Making school choice work: two D.C. schools, a traditional public and a nonunionized charter, are experimenting with socioeconomic integration.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of School Choice - Book review

Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of School Choice

by Sam Chaltain

Teachers College Press, 208 pp.

Over the past few decades, Americans have witnessed an explosion in public school choice--the ability to choose a magnet school, a charter school, or an out-of-boundary public school. While the neighborhood public school still remains the norm for most American children, the number of families who chose a non-neighborhood public school increased by 45 percent between 1993 and 2007. Nationally, more than a quarter of parents choose a school other than the public school their children are assigned by neighborhood to attend. In New Orleans, 80 percent of students attend charter schools, and in Washington, D.C., 44 percent of public school students attend charters and another 28 percent choose out-of-boundary public schools.

The rise in school choice is not hard to understand. In a culture where parents are accustomed to enjoying a wide variety of choices in most facets of their lives, they also like the idea of choosing a public school that meets the individual needs of their children.

But education reformers have advocated school choice for larger public purposes as well. Teachers union leader Albert Shanker, for example, first proposed charter schools in 1988 as a vehicle for empowering teachers to tap into their expertise and create new teaching methods and approaches from which traditional public schools could learn. Shanker and other early advocates of charters also saw the opportunity to move beyond schools that reflect residential neighborhood segregation by race and class, drawing children from a variety of backgrounds who could learn from one another. Over time, even conservatives advocated charters and other forms of choice as a way of boosting competition between schools and fostering innovation.

In Our School: Searching for Community in an Era of School Choice, the author and consultant Sam Chaltain looks into how these theories play out in practice at two schools located in Washington's mixed-income and racially diverse Columbia Heights/Mt. Pleasant neighborhood. One, Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, is a brand-new elementary school whose founders made the most of their chance to "start a new school from scratch." Teaching in Spanish and English, the school focuses on environmental sustainability and hands-on expeditionary learning, in which students delve deeply into a topic for weeks at a time, producing...