Get Bret Schundler talking about the issue of school choice and you may have to cancel your other appointments. Jersey City's eager, energetic, and occasionally embattled mayor is a pioneer in the state's movement for parental choice in education, which has personal as well as political resonance for him. He and his wife enrolled their daughter, Shaylin, now in third grade, in a private school because, he says, “I want my child to know that God loves her and will see her through no matter what happens, that the purpose of life is to live not for one's self but for one's neighbor.” He is riled less by the fact that God has been banished from public schools than by his belief that he and other like-minded parents are financially penalized, forced to pay both tuition and local school taxes when they exercise choice in their children's education. “I have a First Amendment right to have my child taught those things,” he says. “I really believe the system as it stands today is unconstitutional.”
That conviction is the cornerstone of his political agenda and its corresponding grassroots movement. School choiceÑthe notion that parents deserve a say in how, where, and by whom their children are educatedÑis an idea that has gained momentum since it was introduced to New Jersey in the 1970s. In part, that momentum reflects faith in the power of marketsÑthe sense that competition can revitalize anything, including an ailing educational system. “Americans understand that free-market competition works,” says Larry Cirignano, executive director of Excellent Education for Everyone, a nonprofit group that promotes school choice. In an interview last spring, he pointed out that “the power companies, the utilities, are all now subject to competition. The only monopolies left are Microsoft and the school system.” The momentum also stems from growing concerns that American children are not learning even the basics, such as reading and writing, and academically lag behind the young people of other industrialized nations.
Quality of education is a top priority for New Jersey's registered voters, according to a poll commissioned earlier this year by the Record of Hackensack. Reports of school violence, low test scores, and crumbling facilities heighten concerns that the public school system is eroding. The revelation this past February that only 45 percent of the state's fourth-graders were termed proficient in literacy according to the Elementary School Proficiency Assessment was only the latest in a series of sobering statistics about the state of education.
Old-guard organizations like the New Jersey Educational Association (NJEA) stress reforming from within and decry school choice as the means to the eventual demise of public education. Meanwhile, a whole new group of reformers, loosely united under the banner of school choice, are looking to turn the system inside out. Their coalition is an unlikely alliance of Republicans and Democrats, disgruntled teachers and disheartened soccer moms, CEOs and legislators, religious school administrators, and inner-city parents. Teachers hope school choice will introduce innovation into a system often resistant to change. CEOs incensed by an education system they believe costs too much and produces too little fear that a poorly educated workforce may hinder future economic expansion. Religious schools, many of which face declining enrollment, see school choice as a way to rectify the injustice of asking parents to, as Schundler says, pay twice. And many parents, particularly those in urban areas, view school choice as perhaps the only way to rescue their children from inferior schools.
For Clement Price, a Rutgers history professor who recently finished a three-year stint on Newark's public school advisory board, the coalition represents “postÐcivil rights movement realities, where ideology has broken down and what has replaced it is pragmatism.” Says Price, “It's an old American yarn. You do what you must to advance your cause.” Schundler, too, makes a comparison with the civil rights movement. “Nobody ever believed we would get rid of slavery or Jim Crow segregation, but we did it,” he says. “Now we're fighting for educational enfranchisement.”
on a national level, one can trace the genesis of the school choice movement back to a 1980 libertarian manifesto dubbed Free to Choose, written by Nobel PrizeÐwinning economist Milton Fried-man and his wife and intellectual collaborator, Rose Friedman. Revolutionary at the time, the manifesto posited the free market as the solution to a host of social ills, including a failing system of education. The Friedmans subsequently created a foundation to lobby for school choice. Their 1980 call for change was amplified three years later by the publication of A Nation at Risk, the federal government's scalding indictment of teaching at America's schools.
What has emerged since then is the very loose framework called school choice that encompasses several alternatives to traditional public education. Among them are magnet schools, public schools specializing in a particular discipline, such as science and technology, or in a teaching method, such as Montessori. Funded by the state, magnet schools are open to all students in the district, providing a limited version of school choice. Charter schools, likewise funded by the state, can hire their own teachers; control, to a degree, their curricula; and undertake other innovations that their administrators believe will improve education. And charter schools' accountability sets them apart; unlike public schools, if their performance is substandard, the state can close them.
By far most controversial, though, is the voucher system, in which the state entitles parents to funds to spend on the education of their choice, including private, preparatory, and religious schools. “We determine that X amount of dollars is what we're going to spend on students, and every student gets that money in the form of a stipend,” says Cirignano. “They go to the school of their choice, and that money follows them.” The potential for diverting resources from public schools is the reason the voucher system is so provocative. Vouchers would “siphon money away from public schools to private schools,” asserts Lynn Maher, a spokeswoman for the NJEA, “and [they] would deprive the public of accountability, in the sense that public schools are highly regulated institutions governed by locally elected residents. For those students opting out of the public system on the public's nickel, there'd be no way to track just how that public money was being spent.” Turning the free-market argument on its ear, Maher adds, “In a capitalist country, the wealthy can exercise choice in everythingÑmedicine, travel, home. But because the wealthy can afford to buy a Lexus doesn't mean we buy Lexuses for every residentÑat least not at taxpayer expense.”
