REVIEW OF WHO CHOOSES?
WHO LOOSES?
CULTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND
THE UNEQUAL EFFECTS
OF SCHOOL CHOICE
edited by Richard F. Elmore and Bruce Fuller
Review
by
Andrew J. Coulson
The goal of Who Chooses? Who Loses? is to gather empirical evidence on the effects of school choice. But, as is evident from the disparate topics covered by the book's contributors, "school choice" means many things to many people. Everything from public school district open enrollment programs, to magnet schools, to (higher-education) Pell grants, to government-operated voucher programs is touched upon. Elmore and Fuller recognize that
Given the book's broad coverage, it is surprising that the greatest source of evidence on the effects of school choice, the history of education, receives no attention whatsoever. Unable to draw on the historical precedents, the editors are often reduced to speculation, and base their conclusions on incomplete evidence. Compounding its failure to consider historical data, Who Chooses? Who Loses? was written shortly before the release of several important studies of school voucher programs, studies that conflict in key respects with the voucher paper included in the book. Together, these and other omissions have led Elmore and Fuller to make several erroneous judgements.
The first proposition in their conclusion chapter, that "increasing educational choice is likely to increase separation of students by race, social class, and cultural background," is contradicted by a mountain of evidence and does even not follow from the limited data presented in the book. A few of the chapters show that, in programs where choice is only an option rather than a requirement, some stratification is likely along social and ethnic lines, but this does not prove, as the editors assume, that the result would be a greater level of segregation than already exists in public schools.
Research conducted by James Coleman in the late 1980s found that segregation by race and economic class were more severe in public schools than in private schools, even though the public school system enrolls a higher total percentage of minority students. The reason was that the public system tends to concentrate students of each race or economic background in separate schools. In other words, individual public schools tend to be more highly segregated than individual private schools, a fact that is lost when one averages total enrollment figures for the public and private sectors. And while Elmore and Fuller accurately point out that the past 15 years have seen "an increase in the racial, ethnic, and economic isolation of students in American public schools," they neglect to mention that private schools have been experiencing just the reverse of this trend, becoming ever more diverse with each passing year. This fact is truly remarkable when one considers that private schools charge tuition whereas public schools are "free" to all comers.
Elmore and Fuller must be given credit, however, for at least asking an important question that is often ignored by education researchers: "Would requiring all parents to choose, rather than passively making choices available only to active choosers, result in a decrease of social stratification in parent choices?" Strangely, despite acknowledging that they did not know the answer to this crucial question, the editors nonetheless make the sweeping, inconsistent, and false claim that: "regardless of the design of choice programs, they tend markedly to differentiate choosers from nonchoosers in ways that increase the social stratification of schools." Were Messrs. Elmore and Fuller aware of the statistical trends in private school enrollment, of James Coleman's findings, and of the relevant historical precedents (e.g. eighteenth century England and nineteenth century France), they would no doubt have known better than to make such a claim.
So long as there is a mechanism for automatically assigning the children of nonchoosing families to public schools, there will continue to be nonchoosing families, and those families will continue to be the least educated and most disenfranchised. A very different picture can be seen in free market school systems, in which all parents are forced to take an active role in choosing their children's schools (because there is no fall-back public system on which non-choosers can rely). As I argue in my articles "Markets Versus Monopolies in Education" and "Forgotten Lessons: The Historical Case for a Free Educational Market," government-run systems generally have a more serious stratifying effect than markets of competing private schools. So when the editors assert that "policies that... aggravate social stratification... should provoke special scrutiny," it must be concluded that government-run schooling, not free educational markets, should bear the brunt of our inquiries.
Fuller and Elmore's second proposition is that "greater choice in public education is unlikely, by itself, to increase either the variety of programs available to students or the overall performance of schools." Strictly speaking, Harvard economist Caroline Minter-Hoxby has shown this proposition to be false in her 1997 paper titled "Evidence on School Choice: What We Learn from the Traditional Forms of School Choice in the U.S." In that work, Minter-Hoxby demonstrates that increased competition between schools and increased parental choice of schools and school districts does indeed have some positive effect on academic achievement. Still, the improvements are modest, and little innovation and variety can be traced to choice programs which limit themselves to the public sector. The benefits that can be attributed to free markets of private for-profit schools are considerably greater, however.
In short, it is only by failing to consider much of the relevant evidence that the editors of Who Chooses? Who Loses? are able to erroneously claim that "there is strikingly little evidence that enhanced choice triggers the kind of educational improvement on the supply side that its advocates predict." To be fair, some important data were not available at the time of their writing, but the historical precedents for parental choice in free educational markets could easily have been considered. Despite the fact that Fuller and Elmore's conclusions are fatally flawed due to the limited scope of their source material, the book's articles are useful when they are properly considered as just a small part of the total body of research on school choice.
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