Imagine a country -- we'll call it Hobsonia -- that requires all its residents to shop at officially assigned supermarkets based on where they live. Now, Hobsonians care passionately about food, and since the law allows them to move if they wish, citizens decide where to live based largely on where they can buy groceries. Those with money move to the best supermarket districts, which tend to be in affluent areas where store managers know that unhappy customers have the scratch to move elsewhere. Hobsonia thus sorts itself into good supermarket districts and bad. While people talk passionately about improving the latter, nothing ever seems to make much difference.
In America, we understand that shopping is too important for us to forbid people from changing stores without moving. So we only apply this Hobsonian policy to public education.
Teach your children well.
As we trundle our little ones onto those yellow buses for yet another school year, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of schools in the frenzied conversion of open space to strip malls and subdivisions -- a process known familiarly as sprawl. This car-oriented, low-density development on the edge of metropolitan areas isn't pretty; it means more paving, greenhouse gases, and traffic fatalities, not to mention less mobility for the young and the elderly. Sprawling communities are associated with obesity, probably because nobody walks anywhere, and they also strike many of us as alienating and indistinguishable.
Where do schools come in? The standard formulation is that sprawl harms urban school systems by draining middle-class students and their tax-paying families. But any parent will tell you that urban schools also promote sprawl by driving away families who can afford to leave. Michael E. Lewyn, a visiting professor of law at George Washington University, has observed that we give urban parents three choices: They can send their kids to the lousy and possibly dangerous public schools in the city. They can ante up the exorbitant tuition for private school, assuming their kids can get in. Or they can move to the best suburb they can afford, where decent public schools are available to anyone with the price of a house.
While some people genuinely like faceless suburbs, many of us who loathe them move there anyway because of our kids. We tolerate boredom, protracted commutes, and endless shuttling from errand to errand by minivan because, much as we loved Thai food and art museums, there was no acceptable place in the city to educate our children. In a 2004 paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association entitled "Smart Growth and School Reform," University of Maryland urbanologist Howell S. Baum says it plainly: "Improving city schools is central to managing sprawl."
Their parents' hell ...
Ignoring the chain of causality between bad schools and sprawl leads environmentalists to overlook the simplest and potentially most powerful anti-sprawl measure available, which is to let urban parents choose their kids' schools -- even if those schools aren't in the city or aren't even public. Ethically, this notion is supposed to be anathema. Surely we can't trust urban parents to choose their children's schools. Why don't we just improve the inner-city schools? Maybe more testing will work. Or how about vastly greater funding? Perhaps smaller class sizes, bilingual education, phonics, or school uniforms will do the trick.
These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school -- except, perhaps, for the odd island of success in an ocean of pedagogical failure. These few thriving urban schools tend to be in expensive neighborhoods, or magnet schools with special programs. Either way, admission is essentially voluntary. So why not give everyone this choice? Why not let parents pick any school, public or private, that meets official requirements? Even excluding private schools, a sensible system could still let parents choose freely from among any public schools that will have their kids -- even schools in different districts.
It's hard to predict how many middle-class families would choose urban life if they didn't have to worry about the schools, but it's fair to assume the proportion would be substantial. The childless bourgeoisie are a fixture of urban life in most major cities, and the couples who move out to some new subdivision when they have kids are stock figures as well. Duke University economist Thomas Nechyba, who has created a theoretical model of the relationship between school choice and housing decisions, finds in his simulation that giving all parents school vouchers substantially boosted household income in poor school districts. The reason? Many affluent people moved back.
Oh yeah, and as a bonus, school choice could also help desegregate the cities, rescue them from their never-ending financial crises, force them to provide competitive educational offerings, reduce air pollution, and maybe even save some lives on the nation's highways.
Of course, there are other reasons -- reasons of justice and racial equality and economic fairness -- to give parents much greater school choice. Why, after all, should only the poorest families, those whose kids desperately need better schooling to break the cycle of poverty, find themselves unable to opt out of bad schools? How are we ever going to narrow the gap between rich and poor if a good education depends on how much real estate you can afford?
These arguments mysteriously fail to resonate among many of the environmentally minded people I know. One reason might be that environmentalists are generally an affluent bunch, and thus are beneficiaries of the lopsided school-choice voucher system already in place in our society. These vouchers -- the technical term for them is "cash" -- are used by middle-class parents to hire moving vans and buy houses in the suburbs. Like our health insurance system, it works great -- if you can afford it.