Predating the friedmans' manifesto, one of New Jersey's first experiments with school choice arose from Montclair's innovative approach to court-ordered racial integration. In 1977, as an alternative to busing, Montclair set up magnet schools, open to all students in the district regardless of where they lived. The schools produced a kind of de facto integration because elementary and junior high school studentsÑboth black and whiteÑattended the schools of their choice, not necessarily the ones in their neighborhoods. (Montclair's only high school already was racially integrated.) As interest in school choice has grown in the past two decades, a number of communities have followed Montclair's lead, including East Orange and Pennsauken.
Another flash point for school choice came in 1991 in the form of the opening salvo in the state's voucher war. In response to pressure from parents and the Catholic church, Assemblyman Joseph Doria Jr. (DÐBayonne) introduced New Jersey's first school choice bill, which called for several initiatives, including a debate on vouchers. By the time the bill was approved in the mid-1990s, the voucher component had been jettisoned. Governor Christine Todd Whitman reopened the door to vouchers in 1993 when she campaigned on promises to promote school choice. That year Schundler ran for reelection as Jersey City mayor on a proÐschool choice platform and won with 69 percent of the vote. Buoyed by the victory, he tried to place a nonbinding referendum on the November ballot asking that the state's contribution to Jersey City schools be used to underwrite a limited voucher program. Reflecting the tensions that vouchers ignite, teachers from a New Jersey union filed suit and knocked the referendum off the ballot.
Nonetheless, in 1995 Whitman established a fifteen-member advisory panel, chaired by former governor Thomas Kean, to develop a pilot school voucher program. A year later the panel delivered proposed legislation for a pilot voucher program supported by at least $5.5 million. That month New Jersey also passed its first charter school bill, a legislative phoenix rising from the ashes of Doria's first pass at school choice. The bill called for starting a limited number of charter schools. The school Schundler founded, the Golden Door Charter School in Jersey City, was among the first, opening in 1998.
While the new charter schools encouraged New Jersey's school choice advocates, many still lobbied for a sweeping voucher program. Despite her promises, Whitman didn't seem inclined to pursue the Kean panel's recommendations to start a pilot voucher program. But in October 1996, after heated lobbying by the New Jersey Alliance of Catholic School Families, Assemblyman E. Scott Garrett (RÐWantage) introduced the Kean recommendations as Bill A-2443. To the dismay of the alliance and other voucher advocates, A-2443 languished in the Legislature and eventually expired. Two years later, under the sponsorship of Garrett and Assemblywoman Marion Crecco (RÐBloomfield), the same bill was reintroduced as A-1128. Again it was allowed to expire. But the idea persists. This year, the pilot voucher bill, newly dusted off and renamed A-1145, was reintroduced, and a similar bill was submitted to the state Senate by Senator Gerald Cardinale (RÐDemarest). In spite of the bill's inauspicious history, Crecco remains hopeful that the state eventually will enact some sort of pilot school voucher program.
New Jersey's forays into school choice have met with varying fates. The Hoboken Charter School, with more students on its waiting list than in its classrooms, represents one of the clearer success stories. Some 235 students from kindergarten through high school attend Hoboken Charter, while 400 students await an opening. Debbie Weaver, whose son, Kyle, is in elementary school, says she's “thrilled” with the school. Diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder, Kyle attended a private kindergarten but “hated it,” says Weaver. “He absolutely did not want to go to school. They made him feel like he was a problem. Now he can't wait for Monday.” Weaver applauds Hoboken Charter's philosophy of “service learning,” which stresses community involvement, and the school's dedicated faculty. “These people have vision,” she says.
In contrast, Schundler's Golden Door school was put on probation by the state, which questioned the Jersey City school's accounting methods. In April 1999 the state closed the REACH Charter School in Egg Harbor Township for several reasons, including fiscal and teacher certification problems. Charter schools face considerable pressure from outside their doors. In Clifton, Englewood, and Highland Park, school districts have mounted legal challenges against charter schools, claiming they represent egregious examples of taxation without representation; a 1998 regulation required a school district to pay a charter school 90 percent of the cost of educating each student enrolled from its district. Rankled by the drain from its coffers, the Highland Park school district last year appealed to the state's Council on Local Mandates to do away with the 1998 law. The district succeeded, much to the consternation of charter schools across the state, many of which struggled to stay afloat even with the 90 percent subsidy.
