Yale - 2009 Fall - Readings - Public Schools Policy - Case I Montclair

Case I: School choice: Magnet schools in Montclair, New
Jersey
(20 January)
Yale University
Political Science Department
PLSC240
Spring 2009
John Bryan Starr

Case I: School choice: Magnet schools in Montclair, New Jersey
Table of Contents
Overture 3
The case 6
Document #1: Albert O. Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses 7

to Declines in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970). Excerpts.
Document #2: Bruce Fuller, Richard F. Elmore, and Gary Orfield, 27

“Policy-Making in the Dark: Illuminating the School Choice Debate,”
Chapter 1 in Fuller and Elmore, Who Chooses, Who Loses: Culture,
Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice (New York: Teacher
College Press, 1996).
Document #3: Paul Teske and Mark Schneider, “What Research Can 42
Tell Policymakers about School Choice,” Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management, 20:4 (2001) 609-631.
Document #4: Christine H. Rossell, “What is attractive about magnet 67

schools?” Urban Education 20:1 (April, 1985) 7-22.
Document #5: Rolf K. Blank, Roger E. Levine, and Lauri Steel, “After 78
Fifteen Years: Magnet Schools in Urban Education,” Chapter 8 in Bruce
Fuller and Richard F. Elmore, Who Chooses? Who Loses? (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1996).
Background information on Montclair and its public schools 95
Map #1: Distribution of African American residents in Montclair 96
Map #2: Distribution of income in Montclair 97
Exhibit #1: School system statistics 100
Exhibit #2: Montclair School Governance 101
Map #3: Location of Montclair public schools 102
Exhibit #3: 2006 Racial distribution by School in Montclair 102
Exhibit #4: Timeline of events in the establishment of magnet 103

schools in Montclair
2
Document #6: Bernadette Anand, Michelle Fine, Tiffany Perkins, Davis 105
S. Surrey and the Renaissance School Class of 2000, Keeping the Struggle
Alive: Studying Desegregation in our Town, (New York: Teachers College
Press, 2002) pp. 17-56.
Document #7: Lise Funderburg, “Integration Anxiety,” New York Times 130
Magazine, November 7, 1999.
Document #8: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 138

School Choice. (Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, 1992. Excerpts.
Document #9: Mark Schneider, Paul Teske and Melissa Marschall, 144
Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) Excerpts.
Document #10: Montclair Public Schools, Information on the Montclair 149

magnet schools from the district Web site,
http://www.montclair.k12.nj.us
Document #11: Sonya D. Jones and Erin N. Ramsey, “Rejoinder— 156

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: Racial
Imbalance Is Not Segregation,” Journal of Educational Controversy 2:1
(2007)
Document #12: “Montclair Public Schools React to Supreme Court 162

Ruling,” (Available at
http://www.montclair.k12.nj.us/Article.aspx?Id=187)
Suggested Study Group Questions 165
Last year’s clarifying questions 165
Overture.
Because my experience with public policy is primarily in the arena of policy-making

rather than that of policy-analysis, I do not have a sophisticated analytical framework to
present to you to guide the work we will be doing together over the next three months.
In thinking about public policy issues, however, I have found useful a series of questions
3
1
derived from Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis. The questions are as
follows:
(1) What, specifically, is the problem with which we intend to deal?
(2) What are the alternative solutions to the problem?
(3) What is the evidence? What do we know about how the problem has been
addressed in other settings—what, in other words, is “best practice”? Where
does public opinion stand with respect to the problem?
(4) What are the outcomes likely to be in the case of each of our alternative
solutions? What are the intended consequences and, to the extent they can be
foreseen, what are the unintended consequences of the policies under review?
(5) What are the trade-offs involved in our alternative solutions?
(6) What are the criteria on the basis of which we will make a choice among the
alternative solutions? What are the community values and political realities with
which we must deal?
(7) How will the decision to adopt a particular policy be taken and who will be
involved in taking it?
(8) How will we measure whether or not the policy has been successful in resolving
the problem?
