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Improving Our Schools: Parental Choice Is Not Enough
| Article
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17229 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
2,186 Words |
| Author
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John G. Boswell
John G. Boswell is a professor of education at George
Washington University. |
America seems beset by a bewildering array of problems today. As always when faced with problems, Americans turn to their schools. Elected officials get a rousing vote of confidence when recommending that schools take a hand in solving problems. But, in fact, schools are one of the problems we are worried about.
The problems have been exhaustively discussed in special reports and the media for the last decade. Many deficiencies are cited, and two outcomes are reported over and over: First, based on the expectations of employers, youngsters graduating from school today do not have a good foundation of skills and knowledge. Second, compared with American youngsters in the past and with those in other countries, the test scores of American youths today are lower.
The federal government, states, local communities, and individual schools have all tried a variety of strategies to bring about improvement, the most recent of which is called choice. Choice is an attempt to give parents a chance to decide what public school their child will attend.
For the sake of efficient management, local school systems currently draw boundaries so that a reasonably equal number of children attend each school in the district. Each school receives the same amount of financial support from the state and the local district. In theory, all schools should be the same, but in fact they are not. A broad pattern of research that began in England in the 1970s shows how schools are distinct based on the different ways people interact.
By giving parents a chance to decide what
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