Public schooling.

• Position: Letters

Alexander Russo ("When School Choice Isn't," September) considers the interest in school choice a distraction. He urges fixing schools "the old-fashioned way": "better teachers, higher academic expectations, summer school, smaller classes and schools."

There's no question the feeble school choice provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act will be effortlessly thwarted by the establishment. But the "old-fashioned way" to "fix" schools has weaker prospects. If you want "better teachers," you need to bypass the education-school licensing monopoly and let districts hire whom they want, which would open the profession to graduates of selective universities. Smaller classes are expensive and lead to minimal gains; they tend to create openings in the suburbs for veteran teachers in urban schools and leave the neediest students with the least skilled teachers. Finally, while smaller schools are a very good idea, small schools are friendly places to work and harder for unions to organize; unions will resist any serious effort to create smaller schools. And while it is politically feasible to create...