Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education
edited by Paul E. Peterson and David E. Campbell
Brookings, 320 pp., $42.95


Revolution at the Margins
The Impact of Competition on Urban School Systems
by Frederick M. Hess
Brookings, 268 pp., $18.95


Rhetoric versus Reality
What We Know and What We Need to Know AboutVouchers and Charter Schools
by Brian P. Gill, P. Michael Timpane, Karen E. Ross, and Dominic J. Brewer
RAND, 120 pp., $15


Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public
by Terry M. Moe
Brookings, 350 pp., $29.95


THE DEBATE over school choice presents a puzzling spectacle. On one side are those who favor choice. In response to the longstanding crisis of our inner-city public schools, they favor charter schools (which receive state funds as a result of commitments made in the school's charter) and, far more controversially, cash vouchers from the state to use at participating schools. These supporters stand for innovation, experimentation, and a diversity of approaches. And they are generally thought of as the conservatives.

On the other side are the opponents of school choice. Their response to our failing public schools is to seek to strengthen them, usually by spending more money. These opponents of choice defend the status quo, stand with entrenched interests, especially teachers' unions and big-city school boards, and warn ominously that even small changes to a system that has its roots in the nineteenth century will undermine our shared civic culture. They think of themselves as liberals or progressives.

Of course, in one respect, the positions do line up as one would expect. The school-choicers press for market-based reforms, in the spirit of much conservative public policy, while the anti-choicers put their faith in the state, following in the footsteps of much progressive public policy. Some of the debate reflects disagreement about the facts: What is the most effective means to better education in America? But the debate also reflects disagreement about the ends of education in a free society. And sorting out these issues requires both an examination of current research and a reconsideration of fundamental tendencies within the classical liberal tradition.

A central role in the school-choice debate is being played by Washington's venerable Brookings Institution, the moderate--or slightly left-leaning--think tank that is a pillar of Washington's idea industry. For the better part of a decade, a loose-knit group of scholars have been studying school choice. (Their unofficial leader seems to be Paul Peterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.)

According to several studies Brookings has recently published, the evidence is mounting that expansion of choice through charters and vouchers improves, and certainly does not diminish, academic achievement. These findings, which are either bolstered or uncontradicted by other serious studies, such as the RAND education report "Rhetoric versus Reality," seem to strike hard at the anti-choice position.



NONETHELESS, progressive critics see school choice as a threat to democracy. They charge, for instance, that such programs appeal to white elites who wish to separate their children from blacks and to religious parents who wish to separate their children from the secular world. They insist that vouchers and charters deprive students who take advantage of them of diversity in the classroom. They assert that such innovations weaken public schools by draining away state money and creaming off the best students. And they declare that schools out of the government's hands generally subvert the nation's shared civic culture by teaching a narrow, intolerant, sectarian creed.
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