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Abigail Thernstrom and School Choice

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Louisville, Kentucky

Abigail Thernstrom spoke with passion to Louisville’s School Choice Scholarship group last week about the achievement gap between black and white students.  She said Americans should be outraged about the poor achievement of black students and should demand change in the system.

After visiting schools all over the United States, Thernstrom said, while schools may fail for a variety of reasons, all successful schools share certain characteristics that you can spot within a couple of minutes.  First, they are clean and orderly.  You don’t see trash on the floor or graffiti on the walls.  Second, they have a great principal who has control of his budget and his personnel.  In other words, he gets to decide how the money will be spent in his school; he has control over hiring; and he has the power to get rid of teachers who are not performing to his satisfaction.  Third, if a student chooses to be disruptive or not to apply himself as required by the school, the school has the power to show him to the door.  “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to be here.  There are plenty of other children who would love to take your place.”

Thernstrom said one definition of middle class is that people who are in the middle class have the power to choose their child’s school, either by moving to the neighborhood from which that school draws its students or by paying tuition to a private school.  However, poor people do not have the power to choose their child’s school and therefore frequently are trapped in the worst-performing schools.

Thernstrom’s book, No Excuses – Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, explores the issue of the racial learning gap in great detail -- shooting down the conventional wisdom about class size, funding, and “resegregation” and describing what needs to be done to solve the problem.  Thernstrom is a supporter of vouchers, saying that the money should be strapped to the child’s back and should follow him or her to any school the parents choose, as long as the school meets the government’s standards.

The teacher’s unions are strongly opposed to Thernstrom and to the voucher movement, due to their fear of competition.  Many conservatives also oppose the voucher movement, fearing that it gives the government greater influence over private schools and will gradually convert them into government-controlled schools, with all the problems inherent in a government-controlled education system.  Privately-funded scholarship programs, such as School Choice Scholarships, currently provide a non-government alternative that has had tremendous success with minority and white low income children.  However, these scholarship programs have very limited resources.  Some states have instituted tax credits for those who contribute to private scholarship programs, making it easier for resources to be allocated to those very successful programs while substantially reducing the amount of tax money that has to be spent on public schools.

Peter Kirsanow, an attorney from Cleveland who is also involved in the school choice movement, spoke after Thernstrom.  He said education is the civil rights issue of our time.  He said he would much rather his children be learning than that they be in a school that has exactly the “correct” percentage of each ethnic group in attendance.  Kirsanow highlighted examples of communities where large amounts of money are being spent on education, including very upscale neighborhoods, but the achievement gap still has not been narrowed.  He stressed that students who leave high school with an eighth grade education (or worse) have little chance of success and cited statistics of high college drop-out rates among blacks.  He emphasized the importance of developing a culture in which students work hard to acquire a good education, spending their time on homework instead of parking themselves in front of the television after school.  He agreed with Thernstrom that good schools are clean and orderly, with a seriousness of purpose and respect permeating the school. 

Also this past week, several Kentucky schools have requested to be exempted from the special CATS testing required under the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), preferring to use nationally-normed tests to evaluate their students.  Thernstrom said she trusts the NAEP numbers as the “gold standard” in evaluating students.  Certainly, the use of standard, nationally-normed tests would help Kentucky schools know where they stand, which would be some degree of progress in itself.  However, until low-income parents have the freedom to choose their children’s school, the education gap is not likely to improve.  While bureaucrats dither, tax money continues to be wasted, and children continue to fall through the cracks.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I am a donor to School Choice Scholarships, and I encourage you to join me.

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