Another reason might be the mechanism -- competition -- whereby school choice would work. Many of the environmentally minded people I know are uncomfortable with competition, which sounds a little too red in tooth and claw. But competition among schools already works: competition in higher education has led to excellent quality and lots of choices. And environmentalists have managed to warm up to the competitive marketplace before. Markets in sulfur-dioxide emissions credits and halibut fishing rights, to cite just two examples, have proven their mettle in cost-effectively achieving environmental goals.
Why not a more competitive marketplace in schooling? Imagine if Americans could choose a new school without necessarily having to choose a new community. Maybe then the demand driving sprawl would slow down, and the rate of land development would fall back a bit toward the rate of population growth. We might also have better educated kids, thanks to more responsive (and less socially segregated) schools -- kids whose smarter choices as adults might just lead to real environmental progress.
The night I slept with Jim Hansen
4.5 things I learned at my energy audit
Comments
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Laurel Posted 4:19 am
06 Oct 2005
Instead, I strongly believe that by increasing school funding and the equity in its distribution, inner-city schools could hire better, more qualified teachers, improve facilities, and eventually improve performance. Once the performance levels of these schools begin to improve, people will begin to move back to urban areas, and segregation in the schools will decrease. Increasing funding, in contrast to initiating open enrollment policies, will provide a more permanent, sustainable, and fair solution to the existing problem and will eliminate the environmental and logistical problems associated with long commutes to schools in the suburbs. Now, if only we had an administration that valued funding schools more than the ginormous-budget military....
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cpthompson Posted 4:26 am
06 Oct 2005
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cpthompson Posted 4:44 am
06 Oct 2005
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Emily Cunningham Posted 6:51 am
06 Oct 2005
In Portland, the irony is especially bitter. A city that is nationally recognized for its emphasis on community building and sustainability houses an educational system where schools are disengaged from neighborhood, where more kids have to be driven to school and where students are increasingly sorted by race, social class,
interest and ability.
As for Akst's assertion that choice would support equality and desegration, Baker disagrees:
U.S. public schools have always eerily replicated society's racial and economic stratification, but the segregation caused by school choice is especially disturbing.
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But how do you build up community when educational policies conspire to tear it down? As Olson points out, under Portland's school choice system, two of the city's poorest elementary schools, Humboldt and King, have lost 40 percent of their neighborhood student population to other schools. The city's two richest schools, by contrast, Forest Park and Ainsworth, enroll more than 95 percent of their neighborhood population.
And as for the viability of public education itself with "school choice" polices, I'll leave you with this:
The long-term problem with choice is that it leads down the slippery slope to the demise of public education itself. (After all, the Bush administration's initial plan was to support NCLB with school vouchers.) Nor can choice be divorced from the larger funding crisis facing public education.
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solacdncs Posted 8:40 am
06 Oct 2005
This isn't the answer, the answer is better funding for all schools, not just those in ritzy neighborhoods or upper middle class suburbs. Give all kids a chance for a good quality education despite the cost, education is what will move this nation forward, not wars over oil and demanding the spread of democracy or proseletizing (sorry about the spelling here never seem to get that one right, probably because I think it is wrong!) This isn't a competition to see which country can produce the greatest debt or surplus, but who can have the education it needs to be sustainable, with a healthy, peaceful population that has enough to keep its people satisified and still have enough left over to give a helping hand where one is needed. If we produce dullards out of our education system then how will this sort of society ever be possible? Rich kids need exposure to other cultures, socioeconomic classes (of which there should be less distinction) and those from less advantageous backgrounds need to be exposed to things they would otherwise be unable to experience. In other words to make a long story short, schools should be funded the same wherever they are, they should be safe harbors for your children and fertile feeding grounds for their minds. This should not be a matter of politics whatever your platform, it should be a priority.
Your lowly poor disadvantaged environmental advocate! JJ
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raphsperry Posted 9:33 am
06 Oct 2005
Also, while I like the piece, I find it kind of surprising that someone would spend so much time advocating for a policy without considering what the current political implications of it are. I doubt that the right-wingers who advocate school choice would like the idea of cross-district choice, especially if that meant that poor (and black or brown) children would end up in school with their well-to-do (and white) ones. With traditional leftists opposed to choice in general, isn't this an idea with few natural supporters?
