The Condition of School Choice

Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect wrote last week about the importance of opening up school district boundaries to allow parents in urban areas to send their kids to suburban schools, and vice-versa. Making district boundaries more porous is one step toward reducing the growing resegregation of our communities and schools, and it may be beneficial to those students who do transfer. But it doesn't address what most families fundamentally want - a good, safe school in their community.

As I wrote in this report, inter-district choice just isn't going to impact large numbers of students in many large, urban areas - there simply aren't enough good schools nearby to take transferring students. And that's assuming that suburban schools will open up a substantial number of seats - something which will require financial incentives or politically unpopular mandates. This isn't to say that inter-district choice policies aren't worth pursuing, it's just that they will take increased resources and careful attention to be done right. And for school choice to impact a large number of students in many urban areas, policymakers need to combine increased choice across district boundaries with building better schools, whether it's charter schools or traditional public schools of choice.

As a sidenote, and an addendum to Chad's great Condition of Education series, the recent report also includes some relevant information on public school choice. As one might expect, white, non-poor, and suburban parents are more likely to report moving to their current neighborhood for a school:
But among parents who reported having choice among public schools (46 percent), the patterns look different in who takes advantage of school choice, with students of minority and lower-income parents attending public schools of choice at a higher rate:

One disturbing result in the new report is that parents with less than a high school diploma reported the lowest rates of choice. And this was a drop from the 2003 survey results. It's hard to say what, exactly, the reason is for lower choice among parents with lower education levels, but it may indicate that policymakers at all levels - state, district and school - need to step up outreach efforts to ensure choice is accessible to all families.