The political economy of school choice.

• Author: Ryan, James E.

INTRODUCTION

Voices of moderation rarely shift the terms of any discussion, but this is our goal regarding the debate over school choice. This debate is filled with numerous claims by advocates and foes alike concerning the impact of choice on the future of public schools, the academic prospects of students, and racial and socioeconomic integration. Many of these claims are well known and equally well exaggerated. Proponents of private school choice, for example, suggest that choice is a "panacea" for the ills facing public schools, (1) while opponents suggest that it could ruin public education. (2) Just as the claims are becoming quite familiar, so too are (most of) the participants: On one side stand the teachers' unions and civil liberties groups who oppose at least private school choice, while on the other side stand free-market libertarians, religious conservatives, and an already significant and growing number of African-American parents. (3)

We believe that many claims regarding school choice miss the mark, and that they do so because those making them have failed to focus on the most important stakeholders in this debate: suburbanites, especially suburban parents. Suburbanites, by and large, are not wild about school choice, either public or private. Suburban parents are generally satisfied with the public schools their children attend, and they want to protect both the physical and the financial sanctity of these schools. (4) School choice threatens both. It creates the generally unwelcome possibility that outsiders--particularly urban students--will be able to attend suburban schools at the expense of local taxpayers. Choice programs also raise the possibility that some locally raised revenues will exit local schools as students leave to attend either private schools or public schools outside of their residential districts. To the extent that choice may threaten the exclusivity and superiority of suburban schools, it may also threaten suburban housing values, which are linked to the quality of neighborhood schools. (5) Like suburban parents, suburban homeowners without children thus have a strong, self-interested reason to be wary of school choice.

When suburbanites perceive a threat to their schools, they fight back, and they usually win. (6) Consider school desegregation and school finance litigation. Efforts to integrate public schools came to a fairly abrupt halt in Milliken, precisely at the point when school desegregation threatened suburban schools. (7) Urban school districts, especially outside the South, were left to experience the benefits and costs of school desegregation, while suburban schools remained largely outside of the fight. (8) School finance litigation, meanwhile, never got off the ground in the United States Supreme Court, in part because it interfered with the same interest identified in Milliken--local control of schools. (9) What local control meant in desegregation was essentially the ability of suburban schools to reserve their seats for neighborhood kids; what it meant in school finance litigation was the ability of suburban schools to spend unequal amounts of money on their own schools. School finance litigation has been somewhat successful on the state level, but, even after court-ordered reform, the general rule is that states must provide more money for poorer districts, while wealthier districts remain largely free to devote locally raised funds to local schools. (10)

We believe that the same dynamic will shape school choice. In fact, it already has. Most public school choice plans are intradistrict, meaning that students can choose schools within a particular district but cannot cross district lines. Even intradistrict "plans" typically do not allow unfettered choice and instead protect the ability of neighborhood kids to attend neighborhood schools. (11) Similarly, those states that have interdistrict plans almost always make participation voluntary or require schools to accept out-of-district students only when space is available. Most plans also fail to provide funding for transportation, making traveling across district lines much more difficult in reality than it appears in theory. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that very few students attend public schools outside of their home school districts. (12)

Similar geographic constraints are also evident in the two most recent forms of school choice: charter schools and voucher programs. Charter school legislation often limits enrollment to children residing in the school district where the charter schools are located. Those states that allow students to cross district lines to attend a charter school almost uniformly give first priority to students living within the district in which the charter school is located. (13) Similarly, the three publicly funded voucher programs that exist--in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida--place significant limitations on where the vouchers may be used. In Milwaukee and Cleveland, vouchers may be used at private schools, provided the schools are located within city limits. The Cleveland program, in theory, also allows vouchers to be used at consenting suburban public schools, but no suburban schools have volunteered to accept voucher students. In Florida, finally, vouchers are given to students in persistently failing schools and may be used at any public or private school, provided that space is available. Transportation, however, is provided only if students choose a public school within their home districts. Moreover, the program is minuscule, as only two schools have "qualified" as persistently failing and thus only fifty-two students are currently receiving vouchers. (14)

Although we hope to resist the temptation to exaggerate, we feel confident in suggesting that understanding the political economy of school choice--and particularly the incentives and political power of suburbanites--is the key to understanding the current and future prospects of school choice, both public and private. Our central claim is that unless the politics surrounding school choice are altered, school choice plans will continue to be structured in ways that protect the physical and financial independence of suburban public schools. As a result, school choice plans will be geographically constrained and will generally tend to be intradistrict. Voucher programs, in particular, are likely to be limited to urban areas, where parents feel little attachment to neighborhood public schools and are desperate for relief.

If our central claim is correct and school choice plans continue to be limited in scope, it is possible to provide a more realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of school choice. Limited school choice plans will be neither a panacea for public school students nor much of a threat to the status quo. Instead, as we hope to show, such plans will lead to, at best, limited academic improvement, little to no gain in racial and socioeconomic integration, and little productive competition among schools. This is not to deny that limited school choice plans have real costs or benefits, but rather to make the (hopefully) uncontroversial point that those costs and benefits will be as limited as the plans themselves. The larger and perhaps more controversial point is that significant gains in academic achievement, racial and socioeconomic integration, and productive competition are unlikely to materialize unless choice plans are structured to allow a meaningful opportunity for poorer students to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods and outside of their districts.

Although we harbor doubts that such plans can succeed politically, we do think that some steps can be taken to increase the options available to students within a choice program. In particular, we suggest that those interested in long-term change should focus on ways to alter the almost reflexive attachment to neighborhood public schools. We believe that one promising way to make progress on this goal is to support the increasingly popular drive for universal access to preschool. Preschools are not typically organized on a neighborhood basis and are just as often operated privately. Our supposition is that if more parents experience a range of government-funded choices among preschools, this experience could make them more supportive of programs that offer a similar range of choices among elementary and secondary schools.

The Article proceeds in three Parts. Part I begins by documenting a historical pattern in education reform, the central feature of which is that structural reforms tend to stop at the boundaries separating urban and suburban school districts, affecting the former and leaving the latter mostly untouched. We then show that school choice plans conform to this pattern and explain how the political economy of school choice, if unaltered, will produce limited school choice plans. Part II assesses the probable impact of limited school choice plans on racial and socioeconomic integration, academic achievement, and competition among public schools. We argue that limited choice plans will have a correspondingly limited impact on all three factors and suggest that the theoretical benefits of school choice will never be realized unless choice programs offer a meaningful opportunity for poorer students to escape impoverished schools. Part III offers suggestions as to how choice plans might be expanded in politically acceptable ways and how the politics of choice might be altered.

Before we proceed, two final introductory notes are in order. First, we recognize that we are painting with a broad brush; that variables such as race and socioeconomic status, politics, and economics interact in complicated ways; and that the political dynamics we describe may not hold true in every locale. In particular, we acknowledge that not all suburbs and suburbanites are alike. Racial and socioeconomic profiles differ among...