Public education is at a turning point. Last week in New York, businessmen Ted Forstmann and John Walton unveiled their Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) that gave thousands of privately funded vouchers by lottery to low-income, primarily urban students nationwide.
By doing so, CSF either delivered a much-needed wake-up call to supporters of public education or spelled the beginning of the end for public schools.
CSF is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization created when Forstmann and Walton each pledged $50 million of their own money, and raised an additional $75 million, to get kids out of failing public schools. Lest one think this is just another Republican ruse for vouchers, CSF's board of advisors includes former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle (SD), Sens. John Breaux (LA) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (NY), and Charles Rangel (NY), a senior House Democrat.
Public response to Forstmann and Walton's efforts ought to jar anyone out of complacency. Immediately after Forstmann appeared on television with talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, more than 200,000 parents called for applications. Overall, 1.2 million families, with verified income levels low enough to qualify, and willing to contribute at least an additional $500 of their own money toward tuition, participated in last week's lottery. This was a resounding vote of "no-confidence" in the status quo.
The demand was not remarkable considering the sorry state of urban education right now. Success stories do exist -- those engineered by administrators Paul Vallas in Chicago, Gerry House in Memphis and the late John Stanford in Seattle, for example. But overall, urban schools are a disaster by any measure.
Less than three in four urban students graduate on time compared with more than four out of five in suburban and rural schools. In New York City, only 60% of public high-school students ever earn their degree. Standardized test scores of urban students are abysmal, and a 1996 Education Department report concluded that even after statistically adjusting for poverty, "former students of urban public high schools were more likely to be unemployed and living in poverty later in life than those who had attended either rural or suburban high schools."
Not surprisingly, urban parents are much more likely to support vouchers and less likely to express confidence in their schools than parents elsewhere. In a recent Gallup poll, 86% of Americans said it is "very important" to improve inner-city schools.
However, there are better ways to introduce competition and leverage results from public schools than vouchers. Performance-based public accountability around defined benchmarks, rather than purely market-based accountability, is what public schools need. Only the staunchest voucher proponents argue that privatizing education is a practical or equitable option on a large scale.
Vouchers are an abandonment of the public schools rather than an effort to improve them. And there is convincing evidence that with strong leadership and real accountability for performance, urban schools can improve.
Consider Chicago. Mayor Richard Daley took over the Chicago schools in 1995 when the state Legislature, exasperated with the chronic failure of the school system, handed him control. Daley appointed Vallas, then the city's budget director, as chief executive officer of the school system. While Vallas was once a teacher, he is not a career educator. But his record since 1995 speaks for itself
First, the public is again supporting the public schools. Despite a steady decline in enrollment before 1995, enrollment has risen 30,000 since Vallas took over. Kids are coming to school again, too. Attendance is at its highest rate in 15 years. And, students are learning. Test scores are up on state, national and college entrance exams. Although performance still is not where it needs to be, Vallas is making demonstrative progress.
He introduced a strict discipline code in tandem with the creation of a network of alternative schools for troubled students. Strict discipline does not mean putting kids on the street, but it does mean making schools places where students can learn.
Further, he is ending social promotion -- not simply by holding students back but by intervening with after-school and summer-school programs to make sure youngsters have the skills they need for the next grade. Vallas also is introducing sorely needed choice and competition into the public sector by vigorously supporting charter schools.
Most importantly, Vallas has introduced accountability. Already he has fired 36 principals and has made everyone, including himself, accountable for performance and results. "In the past, we used to get rid of perhaps two or three teachers each year," Vallas said recently. "Now we effectively dismiss more than 50."
Firings may seem like a strange way to gauge success, but unless you believe kids in Chicago simply cannot learn, then personnel must have been at the least a part of the problem. Now, teachers and administrators are taking their work more seriously as a dramatic increase in professional development participation by school personnel illustrates.
To the chagrin of many on both ends of the ideological spectrum, Vallas and others like him prove that urban schools can work and give students the skills they need in the new global economy. However, urban-school failure and the tremendous demand for CSF scholarships speak to the need for dramatic change in more places. Unless supporters of public education get off the dime and begin seriously confronting the urban education crisis, vouchers will not be privately funded for long.