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correrafan Posted 12:42 pm
06 Oct 2005
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Corey McKrill Posted 1:35 pm
06 Oct 2005
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billyrainbow Posted 3:08 pm
06 Oct 2005
Instead of focusing on the schools that are doing really well, the focus should be on the ones that are having trouble. The problem schools should be the recipients of the greatest public investments, with incentives applied to attract the best teaching talent. The quality of the whole system would improve like that, leaving no school (or its students) behind, instead of sucking all the best students, best teachers, most innovative administrators, and best equipment out to the wealthy neighborhoods and created cesspools of ignornat misery in their wake.
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Storm Dragon Posted 4:45 pm
06 Oct 2005
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that we abandon the public schools. Not everyone is able to teach their children at home, and of those who can, most will probably choose not to. Therefore, we need to make our public schools as good as we possibly can.
I do want to say, however, that those who choose the home-schooling route should be supported, and treated with respect. There are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding this lifestyle, (as there are about environmentalists), and that is most unfortunate.
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ellenmccullough Posted 6:05 pm
06 Oct 2005
(1) I want to see some numbers that school quality is one of the greatest determinants of where people decide to live. His evidence is anecdotal on this point, yet it is crucial to his central argument. If this can indeed be well-documented, then...
(2) Why not show these numbers to urban developers? Residential real estate development is big business, and urban renewal is in fashion. Some forward-minded real estate developer could buy up lots of land on the cheap, pour lots of money (and effort) into improving the school system, and then benefit from the influence of better schools on real estate prices. I smell public-private partnerships! There are a few problems with my argument - most notably the free rider problem that developers might face. However, everyone might win if poorly performing urban schools look to unconventional sources of income to break out of the performance-enrollment conundrum.
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David Roberts Posted 1:43 am
07 Oct 2005
The single best thing that could be done to improve schools is to detach funding from local property taxes. Federal funding, at least at some minimal level, will insure an equal starting point. Also, it will give everybody a stake in improving education quality and funding. Right now, those with political power already have good schools, and those with crappy schools have no political power.
It's absurd that the quality of a kid's education depends so completely on the wealth of his immediate neighbors.
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Todd Hymas Samkara Posted 2:15 am
07 Oct 2005
School vouchers would neither improve schools, decrease pollution, nor curb sprawl -- the essay's central contentions. Not in the world of "Hobsonia" and its supermarkets, and not in real-life America. What vouchers would do is defund the public schools that need the most help, keep the vast array of suburbanites right where they are, and leave pollution completely untouched.
The rest of this rebuttal can be seen here.
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javabean Posted 6:50 am
07 Oct 2005
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paultoronto Posted 12:07 am
08 Oct 2005
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Biodiversivist Posted 6:27 am
08 Oct 2005
I really like it. That would work as far as urban sprawl is concerned. Hopefully someone will pick up on it. On the other hand, those schools will be filled with wealthy white kids.
Also, it is a fact that school quality is one of the greatest determinants of where people decide to live. I've been there and have watched my peers make thier decisions. Most opted for urban flight or private shcools.
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Wren Posted 5:06 pm
08 Oct 2005
Second... why not fund all schools equally? That way it won't matter where the school is, they will all receive the same economic opportunity. Not that money fixes everything, but it can help in schools where there aren't even enough textbooks to go around, let alone money to hire quality teachers.
Third... some people mentioned parental involvement, which is great... if you have parents who give a hoot, or have the time to get involved. If a child's parents are drunken/addicted to drugs/abusive/etc., or even good parents but forced to work 80 hours a week at their low-paying job just to put food on the table, it's likely they're not going to be around to check homework or go to parent-teacher conferences. And this is the case in a lot of homes in the "poor" neighborhoods.
Fourth... teachers do make a huge difference. We had our fair share of Ben-Stein-in-Ferris-Bueller's-Day-Off kind of boring teachers in my old "poor" school (and even one that was so afraid of the students that he would give out "A"s like they were candy and change lower grades to "A"s if challenged by the student), but we also had some awesome teachers that got involved and really cared about their students. You can't, however, expect every teacher to resonate with every student the same way. What to one student is their most hated teacher can be someone else's favorite, so how a teacher teaches can probably be pretty relative.
