School Choice Puts Town’s Honor to Test : Massachusetts community gets a hard lesson when parents use vouchers. Its district eventually improves, but another doesn’t.

From New England to the Pacific Northwest, parents and students have embraced programs allowing them to choose schools outside their local school district.

But what about the schools and the families that are left behind?

This small, proud community found out the answer the hard way after the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law allowing students to attend public schools in other districts.

Of the 1,500 students in Hopkinton’s public schools, 117 fled to Holliston, a nearby town with a similar middle-class and upper-middle-class population but bigger, better-financed schools.

The exodus caught Hopkinton off guard. Town honor was at stake.

“It really hurt us,” said Sarah Molloy, a junior at Hopkinton High. “It made you feel your school wasn’t good enough.”

The experience here has become relevant to Californians, who will vote Nov. 2 on the most sweeping proposal ever to let families choose schools for their children. If they vote yes, families will receive vouchers of about $2,600 a year that they can use to pay any school in the state--including private schools--to educate their children.

Advocates of school choice say it injects competition into public school systems and forces schools that lose students to improve. Critics complain that it skims money, good students and involved parents from the public schools that need them most.

The evidence from Massachusetts suggests there is truth on both sides.

The state gave school districts a choice of participating or not, and most chose not to. Boston’s suburbs, evidently fearful of an influx of inner-city students, stayed out. The real fireworks were in small towns like Hopkinton.

When the Legislature instituted the program in 1991, some of Hopkinton’s best students promptly switched to Holliston. “It tended to be the parents of students who were high achievers who opted to send them elsewhere,” said Joseph Barnes, administrator of Hopkinton Middle School.

The transfers caused Hopkinton residents, who had turned down school budget increases two years in a row, to do a lot of soul-searching.

The townspeople eventually rallied and voted for 12% school budget hikes. “The town said to itself, ‘Hey, is this what we want for our school system?’ The answer was no,” said Hopkinton Supt. William Hosmer.

In response to what happened in Hopkinton and elsewhere, the state made its policy less punitive for weaker school systems.

At first, the student’s home district had to reimburse the receiving district for the full per-pupil cost in the new district. The state’s per-pupil cost averages $5,050 a year, but it reaches almost twice that in some better districts. The Legislature decided to cap reimbursement at $5,000 per pupil.

For school districts that adopted school reform plans after losing at least 2% of their students, the state refunded 75% of the money that was lost.

All this let the Hopkinton school district hire more teachers and guidance counselors and beef up foreign language instruction and some other programs. That stemmed the flight. A handful of students returned from Holliston, and now Hopkinton is a net receiver of students under the choice program.

“School choice . . . was a wake-up call for the community,” said Hopkinton High School principal Thomas Lane. “The community supported us, and things turned around.”

But Hosmer cautioned: “I’m not sure that other towns could rebuild the way we did.”

Brockton is one of those that have been unable to respond. A poor city south of Boston, Brockton was in the midst of a fiscal crisis and had just fired 100 teachers, raising some class sizes to as many as 40 students, when choice was introduced in 1991.

No wonder it quickly lost 108 students and hundreds of thousands of dollars to nearby Avon, a smaller, more affluent community where per-pupil spending was twice that of Brockton and class size was about half.

“I can’t think of a single thing that would make me think favorably about choice from Brockton’s standpoint,” said Eligijus Suziedelis, head of special projects for Brockton schools. “It pitted the two communities against each other.”

He said Avon attracted Brockton’s best students, leaving behind those who were the least motivated. One quarter of Brockton’s students are from families receiving federal welfare benefits, but only 3% of the students who transferred to Avon were from welfare families.

Suziedelis derided the theory that choice would inspire Brockton’s schools to improve themselves. There was no way, he said, that his poor city could compete with Avon.

Supporters of choice nationwide say it works only if conditions are right, which they were decidedly not in Massachusetts. When choice was instituted, per-pupil expenditures varied from $2,817 to $8,634.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that choice is an essential element in school reform, but you have to make sure there’s a level playing field,” said Joseph Fernandez, the former New York City school chancellor who formulated a choice program for New York that is being inaugurated citywide this year. “Choice by itself does not make good schools.”