Our next three cases will provide us an opportunity to “test-drive” some of Bardach’s
questions. These three cases involve, broadly speaking, the question of “choice” in public
schooling. The problem is likely to present itself in the form of parents in our community
who are dissatisfied with the quality of the education that their children are receiving at
the public school to which they have been assigned. The question then arises, should
those parents have the choice of moving their children to a better school where they are
likely to receive a more effective education?
There are a number of alternative solutions to the problem. In the first instance, of course,
parents already have a choice. They are free to enroll their child at a private school, or to
move to another community where the quality of the public schools is higher. To
exercise these choices, however, presupposes a certain level of affluence and geographical
mobility that is not available to every dissatisfied parent. Those who are poor and whose
jobs are not easily transferable will argue that it is unfair that they should be deprived of
the opportunity to provide their children with a quality education.
1
Eugene Bardach, A practical guide for policy analysis: The eightfold path to more effective problem solving (New
York: Chatham House, 2000). Bardach is Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman
School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
4
A second alternative that deals with this issue of fairness would be for the dissatisfied
parents to persuade our school board to implement a system of open enrollment in place
of neighborhood schools. This would allow the dissatisfied parents to choose other, better
schools for their children. For a system of open enrollment to work, of course, there must
be at least some “better” schools within the system.
In the absence of better schools, our dissatisfied parents are likely to look for other
alternatives. One of them might be to implement a scheme at the district or state level
that allows for public funds to “follow” students to schools in other districts, or to private
schools in the area—a voucher plan, in other words. Another solution might be for our
dissatisfied parents to organize themselves to start up a new public school—a charter
school that, free of the constraints of the control of the local school district, could
innovate and excel at educating its students. Perhaps they might even decide to turn over
day-to-day operation of their charter school to a for-profit “education management
organization” like Edison Schools.
Having identified the alternatives, we turn to the question of evidence. There is substantial
evidence with respect to each of these alternatives. For an example of open enrollment,
we turn in our first case to Montclair, New Jersey, which implemented a system of
magnet elementary and middle schools some thirty years ago. Parents in Montclair are
obliged to choose their children’s schools. Voucher plans exist in nine states and enroll
some 74,000 students. We will look in depth in our next case at one of those voucher
plans--that adopted for the Milwaukee Public Schools eighteen years ago. Similarly, there
are many examples of charter schools to which we can turn for evidence. As of July 2005,
3,400 charter schools were operating in 40 states and enrolling close to a million students.
Week after next we will use Washington, D.C. as our case study exploring charter
schools. The city has 39 charter schools that enroll upwards of 15% of its student
population. Finally, there are also many examples of EMO’s—educational management
organization—and the schools they operate. As of school year 2002-03, 47 companies
were operating 417 schools in 25 states, enrolling about 188,000 students. Our fourth
case investigates the work of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) in running schools
in Houston. Finally, parents have the option of opting out of the system entirely and
joining the growing ranks of “home-schoolers.” Our fifth case looks at a Pennsylvania
district, Homer-Center, where home-schooling has become an issue.
As for public opinion on these alternative forms of choice, the jury appears to be still out.
When polled, the public says that it doesn’t know very much about vouchers, that it
thinks rather highly of charters, and that it is in process of changing its mind in favor of
the EMO’s.
A careful study of the evidence is likely to reveal potential outcomes of implementing one
or another of these policies. The intended consequences are clear enough; the unintended
consequences require a closer look and careful thought.
Trade-offs almost always involve money and, in the public arena in the middle of the
current decade, public money is almost always scarce. Should this scarce public money be
spent fixing the existing unsatisfactory schools, or should it be spent providing parents the
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opportunity to remove their children from those schools? Does choice inevitably involve
depriving existing schools of badly needed budget dollars, or are there ways of structuring
a system of choice that provides choice without reducing the money spent in existing
public schools. And, while we’re talking about budgeting for underperforming schools,
shouldn’t we address the argument that an underperforming school requires more funding
to improve its outcomes?
Looking at the criteria on the basis of which the policy decision about school choice will
be made, we arrive at some very fundamental community values and strongly held
political positions. Underlying the arguments in favor of school choice are assumptions
about the superiority of private over public organizations and the effectiveness of the
competition involved in so-called “market forces” to bring about positive change.
Opponents of most schemes of school choice believe equally fervently in the idea that a
primary outcome of education should be the enhancement of our civic culture, and that
public schools are better equipped to produce this outcome than private schools. Add to
that a strict interpretation of the Constitution’s provision for separating church and state,
which leads to a great reluctance to see public funds expended in parochial schools.
The question of who is to be involved in taking the policy decision in our community and
how it will be taken is, generally speaking, outside of the scope of this course. It fits more
comfortably in the framework of my other seminar—”Public Schools and Politics”—than
it does in that of a course on “Education and Public Policy.” Realistically speaking, we
won’t be able to ignore that question as we move through our eleven cases; but we won’t
dwell on it.
The last of Bardach’s questions is the hardest to answer. Moreover, it is probably unwise
to leave it as the last step in the sequence. As we formulate and adopt our policy, we
should be able to build into it some measures for evaluating its success. But, in education,
“success” is not subject to straightforward measurement.
Our exemplary problem arose when parents in our city were dissatisfied with the
“quality” of their children’s education. Fifteen years after the push to adopt state standards
and five years into the consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act, the default
yardstick for measuring educational quality is the standardized test score. It doesn’t take a
doctorate in education, however, to become highly skeptical of the reliability of that
yardstick, particularly when used as the sole criterion of quality. On the other hand, it
does take time, careful thought, and creativity to come up with measures of student
success with which to supplement standardized testing. As we will discover time and
again in coming weeks, we haven’t yet succeeded in developing and implementing those
alternative measures.
And so, far from serving as a sophisticated analytical model for the study of issues of public
policy, Bardach’s questions will at least serve us as a reasonably comprehensive “to do” list
as we look at the eleven cases we have ahead of us.
• • •
The case.
6
This is the first of what will ultimately be five cases dealing with school choice in its
various forms. Writing in 2004, Ted Sizer, a pioneer in the modern school reform
movement, had this to say about school choice:
“As to parental choice: I have known no family that did not absolutely desire and expect
it. I know many families that have acted on that expectation, largely because they knew
how to work the system and had the money and time to do it. I have known many
families, most of them poor, that wanted it (or at least wanted more out of the school to
which their child had been assigned) but were not in a position to demand it. “Choice”
has become almost as volatile a word as “voucher.” Again, given the school/school
district-choosing behavior of wealthier Americans, I suspect that the word, like
“voucher,” has been hijacked for a political purpose (if you are rich, you can choose; if
you are not rich, tough luck). To me, if most Americans want choices among schools for
2
their children and if some (wealthier) Americans can act upon it, why not all Americans?”
Our first case treats magnet schools as a vehicle for providing parents choice with respect
to where their children are enrolled within a public school district and uses, as our case
study, Montclair, New Jersey. Subsequent cases on school choice will consider vouchers
(in Milwaukee), charter schools (in the District of Columbia), for-profit schools (in
Houston), and home-schooling (in Homer-Center, Pennsylvania).
This first case opens with a review of some of the extensive literature on school choice—
an issue with a surprisingly long history in American public education. We focus next on
magnet schools as one of the first forms of school choice to be widely adopted across the
country, preceding both charter schools and school vouchers. Magnet schools arose in
school districts most frequently as the result of two impulses. In Montclair, the focus of
this case study, both impulses were at work. The district’s first two magnet schools were
created in order to address the problem of racial imbalance in the district. Over the years,
however, the principle of providing parents a choice among schools has come to dominate
the rationale for the continuation of the magnet school program.
Montclair has operated magnet schools for more than thirty years, and for the last twenty
years has operated as what it refers to as a “true system of choice.” All of its elementary
and middle schools are designated as magnet schools and all Montclair parents must choose
the school their children attend. Montclair has for many years prided itself on the degree
to which it operates as an integrated community. Ten years ago the community became
concerned that a tipping point had been reached and that the community would become
majority minority. In the intervening decade, a new commuter train connection to
Manhattan and the rapid rise in the New York City metropolitan real estate market have
brought the community to a different and unexpected tipping point. With housing prices
on the rise, fewer African American families can afford to purchase Montclair real estate
and the integrated community risks becoming majority majority.
2
Theodore Sizer, The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (Yale University Press,
2004) pp. 24-28
7
As we look at Montclair we will consider the effect of a recent Supreme Court decision
on the method used in the district to insure racial balance in the district’s schools. In the
case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 the Supreme
Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to determine school assignments exclusively on the
basis of a student’s race even when it is done in order to integrate a district’s schools.
Montclair had been using race as a factor in assigning students to schools and had to devise
another system for school assignment that would avoid litigation.
• • •
8
We begin with a framework that will, I think, help to guide our thinking about school choice. Albert
Hirschmann helps us think about the circumstances that cause customers, clients or members to exit a
“declining” firm or organization, and the circumstances that cause them to remain in the firm or
organization but use their voice to attempt to bring about a change. Public schools are, of course, the
particular organizations we have in mind here.
Document #1: Albert O. Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Declines in
Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). Excerpts.
Introduction: Enter “Exit” and “Voice”
The argument to be presented starts with the firm producing saleable outputs for
customers; but it will be found to be largely—and, at times, principally—applicable to
organizations (such as voluntary associations, trade unions, or political parties) that provide
services to their members without direct monetary counterpart. The performance of a
firm or an organization is assumed to be subject to deterioration for unspecified, random
causes which are neither so compelling nor so durable as to prevent a return to previous
performance levels, provided managers direct their attention and energy to that task. The
deterioration in performance is reflected most typically and generally, that is, for both
firms and other organizations, in an absolute or comparative deterioration of the quality of
the product or service provided.3 Management then finds out about its failings via two
alternative routes:
(1) Some customers stop buying the firm’s products or some members leave the
organization: this is the exit option. As a result, revenues drop, membership declines, and
management is impelled to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led
to exit.
(2) The firm’s customers or the organization’s members express their dissatisfaction
directly to management or to some other authority to which management is subordinate
or through general protest addressed to anyone who cares to listen: this is the voice option.
As a result, management once again engages in a search for the causes and possible cures of
customers’ and members’ dissatisfaction. The remainder of this book is largely devoted to
the comparative analysis of these two options and to their interplay…
Chapter 2. Exit
3
For business firms operating in situations of monopoly or monopolistic competition, performance
deterioration can also be reflected in cost and resulting price increases or in a combination of quality drops
and price increases. On the other hand, changes m either price or quality are ruled out when both are rigidly
dictated by a perfectly competitive market; in this admittedly unrealistic situation, deterioration can manifest
itself only via increases m cost which, with price and quality unchanged, will lead straightaway to a decline
in net revenue. Under perfect competition, then, managers learn about their failings directly and exclusively
from financial evidence generated within the firm, without any intermediation on the part of the customers
who remain totally unaware of the firm s troubles. It is perhaps because the whole range of phenomena here
described has no place in the perfectly competitive model that it has not been paid attention to by
economists.
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The availability to consumers of the exit option, and their frequent resort to it, are
characteristic of “normal” (nonperfect) competition, where the firm has competitors but
enjoys some latitude as both price-maker and qualitymaker—and therefore, in the latter
capacity, also as a quality-spoiler. As already mentioned, the exit option is widely held to
be uniquely powerful: by inflicting revenue losses on delinquent management, exit is
expected to induce that “wonderful concentration of the mind” akin to the one Samuel
Johnson attributed to the prospect of being hanged.
Nevertheless the precise modus operandi of the exit option has not received much attention,
to judge from a determined though inevitably fragmentary search of the vast literature on
competition.4 Most authors are content with general references to its “pressures” and
“disciplines.”