Fifth... there probably isn't any one solution to this problem, but perhaps we could look to countries that have good school systems for ideas on how to modify our own? Japan is always talked about for having excellent schools, as well as many places in Europe. Perhaps some of their programs might work for us as well?
Sixth... discussion is good. Everyone that would like to see their local schools improve, take your ideas, suggestions, and energy and try and get involved! A lot of good can come from a caring community rallying together to change things for the better, even one PTA meeting at a time. ^_^
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Bobbi Katsanis Posted 4:13 am
11 Oct 2005
Why do inner-city schools do such a bad job? Some of the answers have been touched on, but not the most important ones. Money helps, but parental involvement helps more. Schools can be successful even if they're poor if they can manage to maintain a high level of parental involvement.
An even more important point is that inner-city schools have exponentially more obstacles to successful education than wealthy suburban ones. Teachers are trying to educate populations of kids that include homeless kids, kids who speak English as a second language, kids who aren't getting enough to eat, kids whose parents are abusive, addicted, and/or absent, etc. I believe that school funding should absolutely be de-linked from property values, because right now the schools that need the most money (because they must handle the most difficult problems) get the least. Allowing parents "choice" will only exacerbate the problem.
Schools need to be smaller (500 in a high school, max), filled with teachers who are motivated and energetic (read: paid enough), racially and economically diverse, and given the resources to address the problems their students bring in the door. There COULD be a good school in every neighborhood, but we've never really applied ourselves to the strategies that might make it happen. Schooling kids is expensive and it will never turn a profit; our capitalist-obsessed nation needs to face that fact. But doing it right is always worth it.
It sounds like the author mainly wants to justify his desire to bus his kids out. There are lots of self-justifying arguments that so-called environmentalist parents come up with because they're not willing to do the work of being real environmentalists. These are the same folks who want to believe that Pampers are as environmentally friendly as cloth diapers, mainly because they're too lazy to mess with cloth diapers.
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titania Posted 8:50 am
11 Oct 2005
In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, we have that choice in education. The calibre of schools all over the city is so impressive that one hardly stands above the others unless you are looking for special programs. However, people still buy houses in the suburbs, now they just drive their children to school. The percentage of children driven by their parents from other parts of the city has risen dramatically. So much in fact that many children are at risk to increased danger of roadside accidents because they do not practice road safety in daily walks to school. The line ups of idling vehicles before and after classes leaves clouds of fumes in the school yard.
I certainly don't know what the ideal combination is for this ecological and social school dilemma.
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miguel Posted 9:30 am
11 Oct 2005
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mehall1027 Posted 1:46 am
13 Oct 2005
leave the city to get a decent education for their kids. I live and am a public school teacher in NYC and I see it all the time. My boyfriend's
family lived in Queens until he started high school, then moved to Westchester. Case in point.
But I don't buy the argument that school vouchers are the answer for a bunch of reasons. First, under No Child Left Behind, parents do have choice
within the public schools, so no child need attend a failing school.
The author contends that parents in urban areas have only 3 choices: have their children attend failing public schools, private schools, or move to the suburbs. This article also neglects the importance of parent involvement in changing schools. Or the possibility of middle class families getting involved in teaching at schools. I'll cite Jonathan Kozol again in this thread. His new book describes how urban schools are continuing to fail except for one thing: young, optimistic teachers are moving to inner city schools in droves. As a Harvard graduate who chose to come teach in NYC public schools, and am now entering my fourth year teaching, I can vouch that it's true. Most of my colleagues (and almost all of those in my generation) are brilliant, creative, committed people who have chosen to teach. Don't like your local public school? Get involved!
Another point is that I find doubtful the author's claim that if all parents received vouchers that
would make schools less segregated. Perhaps cities would be less segregated, but I bet there would still be pockets of good (probably mostly white) schools and poor (probably mostly students of color) schools. There are just differing levels of social and intellectual capital in those communities. Parents who don't speak English, or
who've been harrassed because of their skin color or undocumented status, or who have to wait in line for foodstamps are not going to know how or be able to find a good school for their child, much less navigate the complicated process of school choice. This model of vouchers sort of requires that some schools end up being better than others. (Even his comparison to the college system tacitly acknowledges that. And access to college for minorities has improved, but isn't equal to access for white, wealthier students.) Instead of creating this hierarchy, I think we owe future generations a legacy that all schools must be excellent. Idealistic? Yes. Impossible. Perhaps. But I don't think vouchers are the way to approach that goal.
