Can choice lead to better learning environments than this? Photograph by Yvonne Hemsey, Gamma Liaison

Americans no longer regard their government with the same level of trust as they once did. The proportion who say they trust the government to do what is right most or all of the time has fallen from more than 75 percent in 1964 to little more than 20 percent in 1994. Many factors contributed to this decline: public expectations have risen; the costs of government have increased; news reporting focuses more on public problems than on achievements; partisan bickering has intensified; and the country's purposes have become more obscure with the ending of the Cold War.

About most of these factors little can be done. But one probable cause of declining public trust--the declining relative efficiency of the public sector--can be addressed at least partially. Over the past three decades, the private economy has become increasingly efficient and productive, making possible the economic growth, high profits, full employment, and rising stock market that the country has recently enjoyed. But public agencies have failed to keep pace with private-sector gains. One way of enhancing trust in government might be to privatize government-financed services now provided by public agencies.

Privatization may enhance efficiency in three different ways. First, competition reduces costs and improves service quality. Second, consumers can be given opportunities to choose among an array of options, allowing for a closer match between preferences and services. Third, consumers can co-produce--that is, help to provide the services, thereby reducing costs and improving effectiveness.

When advocates speak of privatization, eyes glaze over as the dull details of garbage collection come to mind. Whatever benefits may accrue--lower costs, cleaner streets, better sanitation--they are hardly likely to transform the public's attitude toward government. The more compelling, though more controversial, example is education. If schooling could be privatized successfully, so that learning opportunities are enhanced and made more equitable, the social consequences would be sweeping--especially for poor children living in America's central cities.

Apart from cash-transfer programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, education is the largest publicly provided service. In 1990 the cost of publicly financed education totaled $305.6 billion, or 5.6 percent of GNP. But public confidence in public schools remains very low. Over the past decade, the proportion of Americans who gave our public schools a grade of D or F doubled, to a recent level of 28 percent.

Declining confidence in public schools may be due to their failure to keep pace with rising public expectations. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of education rose by 50 percent between 1974 and 1991--an annual rate of increase of more than 2 percent. But student test scores, an important educational outcome, improved hardly at all. Between 1970 and 1992, elementary and secondary students attained only slight gains in mathematics and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, generally thought to be the best available measure of student achievement. Their scores in science fell substantially. Increasing costs with at best slight gains in student achievement suggest the public school system has become less efficient.

The problems are particularly severe in large central cities. Although competition exists in suburbia, where many districts need good schools to attract homeowners, most city schools are governed by a single school board that does not ordinarily allow schools to compete for students. Whereas schools in rural areas often function as community institutions, facilitating co-production, city schools have more limited ties to their immediate neighborhoods. Perhaps for these reasons, educational outcomes within the central city trail those achieved outside. Students in New York City, for example, perform 3 percentile points behind the statewide average in third grade, 6 percentile points behind in sixth grade, and as much as 15 points behind in high school. These alarming results obtain even when they are adjusted for the racial and income backgrounds of the students.

Some Americans denounce public financing of private schools. They say parents do not have the necessary information to discern a school's academic quality. They say that parents choose schools on the basis of a school's proximity, religious affiliation, sports facilities, or social segregation--factors said to be irrelevant to academic performance.

These arguments have remained influential in part because prior research has left the question unresolved. Although many studies have found students learning more in private schools, their findings are not conclusive because the students involved come from tuition-paying families who may be particularly supportive of their children's education.

Recently, my colleagues and I became better able to address this issue because we had access to data from an experiment which randomly assigned students to private and public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee choice program, initiated in 1990, provided a limited number of students from low-income families with vouchers that could be used to pay the tuition of the secular private school of their choice in Milwaukee. To ensure equal access to the program among eligible applicants, the legislature required choice schools, if oversubscribed, to admit applicants at random.

Our study indicates that the effects of choice schools on mathematics achievement were slight for the first two years students were in the program. But after three years of enrollment, students scored 5 percentile points higher than the control group; after four, they scored 10.7 points higher. Differences on the reading test were between 2 and 3 percentile points for the first three years and increased to 5.8 points in the fourth.

The results after three and four years are moderately large. If they can be generalized and extrapolated to 12 years, much of the national difference in the reading performance of whites and minorities could be eliminated. All of the differences in math performance could be erased

Without data beyond the Milwaukee program's first four years, one can only speculate as to whether such conclusions are warranted. But if these findings should be repeated elsewhere, they would provide a powerful argument for those who say school choice can help alleviate racial discord.

Any such finding must remain tentative, given certain limitations of the data from Milwaukee. But the magnitude of the findings quite clearly calls for further randomized experiments capable of reaching more precise estimates of the effects of families' school choice on student achievement.

One such experiment is under way in New York City. My colleagues and I have begun an evaluation of this program, which we hope will in the next few years provide a more precise estimate of potential gains in the achievement of central-city, minority children if families are given a choice. Should the findings from Milwaukee recur in New York City, the case for more competition in central-city education would be further strengthened. If implemented on a wide enough scale, such choice might lead to more effective schools generally. That in turn might equalize educational opportunity, alleviate racial discord, and enhance public trust in government.

But even if the evidence ultimately supports choice, will we proceed to embrace it? Some argue that constitutional questions are overriding, regardless of the effects of choice on student achievement. They say that any program that gives families equal access to private schools in the inner city must ultimately include religious schools (as the Milwaukee experiment did not), a step that violates the establishment clause of the federal constitution. But when families are allowed to choose any school, religious or secular, it can hardly be said that any religion is being established. Indeed, to deny families equal access to a school, simply on the grounds that it is guided by religious ideals, would seem to violate the constitutional right to freely exercise one's religion. As the great civil libertarian, John Stuart Mill, put it more than a hundred years ago: "The State should leave to parents to obtain the education [of their children] where and how they please, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees. [If this were done] there would be an end to the difficulties about what the State should teach, and how it should teach, which now convert the subject into a battlefield for sects and parties."

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs