Reinterpreting Urban School Reform: Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools?

8. Private Scholarships and School Choice: Innovation or Class Reproduction?

177 Chapter 8 Private Scholarships and School Choice: Innovation or Class Reproduction? Carolyn S. Ridenour and Edward P. St. John During the 1990s private donors in several urban communities organized private scholarship programs that partially subsidize the costs of attending private schools for children with financial need. Two major, publicly funded voucher programs—in Milwaukee (Witte 1998) and Cleveland (Metcalf et al. 1998)—have received a great deal of public attention. From the research on these experiments, it appears that students who use vouchers to attend public schools have modest improvement in achievement and substantial influence on parent satisfaction (Peterson 1998; Metcalf et al. 1998; Witte 1998). More recently, several cities have initiated privately funded scholarship programs (PFSPs) that provide need-based scholarships to lowincome students to attend private schools. Some of these new programs even have included experimental designs with control groups of students who received and did not received private scholarships . These urban experiments may provide further information about the differences in achievement in public and private schools, but most of these new studies will not address questions related to the impact of these new market forces on what schools do to improve. To understand why it is important to consider the impact of PFSPs on educational improvement, it is necessary only to reconsider the crisis in urban education. For decades urban schools have been confronted by severe poverty (Jencks and Peterson 1991). At the start of the twenty-first century, a larger percentage of students in urban settings are minorities than at any point in the prior century . Urban public schools have become predominantly minority. A larger percentage of African-American children, heavily concentrated in cities, attended predominantly or exclusively minority schools in the middle 1990s than in 1954, at the time of the Brown decision (Fossey 1998). In this context, it is important to recall that Chubb and Moe (1990, 1991) originally argued that vouchers should be used because they felt that the introduction of market forces would stimulate educational improvement in urban schools. This chapter examines the results of a two-year study of the effects of a PFSP on educational improvement in an urban community in the Midwest (hereafter referred to as The City). We analyze interviews with teachers and parents conducted the year the PFSP was announced, base year (1997–98), and interviews in selected schools during the base year and the first year of the scholarship program (1998–99). The study also included interviews with senior administrators in public and private school systems (St. John and Ridenour 2000) and these results are summarized below. First, we provide an overview of the context (The City and the PFSP), summarize findings from analyses of the PFSP on strategic behavior of senior and site administrators, and critically examine arguments about the potential influence of market forces on schools. Next, we summarize the research methods used in the study. Then we examine perceptions of teachers and parents who have been involved in these schools. Finally, the conclusions are presented. Background The Context The PSFP program was a local intervention initiated by a noted advocate of school reform and a strong market advocate. The City Public Schools, like many urban districts in the United States, had a history of declining achievement test scores and was subject to intense scrutiny by the state. It had a long history of court-mandated desegregation remedies and gained approval for a new choice-based approach to desegregation in 1998, the same year the PFSP was introduced. There was a strongly committed donor community in The City and they formed a Board to oversee the new PFSP. The members of the board were not only the major contributors to the program, but they had a long history of commitment to educational improvement efforts in both the public and private schools. The public schools in The City had initiated a number of reforms in the years immediately preceding the introduction of the PFSP. They had initiated a restructuring process in 1997 that focused on schools with the lowest test schools. This process included collaboration with representatives of one of the nationally recognized com178 Carolyn S. Ridenour and Edward P. St. John prehensive reforms as well a team of faculty from a local university. In addition, The City had a long history of using magnet schools as an integral part of its desegregation strategy. The City Public Schools (CPS) had implemented several...