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creeker Posted 1:21 am
16 Oct 2005
Defunding of local public schools (when state funding is based on student attendance), student "bus lag", diminution of a parental voice in the target school board deliberations, and the most important--- lack of parent involvement with a remote school when single parent, or even two-parent families hold two or more jobs, are all valid reasons to oppose vouchers.
As I understand it, No Child Left Behind does allow for a form of Open Choice to same-district schools for parents of students in schools chronically out of NCLB compliance. The question is how many parents are using this capability, and how is it implemented by the school district to lessen impacts on the errant neighborhood school.
Finally, there seems to be no mention of the role of teacher's unions on urban educational quality. Some say unions have a monopoly, which serves the membership and not their students. The unions are opposing NCLB, as is Connecticut's AG. I know this is a very emotional issue, and I'm not advocating one way or another, but there is controversy on the role of teacher's unions on urban schools. See Peter Brimelow in http://www.vdare.com/pb/worm_review_10.htm
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valj Posted 12:04 pm
16 Oct 2005
The district carves out certain neighborhoods to be "feeder" patterns. Our neighborhood is in the burbs but feeds into an urban middle school with a 60+% poverty rate. The school that is closer to us and extremely wealthy just got soccer balls donated to their league. My daughter's volleyball team had to share water bottles and can't afford a game ball. They have old balls to practice with, but have to rely on the other team for a gameball.
You can give equal amounts of money from the district, but the fundraising that goes on outside of that is where urban schools are at a disadvantage. There are no parents who are bank presidents or engineers who can write checks for the latest magazine drive. Our school celebrates when they raise $200 for the Red Cross while the next school came up with $1500 from a lemonade stand and the children's last names you would recognize from an American dynasty.
Competition did come from the school choice program...one school designated itself as an "honors" high school while another school is now considered the "dumping ground" for troubled youth. But it's my feeder pattern, so I can apply for choice at another school, but there are no guarantees. But many of us don't "choice out". We believe in public education and work to make sure these schools do not fail. We have the luxury of not being poor and having the time to volunteer. We work with our children at home and provide decent meals and a place to sleep without having to hear bullets whizzing by as the urban kids do. But my children are learning about all the different types of people there are in the world and have not been surrounded by only affluent white soccer SUV families. They are learning about empathy and injustice and communication and frustration. There will never be equality in education unless everyone shares from the same pot, where no one is allowed to donate equipment or funds to one school or class. Sounds scary, but it really is all about the money.
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BoxFreeThinking Posted 5:52 am
01 Dec 2005
While Mr. Akst's article offers a nice basis for debate on the whole "voucher" issue, it is quite contradictory and, well a bit off the mark. Taken on its face that "[s]chool choice could be an answer to sprawl" is a bit far fetched. First, it has never been shown that a large-scale voucher system would work let alone reduce sprawl. Vouchers on a limited basis have shown some promise (such as Cleveland and Milwaukee) but large-scale programs present huge problems that will always keep them from being implemented.
Further, to cite Thomas Nechyba's theory on the economic effects of school vouchers and conclude "many affluent people moved back" to inner cities so poor districts would be brought up, is wrong in interpretation and result. In discussing the matter with Dr. Nechyba, he points out
"The simulations do predict movement of families into poorer districts, with income of those families being above the average of the receiving community. I don't think this would happen instantly... So if you have a family that is stretching to afford expensive housing to get access to a good public school, the next time a job or family change causes them to move they are more likely to choose a relatively poorer area (with cheaper housing) if they have a voucher."
This is a far cry from Mr. Akst's comment that "Many affluent people moved back." Dr. Nechyba's point is someone who now has the means to decide on a school could stay or at least choose any affordable housing without considering education.
The issues raised on this page about education costs (school costs, teachers, etc.) make for a fine debate, but a limited and good vouchers program is about choice and will not change the current system let alone end sprawl. While vouchers are a hot topic and will continue to be so, to say that farmland will be saved and no more sprawl because of vouchers is way off teh mark.
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