerings and more teachers. Last year, about 22% of the state’s 345 participating districts joined cooperative programs with other systems as a means of inexpensively adding new courses or extracurricular programs to attract students. This year, that number could be higher: All 431 of Minnesota’s school districts are required to offer open enrollment.

Choice has also spurred school districts to link up with colleges to offer students a chance to take college courses. Such programs this year enrolled 7,000 Minnesota teen-agers, says Joe Nathan, a researcher at the Hubert Humphrey Institute and one of the choice program’s designers.

Choice programs have made many parents believers. Frankie Armon, an administrative assistant in Milwaukee, is sending three children through the city’s public schools and has never felt they receive all the attention or discipline they need. This year, through the choice program, she has enrolled her daughter Lana in a 22-student first-grade class at the private Urban Day School, and she’s delighted.

“They encourage parent involvement, they’ve got a structured program, and they don’t tolerate any disrespect,” Armon says. “Lana’s really reading well.”

The Milwaukee choice program also seems to belie the claims of critics that choice programs primarily benefit the middle-class students whose parents are sufficiently engaged to seek out private schools.

John Witte, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who is conducting a study of the Milwaukee experiment for state officials, says children in the program represent all skill levels, and come from all sorts of families. “There hasn’t been the kind of ‘creaming’ people worry about,” he says.

But early results from the Milwaukee program also hint of potential problems with private-school choice. About 20 of the 317 students who were enrolled last September have already been dropped from the private school rolls because officials found them too difficult to handle, Witte says. Critics of the programs have predicted that conflicts would arise when private school programs rejected the troubled students who need help the most.

Financial Failures

The Milwaukee experiment has underscored the financial fragility of inner-city private schools, which traditionally have difficulty finding adequate funds and often are undercapitalized. Although the $2,500-per-pupil payment provided the private schools by the public school systems was nearly five times what some of the private schools were charging, it wasn’t enough to keep them going. This year, two of the seven that accepted choice program children have filed for bankruptcy court reorganization. And a third is merging with another institution.

One that sought reorganization, the Juanita Virgil Academy, found itself at the center of a storm of controversy when its administrator announced in February that she was sending the school’s 62 choice-program children back to the public system. The reason ostensibly was so that Juanita Virgil could resume religious instruction. But parents already had been complaining that the school was in disarray, with poor busing and lunch programs, and a lack of discipline. Three weeks after the students were dropped, the school closed its doors.

Witte predicts that many such problems could emerge in choice programs, because urban private schools are so often run on shoestring budgets. “These private schools are fragile flowers, and with a little stress, they fold,” he says. And parents sometimes find there are no other private schools around with openings. “Then you’re left trying to figure out what to do with the children,” Witte says.

While advocates argue that choice should cost nothing extra, experiments to date suggest the system can spur schools to overspend in their eagerness to entice students.

Public schools often have far more money to spend than their private counterparts. Nonetheless, in a system of full choice, they are pitted against other public schools as well as private ones in a battle for students. And analysts say some public schools feel they need to offer more costly programs and extracurricular frills simply to overcome the widely held view that they are inferior to private institutions.

Lavish spending led to the spectacular collapse of the Richmond, Calif., program, which in three years exceeded its income by $60 million--largely by adding extra staff, computers, musical instruments and other expensive equipment. The program has sought bankruptcy court protection. The 31,000-student district also claimed choice had spurred academic improvement. But, “it never really translated into improved test scores,” says Maureen DeMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s adviser on child development and education.

Minnesota schools have also found that the choice program is expensive. About 40% of districts with choice programs had to boost their spending to accommodate them, a state study found.

Choice advocates argue that these problems aren’t insurmountable. To ensure the solvency of private schools that accept public money, authorities can set financial rules, such as audit requirements and minimum capital standards, advocates say. Public systems can avoid the chaos that overtook Richmond simply by prudent management, they point out.

A central tenet of choice advocates is that lower-income parents must be kept informed about choice options, so they can participate as fully in the program as middle-class families.

Spreading the Message

But the Cambridge schools’ experience shows how difficult that may be. Gallagher and 17 other school workers make a special effort to contact all parents during a three-month pre-enrollment period to fill them in on the merits of various programs, yet she finds that the middle-class parents are far more likely to be in line for the best offerings. “I think we’re reaching everybody, but we’re not getting the message across to a lot of them,” she says. Cambridge has a burgeoning population of immigrants from Haiti and Latin America, who often don’t feel comfortable applying for what many regard as special treatment, Gallagher says.

The Milwaukee program suggests that there may be some basis for the warnings that private-school choice would bring a splintering of schools into specialized curriculums. Of the four schools where most of the children in the program have been sent, one has a Latino cultural focus, two have an African emphasis, and the last is 75% white. While these four schools all teach traditional American values, such specialization has led some observers to worry that all schools might not.

Robert Paul, chief counsel to the Wisconsin superintendent of instruction, says he can imagine that white survivalists in northern Wisconsin might want to set up their own school. “As long as you teach your four or five basic courses, you could also teach skills like how to load a submachine gun in the dark,” Paul says. “You could get state money, and nobody could object.”

Advocates of choice say such fears are overplayed. “You have to ask yourself how much demand there is for fringe education,” says Brookings’ Chubb. “My own answer is that the demand is fairly small.”

While advocates such as Chubb and choice’s opponents agree on very little, most do share a view that for choice to work, the mechanics of the system must be carefully adjusted. Even modest experiments can yield effects as dramatic as those at the Fitzgerald school, they agree.

“Choice is like electricity,” Minnesota’s Joe Nathan says--”so powerful it has to be handled with real care.”

Five School Choice Plans

MINNESOTA--A 3-year-old statewide open-enrollment plan offers all 740,000 public schoolchildren the choice of going to any public school in the state. This year, about 6,200 pupils are taking advantage of the program, but it has prompted many districts to expand their course and extra-curricular offerings to lure pupils.

MILWAUKEE--A plan that began last September offered inner-city children an opportunity to attend participating non-sectarian private schools by providing a $2,500 tax subsidy for each. About 250 students are being taught in five private schools, including two that teach a curriculum with an African emphasis and one that has a largely Spanish-speaking student body. The program faces a legal challenge from the state superintendent of instruction, who believes it would undermine public education.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.--A voluntary desegregation plan worked out for the city permits parents to send their children to any school in the district, provided that it does not upset the school’s racial balance. Parents apply by listing three choices, in order of preference. The program has forced curriculum changes in schools shunned by parents.

EPSOM, N.H.--The selectmen of this town of 2,800 voted last January to grant a tax break of $1,000 to parents who sent their children to private school rather than to the regional public high school. The move was partly to save property tax dollars for the town, which spends $4,600 on each child it sends to the high school. Tax breaks so far have been provided to 14 families--12 of which had their teen-agers in private school before the program began. But the proposal also has been tied up in court.

EAST HARLEM SCHOOL DISTRICT, NEW YORK--The administration of this portion of the New York City public schools began allowing educators to experiment with curriculums in 1973, causing a proliferation of elementary and junior high schools. Students can choose among schools that specialize in the performing arts, health services, environmental studies and other programs. East Harlem schools rose from last place among New York’s 32 districts in 1973 to 16th in 1990. But some critics say the improvement reflects not only the stimulus provided by choice, but also the presence of unusually talented educators, and special grant funds.