Does School Choice Improve Education?

LETTERS

Published: December 11, 2011

To the Editor:

Lilli Carré

As a school choice advocate and a former member of the District of Columbia City Council, I must take issue with some of the claims made in “Why School Choice Fails,” by Natalie Hopkinson (Op-Ed, Dec. 5).

Ms. Hopkinson points to what she deems the fundamental unfairness of the lottery aspect of the charter school law. To be sure, it’s not a perfect system, but luck and chance have always determined where one attends school. If you are lucky enough to be born to reasonably well-off parents who can write checks to private schools or buy a house in an expensive suburb, opportunity is everywhere.

If you aren’t so fortunate, your parents grit their teeth and send you to the neighborhood school, chosen for you based on nothing but your ZIP code. If access to high-performing schools has to come down to a number, better it be a lottery number than a ZIP code.

Washington parents seem to agree. Polls show that for the first time in over a decade, a majority of the city’s parents give positive ratings to the school system.

It’s an oft-used analogy in the education reform movement that failing schools are like a burning building: the forces against choice would rather leave everyone inside if everyone can’t be saved. I’ve never made the claim that choice is a panacea. But by and large, Washington’s charter program — and others like it — are success stories. They have given a generation of underprivileged students access to a quality education that has heretofore been largely out of reach.

KEVIN P. CHAVOUS
Chairman
Black Alliance for Educational Options
Washington, Dec. 6, 2011

To the Editor:

Kudos to Natalie Hopkinson for her excellent essay about her desperate hunt for a middle school for her 11-year-old in a low-income section of Washington. Her insights are just as applicable to New York, where school choice is destroying education.

The race to offer choice ignores something fundamental about most good schools: they have an involved parent body and community. When a school is not community-based, a lot of the air is let out.

Here’s a modest suggestion: keep students from successful elementary schools together. Make sure that success doesn’t end there, but continues on.

DANIEL KAPLAN
New York, Dec. 5, 2011

To the Editor:

Natalie Hopkinson’s essay describing how some neighborhood schools have suffered because families chose better schools elsewhere in Washington is a poignant reminder of the costs associated with school choice.

But it’s not clear that eliminating formal school choice programs is the solution, because school choice will always exist for those with the means to choose where to live. If there were only neighborhood schools in cities like Washington, it’s worth asking whether parents like the writer, who care about education and presumably have options about where to live, would ever move to a neighborhood with poor schools in the first place. And if they wouldn’t, neither the schools nor the neighborhoods would be better off for the choices they made.

Allowing for school choice, if nothing else, can be a useful way to revitalize city neighborhoods.

JAMES E. RYAN
Charlottesville, Va., Dec. 6, 2011

The writer is a professor of law at the University of Virginia Law School and the author of a book about educational opportunity, “Five Miles Away, a World Apart.”

To the Editor:

Natalie Hopkinson claims that “charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.”

In fact, the high-school graduation rate for Washington’s charter schools was 83 percent last school year, compared with 72 percent for its public school system. Furthermore, charter school students have scored higher on the district’s standardized tests in math and reading.

Some 34 percent of Washington’s charter schools have been required to give up their charter — a higher share of schools than those closed by the public school system.

ROBERT CANE
Executive Director
Friends of Choice in Urban Schools
Washington, Dec. 5, 2011

A version of this letter appeared in print on December 12, 2011, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Does School Choice Improve Education?.