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Endangering the Dream: What if? (part three of a three part series)

By: Mr. Jim Waters

If Kentucky hopes to close the academic achievement gap between its black and white students, policymakers must seriously consider school choice as a way to empower families and hold our state’s education system accountable. Too often, school choice has been offered only as a last resort and usually after years of astronomical spending and untested educational experiments.

After years of some of the nation’s highest per-pupil spending and most deficient academic results, Congress finally approved choice for the deteriorating Washington D.C. school district.

What if school choice had been given an opportunity sooner rather than later? How many students could have been rescued from a lifetime of under-achievement?

These also are relevant questions for Kentucky policymakers.

In 1990, the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) was created on the premise that all children can learn at high levels. Yet 81 percent of black Kentucky public-school students still score below proficiency in math, according to the 2003 CATS assessment.

What if the education establishment in Frankfort had not been so determined to keep school choice out of Kentucky?

Had parents been offered school-choice options as necessary elements of KERA, the average black high school graduate would likely be better prepared for the challenges of the 21st century. Instead, Kentucky’s average African-American graduate now gets a diploma, the equivalent of which is an eighth-grade education.

What if we were looking back on 15 years of true educational freedom in Kentucky in which parents had been able to choose the schools they thought were best for their children? It’s reasonable to assume that the achievement gap between the commonwealth’s black and white students would have significantly narrowed. Schools would have been forced to compete for students and the state dollars that would have followed them.

Instead, thousands of Kentucky’s black children are forced to remain in failing schools. More than 31,000 of the 98,000 students in the Jefferson County Public Schools – more than 30 percent of whom are black – were deemed eligible to transfer to a different school by the 2004 No Child Left Behind report.

The ink had barely dried on October’s final NCLB report before Jefferson County school officials were criticizing the federal law’s accountability requirements and claiming to have room for only 600 students – or 2 percent – of students eligible to transfer.

Only the motivation that comes with competition will change such dismal results, including the fact that more than 40 percent of all Jefferson County schools failed to meet last year’s math and reading goals.

Credible research reveals that charter schools, which are publicly funded but free of burdensome administrative regulations, may be the best hope for producing fewer failing public schools and academic parity between black and white students.

“Unless more schools are freed from the constraints of the traditional public school system, the racial gap in academic achievement will not significantly narrow, we suspect,” says Abigail Thernstrom, author of “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning” and a respected member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “Indeed, every urban school should become a charter.”

Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby calculates that average student achievement would increase by 28 percent throughout the nation – without additional spending – if every public school was forced to compete with all other public and private schools for students.

History shows that the mysterious success of incentives is not limited to the marketplace. Having choices also has been proven to work in the school house.

Dunbar, a predominantly black Washington D.C. public school, made staggering academic achievements from the late 19th century and for much of the 20th century. Despite blatant racism, a lack of proper funding and a small percentage of Dunbar teachers who attended colleges of education, the school’s students outscored their white counterparts in the rest of the D.C. district for decades on most tests.

Actually, the school’s success resulted more as a consequence of being ignored by the district’s white administrators – who wanted little to do with Dunbar – than from overt planning.

Decisions about staffing, curriculum and discipline were left to the principals. Students were not automatically assigned to the school; they had to choose to attend and knew ahead of time that the expectations were high.

Among Dunbar’s graduates were a general, federal judge, Cabinet member, senator and the discoverer of blood plasma. All were black and to this day provide vigorous verification to the power of school choice to close racial learning – and earning – gaps.

A court decision in 1968 resulted in Dunbar no longer being a school of choice and D.C. administrators took away its administrative and pedagogical freedoms. As a result, by the mid-1990s, Dunbar could no longer be distinguished from any other troubled inner-city public schools.

What if Dunbar’s success could have continued unfettered? What if it could happen in Kentucky?

– Jim Waters is Director of Policy and Communications for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions (www.bipps.org), Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

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