Insofar as the apologetic literature is concerned, this neglect of what could be considered
one of the principal virtues of the “free enterprise system” may be particularly surprising;
but some of the reasons for it have already been suggested. Those who celebrate the
invigorating qualities of competition are loath to concede that the system could fail for
even a single moment to make everybody perform at his peak form; should such a failure
nevertheless occur in the case of some firm, that firm must ipso facto be assumed to be
mortally sick and to be ready to leave the stage while some vigorous newcomer is
presumably waiting in the wings to take its place. This “view of the American
economy…as a biological process in which the old and the senile are continually being
replaced by the young and the vigorous,” as Galbraith puts it mockingly,5 does not leave
room for showing how competition helps to cure the temporary and remediable lapses
whose importance is stressed here. It would seem that the apologists of competitive
enterprise have missed, in their eagerness to stake extravagant claims for their system, one
of the more substantial points to be made in its favor.
The technical economic literature, on the other hand, has been very largely concerned
with discussing the conditions under which competitive market structures result or fail to
result in an efficient allocation of resources within a static framework. One nonstatic
aspect of competition has also been amply, if rather inconclusively, scrutinized, namely, its
aptitude to generate innovation and growth. But, as far as I have been able to ascertain, no
study, systematic or casual, theoretical or empirical, has been made of the related topic of
competition’s ability to lead firms back to “normal” efficiency, performance, and growth
6
standards after they have lapsed from them.
4
Which was carried out by David S. French.
5
John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 36.
6
John Maurice Clark, who had a most lively sense of the multiplicity of functions competition is expected
to perform, does mention that “another thing desired is that competition should keep firms vigilant to
eliminate inefficiencies of process or product, before losses have so depleted their resources as to make
rehabilitation difficult or impossible.” Competition as a Dynamic Process (Washington: Brookings Institution,
1961), p. 81. In ch. 4, “What Do We Want Competition to Do for Us?” dark dealt at some length with
what he considered to be the ten principal functions of competition. Strangely, the rescue of faltering firms
is not among them; the sentence cited is found, almost as an afterthought, at the end of a section entitled
“Elimination of Inefficient Elements,” which deals primarily with the “unpleasant services demanded of
competition” in seeing to it that faltering firms are liquidated rather than restored to health.
10
How the Exit Option Works
The conceptual elements needed for such an exploration are straightforward. The first one
is a variant of the familiar demand function, with the difference that quantity bought is
made to depend on changes in quality rather than on price. Just as quality is normally
assumed to remain unchanged when the effect of price changes on demand are
considered, so it is now convenient to assume that price does not change when quality
drops. Costs also remain constant, for by definition the quality decline results from a
random lapse in efficiency rather than from a calculated attempt, on the part of the firm,
to reduce costs by skimping on quality. Under these conditions, any exit whatever of
consumers in response to quality decline will result in revenue losses; and, of course, the
more massive the exit the greater the losses following upon any given quality drop.
Whereas an increase in price can result in an increase in the firm’s total revenue in spite of
some customer exit, revenue can at best remain unchanged and will normally decline
steadily as quality drops.7
Secondly, there exists a management reaction function which relates quality improvement
to the loss in sales—upon finding out about customer desertion, management undertakes
to repair its failings. Perhaps the simplest way to visualize such a relationship is as a
discontinuous three-value function. No reaction occurs for a small drop in revenue, full
recovery follows upon a drop of intermediate size; and, then again, if the revenue decline
exceeds a certain large percentage of normal sales volume, no recuperation ensues—
beyond a certain point, losses will weaken the firm so badly that bankruptcy will occur
before any remedial measures can take effect.8
The interaction between the exit function and the reaction function can now be
described. If there is to be a drop in quality it is desirable that it be of the size which leads
to recuperation. Evidently if demand is highly inelastic with respect to quality change,
revenue losses will be quite small and the firm will not get the message that something is
amiss. But if demand is very elastic, the recuperation process will not take place either, this
7
The response of demand and revenue to quality changes can be graphically represented by means of a
demand curve with the familiar downward slope if the vertical axis of the traditional diagram is made to
measure quality deterioration rather than price increase. This is done in Appendix A, figure 2, which also
shows, in its lower portion, the effect of quality decline on revenue. This diagram makes clear that the effect
on total revenue of a decline of demand caused by quality decline is much simpler—and more damaging—
than that caused by price rises. In the former case, total revenue declines whenever the quality-elasticity of
demand is greater than zero, whereas in the case of price increases total revenue falls of course only if price-
elasticity of demand is greater than unity. (Unit elasticity of demand has no precise meaning in the case of
quality-elasticity. When the concept of “quality-elasticity of demand” is put together in analogy to price-
elasticity, two different scales—some measure of quality and money—are divided into one another. Hence,
any numerical measure other than zero and infinity is the result of arbitrary scaling.)
