How to Create Welfare Hostels for the Intellect : Education: Truth be told, the Parental Choice Amendment is a bailout measure for church-run schools and a sop to the wealthy.

To get their 4-year-old prodigies into the Open Magnet School in Los Angeles, one of the most innovative primary schools in the country, affluent Westside parents pull every string. But with five times as many applicants as seats, chances for admission are slim--even L.A. County Dist. Att. Ira Reiner’s kids didn’t make it when they first applied.

Anxious parents and elite schools regularly perform this courtship ritual. What’s remarkable about Open Magnet School is that it isn’t a private school nestled on a leafy site. It’s a ragtag collection of double trailers parked on the asphalt playground of an elementary school in an unfashionable section of the city.

Unusual, too, is that the Westsiders are competing, often unsuccessfully, with families from the farthest reaches of the Valley and the heart of Watts, as well as with families just arrived from Mexico or Vietnam. Every child in Los Angeles has a shot at this public magnet school, one of the district’s 50. It’s all part of an initiative to emphasize parental choice.

Across the country, choice has become the rallying cry for a growing band of lawmakers, educators and parents. In California, come November, voters will likely decide the fate of the “Parental Choice in Education Amendment” to the state’s constitution. Nearly a million signatures have been collected to qualify it.

Already, proponents and opponents have trotted out their favorite arguments. Proponents contend that, since children are different from one another, there’s no single best way to teach them. Parents know their children best, so they, not the bureaucrats, should make the decisions. Competition, which choice encourages, will make schools stronger.

Picking an education for one’s kids, the amendment’s opponents say, isn’t like deciding between McDonald’s and Taco Bell. The stakes are so much higher and reliable information so much harder to get. Allowing parents to choose their kids’ schools means that choice among schools will become a popularity contest--that families will make bad choices; and that poor and nonwhite families, least prepared to play this game, will be stuck in the worst places.

The real issue, however, isn’t educational monopoly vs. educational options. During the past decade, an unmistakable revolution has taken place: There are real options for kids and real choices for their families. The critical question, so far finessed in the sound-bite struggle for voters’ allegiance, is: Just how much choice will be offered, and by whom?

Within public-school systems, a remarkable transformation has already occurred. From Maine to California, hundreds of communities have stopped requiring parents to send their kids to the nearest school. Now they can attend any school in the district with a spare desk. Specialized magnet schools attract children from across a city.

In many places, Los Angeles among them, civil-rights groups and educators have joined forces, relying on magnet schools instead of busing to achieve racial balance. Black students in Massachusetts, for example, can opt to be bused out of the Boston ghetto and into the suburbs; there, waiting lists confirm parents’ interest.

Six states currently require open enrollment in all their school districts, and two others encourage it. Minnesota has gone even further, mandating statewide open enrollment. Starting this fall, Minnesota’s public-school teachers will be able to open their own schools under a charter from the local school district. These schools will be financed with public dollars, and they will be accountable to the parents who pick them. Legislators in half a dozen states are contemplating their own “charter schools.”

This is the context of the California initiative--not as choice vs. monopoly but as one choice among choices.

If the measure passes, every school-age child will be offered a scholarship worth $2,700, half of what California typically spends on a public-school student. Private schools, including church-run schools, could take these vouchers and the almost total freedom from state rules that accompanies them. In theory, public schools could also transform themselves into “state scholarship schools,” roughly akin to Minnesota’s charter schools, relying on the $2,700 per student stipend.

In truth, the choice amendment as a bailout measure for church-run schools and a sop to the wealthy.

Paying for private schools, including church-run schools, with public dollars raises constitutional questions about church-state separation. There are also hard questions about which schools will be eligible to collect these state dollars.

Worse, for most parents and their children, the amendment’s promise of new options for schooling is illusory. Private-school tuition is typically much higher than the proposed scholarship, and most middle-class families couldn’t begin to make up the difference.

Since transportation costs aren’t covered, urbanites couldn’t readily turn to suburban alternatives. And neither public schools nor many new private schools would participate in the plan because the dollar inducement is so small. Instructively, Minnesota’s charter schools get roughly twice as much money as would their California counterparts.

Most troubling is that this “choice” scheme gives the back of the hand to California’s 1 million poor kids. While some would fill the 25,000 vacant seats in inner-city parochial schools, most would remain in public schools. But those schools would likely be even worse than they are now. City public schools would no longer be common schools, even in theory. They would become welfare hostels for the intellect.

It didn’t have to turn out this way. A different plan, drafted by UC Berkeley law professors John Coons and Stephen Sugarman, almost got the support of businessmen pushing the choice amendment. That proposal offered something of value for rich and poor, minority and white. It pegged scholarships at 90% of public-school costs, rather than 50%, and set aside 20% of the seats in private schools for poor kids.

In the end, though, the amendment backers feared that this strategy would cost too much--they were as eager to save money as to improve schooling. The initiative they substituted is a reminder that choice is only a catch phrase not a blueprint for the future of education.