Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities.

• Author: Shughart, William F., II

Responsive Schools, Renewed Communities sounds a clarion call for school choice. In it, Clifford Cobb, identified as a former public school teacher, the holder of a master's degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and the executive director of the Institute for Educational Choice, presents one of the most spirited and thorough defenses of vouchers available among the recent spate of books on educational reform. Unfortunately, Cobb's well reasoned responses to the critics of school choice are ultimately overcome by increasingly strident communitarian rhetoric and some very woolly headed economics.

Following an opening paean to the "self-governing way of life" by Robert Hawkins, president of the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and Amitai Etzioni's foreword, about which more later, the book is divided into four main parts. The first documents the decline and fall of educational achievement in America's public schools and lays out the case for reform based on subsidizing the student, not the school. Here, although failing to credit Milton Friedman for originating the voucher idea, Cobb argues forcefully that choice is meaningless unless alternatives to existing government schools, including those run by sectarian organizations, are made available on proportionately equal terms. Indeed, it is the freedom to offer curricula and teaching methods tailored to the needs of their student- and parent-customers, rather than marching in lock step to the edicts of state education bureaucrats, that, along with the freedom to fail, largely explains the successes of existing non-government schools.

Part II focuses on the benefits of school choice to minority and low-income parents. But in the process of laying to rest some of the paternalistic fears of those who claim that vouchers will either leave the children of the poor behind in substandard public school dumping grounds or leave their parents vulnerable to fraud by the operators of for-profit non-government schools, Cobb falls into the "self-esteem" trap laid by the defenders of the status quo. He, too, largely blames the alarmingly high drop-out rates and the abysmally low academic achievement of poor and minority children on the failure of the public schools to present their native cultures in a favorable light. The public schools fail Latino kids, for example, not so much because they fail to maintain order, but rather because the teachers submerge them in "the...