The real threat to charters, though, may come not from disgruntled school districts but from tighter regulation. In the salad days of the charter school movement, advocates envisioned a system that would flourish as a result of operating virtually free from state regulation. Instead, the state has defined each charter school as a kind of district unto itself, ensuring enforcement of the usual school regulations. Says Sarah Tantillo, founder of the Charter School Resource Center, “I have yet to meet a regulation that charters are free from.” Nonetheless optimistic about the future of charter schools, Tantillo signed on to teach ninth grade this fall at a charter school, Newark's North Star Academy.
Success is apparent in the classrooms of Ecole Toussaint Louverture, a magnet school in East Orange. The city's school district, which serves mostly minority students, opted for the magnet system six years ago. Ecole Toussaint Louverture, whose current principal, Roosevelt R. Weaver, once worked in West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, offers an Afrocentric French-immersion program for children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. As evidence of the school's success, Weaver points to his students who have excelled in international French-language competitions, and to their enthusiastic parents. “It's such a joy to see these parents' faces when they hear their children speak a foreign language with proficiency and fluency,” Weaver says. “If parents are turned on about the school and what it has to offer, they tend to participate more, and the level of student interest tends to rise.”
As these educational experiments flourish or flounder in New Jersey, the state Department of Education (DOE) is gingerly dipping its toe into the school choice waters. This fall the department is trying out a limited intradistrict plan that will allow a small number of children to attend public schools outside their districts. So far the plan has allowed 10 districts to accept 100 outside students, and the program should include 21 districts by its fifth year. Tuition funds will follow students to their new schoolsÑwhich raises the hackles of schools losing students and, therefore, money.
Among students transferring is fifth-grader Brian Heath, who just started at the Canfield Avenue School in Mine Hill. The Heaths live in neighboring Wharton, and while Brian has always done well in schoolÑhe's been at the top of his class every year since kindergartenÑhis parents believe he hasn't been challenged. The Heaths chose to transfer Brian partly because Mine Hill's student test scores averaged 10 to 14 percent higher than those of the Wharton schools. “I felt that because their scores are higher, they're likely to teach at a little bit quicker pace,” says Brian's father, Raymond. Deborah Andrisano, a Dover parent whose daughter, Katie, entered Canfield Avenue's second grade as part of the pilot program, had expected to exercise school choice by the traditional method: moving to a better school district. She was unable to move, so when her mother, who lives in nearby Mine Hill, told her about the intradistrict program, “we jumped on it right away,” she says. Andrisano, too, is fleeing low test scores and looking for a more creative, innovative environment. “They do a lot more reading,” she says of Canfield Avenue, “and they have a lot more computer access. They're smaller.”
Whether the pace of change in new Jersey's educational system will be glacial or, as school choice advocates would have it, rapid and sweeping is unpredictable. The intradistrict program now being tested broadens options but in a limited fashion. Commissioner of Education David Hespe says that a transfer program probably wouldn't ever serve a significant number of the state's students. In other states with similar programs, he says, typically only 2 to 3 percent of students take part, even when everyone has the option. And in New Jersey, local boards of education can limit the number of transfer students to as few as 2 percent of a grade per year.
The future of a voucher system, in particular, is hard to predict. While its supporters are a determined lot, the program is a hard sell for a broad audience, provoking intense opposition even from people who advocate other versions of school choice. Mark Silberberg, a founder and co-coordinator of the Hoboken Charter School, considers vouchers a direct threat to public education. And to move away from public education, he says, “would have a potentially damaging effect on the society.” Tom O'Neill, executive director of the Partnership for New Jersey, an association of CEOs focusing on a variety of civic issues, supports school choice but is wary of vouchers. Whether vouchers will benefit education in New Jersey, O'Neill says, can only be decided after undertaking a “well-designed experiment that show[s] that poor children, the real beneficiaries of vouchers, could learn under a voucher system.”
Strong opposition to school choice remains from outside the movement. Internal bickering, too, plagues the movement, and its progress has been halting. Still, the school choice lobby has persisted, and optimism continues to be the singular thread binding the lobbyists. This is a coalition, however disparate, of true believers. Ask them about the future of school choice in New Jersey and, like Mayor Schundler, they'll probably tell you it's inevitable. As Cirignano says, “It's almost like the Berlin Wall falling. Once people get the choice and we start to foster competition, you're not going to take it away.” For the parents, legislators, lobbyists, and educators who've chiseled away at that wall chunk by small chunk, it's a cheering analogy.
Leslie Garisto Pfaff recently won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her profile of Perth Amboy mayor Joe Vas, which appeared in the November issue.