8
It would be easy to think instead of a continuous reaction curve. Remedial action would be small with
small sales losses and v/ould then increase and later decline. It is even conceivable that, as a result of the
reaction, the firm would come to produce at qualities superior to the ones at which it started out—to that
extent one might speak of a point of “optimal deterioration” in quality. At a later point, beyond a certain
loss in sales, the reaction would turn into reinforcement as demoralization and other results of financial
stringency would compound quality deterioration and thus hasten the firm’s downfall. Such a shape of the
reaction function would not change materially the points that will be made in the text.
11
time because the firm will be wiped out before it will have had time to find out what hit
it, much less to do something about it. This is a case of “too much, too soon.” For the
recuperation potential of the firm to come into play, it is therefore desirable that quality
elasticity of demand be neither very large nor very small. This proposition, which is
intuitively evident, can also be phrased as follows: For competition (exit) to work as a
mechanism of recuperation from performance lapses, it is generally best for a firm to have
a mixture of alert and inert customers. The alert customers provide the firm with a
feedback mechanism which starts the effort at recuperation while the inert customers
provide it with the time and dollar cushion needed for this effort to come to fruition.
According to traditional notions, of course, the more alert the customers the better for the
functioning of competitive markets. Consideration of competition as a recuperation
mechanism reveals that, although exit of some customers is essential for bringing the
mechanism into play, it is important that other customers remain unaware of, or
unperturbed by, quality decline: if all were assiduous readers of Consumer Reports, or
determined comparison shoppers, disastrous instability might result and firms would miss
out on chances to recover from their occasional lapses.
As has already been noted, in perfect competition (which includes perfect consumer
knowledge as one of its many exacting assumptions) the firm is not deprived of an
effective correction mechanism because performance deterioration, which cannot possibly
affect either quality or price, is reflected directly in a decline in revenue (due to increasing
costs). But assume now a small departure from the perfectly competitive model so that the
firm has some latitude in varying quality; then performance deterioration can (and is
perhaps likely to) take the form of quality decline and if the market in which the firm sells
is highly competitive, that is, full of highly knowledgeable buyers, the firm will be
competed out of existence in very short order. In other words, while the perfectly
competitive world is a feasible one from the point of view of an effective recuperation
mechanism, the world of quasi-perfect competition is not. If one gives up, as he must in
most real cases, the concept of a firm with no latitude as to quality whatever, then the
optimal arrangement is not one as close as possible to that of perfect competition, but one
rather far removed from it; and incremental moves in the direction of perfect competition
are not necessarily improvements—the argument of the second best applies here in full
force.
Competition as Collusive Behavior
No matter what the quality elasticity of demand, exit could fail to cause any revenue loss
to the individual firms if the firm acquired new customers as it loses the old ones. But why would
a firm whose output deteriorates in quality attract any new customers at all? One can
actually think of a situation in which this seemingly quite unlikely event would come to
pass: when a uniform quality decline hits simultaneously all firms of an industry, each firm
would garner in some of the disgruntled customers of the other firms while losing some of
its previous customers to its competitors. In these circumstances the exit option is
ineffective in alerting management to its failings, and a merger of all firms would appear to
be socially desirable —that is, monopoly would replace competition to advantage, for
customer dissatisfaction would then be vented directly and perhaps to some effect in
attempts at improving the monopoly’s management whereas under competition
12
dissatisfaction takes the form of ineffective flitting back and forth of groups of consumers
from one deteriorating firm to another without any firm getting a signal that something
has gone awry.
While a simultaneous and uniform deterioration of all firms in a certain type of business is
of course highly unlikely, a slight modification of the previous situation serves to endow it
with greater realism and relevance. A competitively produced new product might reveal
only through use some of its faults and noxious side-effects. In this case the claims of the
various competing producers are likely to make for prolonged experimenting of
consumers with alternate brands, all equally faulty, and hence for delay in bringing
pressure on manufacturers for effective improvements in the product. Competition in this
situation is a considerable convenience to the manufacturers because it keeps consumers
from complaining; it diverts their energy to the hunting for the inexistent improved
products that might possibly have been turned out by the competition. Under these
circumstances, the manufacturers have a common interest in the maintenance rather than
in the abridgement of competition—and may conceivably resort to collusive behavior to
that end.9 The argument presented so far maintained the premise that the unsatisfactory
features of the product turned out by the various competing firms could be eliminated as a
result of pressures and a resultant search for solutions. But even if this premise is dropped,
the competitive solution may again be inferior to one in which a single firm is the sole
producer. For the presence of a number of competing firms fosters in this case the
perpetual illusion that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” that is,
that an escape from defectiveness is possible through purchase of the competitor’s product.
Under monopoly, consumers would learn to live with inevitable imperfection and would
seek happiness elsewhere than in the frantic search for the inexistent “improved” product.
The reader can judge whether elements of the foregoing situations can be detected in the
economic and commercial life around us.10 A few comments may be in order, however,
on the relevance of the preceding notions for organizations other than business firms. The
basic point is that competition may result merely in the mutual luring over of each others’
customers on the part of a group of competing firms; and that to this extent competition
and product diversification is wasteful and diversionary especially when, in its absence,
consumers would either be able to bring more effective pressures upon management
toward product improvement or would stop using up their energies in a futile search for
the “ideal” product. It will be immediately evident that competitive political systems have
9
This is even more the case if the most determined comparison shoppers are those who would make most
trouble for the manufacturers if there were no possibility of exit. The competitive mechanism then rids
management of its potentially most troublesome customers. This argument is explained more fully below.
10
To help him judge I should like to provide some sample passages from letters recently fired off, by irate
owners of “lemons,” (a) to the Ford Motor Company: “. . . You can be assured that I absolutely will not
purchase another Ford of any kind no matter what your usual form letter to me will say . . .” “. . . Needless
to say my Falcon is the last of any Ford product I would consider to purchase. I am a young girl of 25,
reasonably attractive, who has depleted her bank account buying Falcon transmissions, when there are other
things in this world where the money could be put to much better use . . .”; and (b) to the General Motors
Corporation: “. . . At home we have a Chevrolet bus and a Chevrolet van. You may be sure that after all of
this trouble and inconvenience and wasted time I shall never own a General Motors product again . . .” “...
I have had a G.M. auto and wagon for many years now but maybe FORD has a better idea. I’ll try to put
up with this LEMON till the ‘70 models come out, but you can be sure there will be no G.M. product of
any kind on my driveway . . .” Copies of the letters from which these excerpts are taken were mailed by
their authors to Ralph Nader who has kindly made them available to me.
13
frequently been portrayed in just these terms. Radical critics of societies with stable party
systems have often denounced the competition of the dominant parties as offering “no real
choice.” It is of course a very open question whether, in the absence of the competitive
party system, citizens would be better able to achieve fundamental social and political
changes (assuming, for the sake of the argument, that such changes are desirable).
Nevertheless the radical critique is correct in pointing out that competitive political
systems have a considerable capacity to divert what might otherwise be a revolutionary
ground swell into tame discontent with the governing party. Although this capacity may
normally be an asset, one can surely conceive of circumstances under which it would turn
into a liability.
A less speculative illustration of the issue under discussion can be drawn from the history
of the trade union movement in this country. A preliminary step to the CIO-AFL merger
of 1955 was the No-Raiding Agreement which was concluded between the two
organizations two years earlier. The text of this agreement referred to a statistical study of
all petitions over a two-year period, addressed by CIO-AFL unions to the National Labor
Relations Board for certification as the official bargaining agents in industrial plants. It was
found that most petitions were unsuccessful and that those which were granted were
about equally divided between CIO petitions to displace an AFL union and AFL petitions
to displace a CIO union. These results, so the report says, “compel the conclusion that
raids between AFL and CIO unions are destructive of the best interests of the unions
immediately involved and also of the entire trade union movement.”11 As reasons for this
conclusion, the document cites unrest and disunity created among the workers as a result
of the raids, successful or not, and the desirability of devoting the energies of the trade
union movement to the organization of unaffiliated workers rather than to raiding.
Implicit in this conclusion is the judgment that the disadvantages of exit-competition
outweighed in this case its possible efficiency-inducing advantages and perhaps the
assumption that these advantages can be better secured via the alternative mechanism—
voice—which must now be examined more closely.
Chapter 3. Voice
If the exit option has not been investigated in detail by economists, its existence and effect
on performance—generally presumed to be wholesome—nevertheless underlies many
judgments and attitudes toward economic institutions. Nothing remotely similar can be
said about the voice option. The very idea that this is another “recuperation mechanism”
which can come into play alongside, or in lieu of, the exit option is likely to be met with
a mixture of incredulity and raised eyebrows. Yet, in this age of protest, it has become
quite apparent that dissatisfied consumers (or members of an organization), rather than just
go over to the competition, can “kick up a fuss” and thereby force improved quality or
service upon delinquent management. It is therefore both legitimate and timely to
examine the conditions under which the voice option is likely to make an effective
appearance, either as a complement to exit or as a substitute for it.
11
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, Constitution of the AFL-CIO
(Washington, D.C., January 1956), AFL-CIO Publication no. 2, p. 36. I am indebted to John Dunlop for
the reference and for discussing this point with me.
14
To resort to voice, rather than exit, is for the customer or member to make an attempt at
changing the practices, policies, and outputs of the firm from which one buys or of the
organization to which one belongs. Voice is here defined as any attempt at all to change,
rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs, whether through individual or
collective petition to the management directly in charge, through appeal to a higher
authority with the intention of forcing a change in management, or through various types
of actions and protests, including those that are meant to mobilize public opinion. It is
becoming clear, as was already pointed out in the introductory chapter, that voice is
nothing but a basic portion and function of any political system, known sometimes also as
“interest articulation.”12 Political scientists have long dealt systematically with this function
and its various manifestations. But in doing so they have ordinarily confined their
attention to situations in which the only alternative to articulation is aquiescence or
indifference (rather than exit), while economists have refused to consider that the
discontented consumer might be anything but either dumbly faithful or outright traitorous
(to the firm he used to do business with). A niche thus exists for this book, which affirms
that the choice is often between articulation and “desertion”—voice and exit, in our
neutral terminology.
First a few remarks on the working of voice in isolation, as compared to that of exit. As
before, the initial assumption is a decline in the performance of a firm or organization
which is remediable provided the attention of management is sufficiently focused on the
task. If conditions are such that the decline leads to voice rather than to exit on the part of
the discontented member-customers, then the effectiveness of voice will increase, up to a
certain point, with its volume. But voice is like exit in that it can be overdone: the
discontented customers or members could become so harassing that their protests would at
some point hinder rather than help whatever efforts at recovery are undertaken. For
reasons that will become clear this is most unlikely to happen in relations between
customers and business firms; but in the realm of politics—the more characteristic
province of voice—the possibility of negative returns to voice making their appearance at
some point is by no means to be excluded.
An interesting parallel appears here between economics and exit, on the one hand, and
politics and voice, on the other. Just as in economics it had long been thought that the
more elastic demand is (that is, the more rapidly exit ensues whenever deterioration
occurs) the better for the functioning of the economic system, so it has long been an
article of faith of political theory that the proper functioning of democracy requires a
maximally alert, active, and vocal public. In the United States, this belief was shaken by
empirical studies of voting and political behavior which demonstrated the existence of
considerable political apathy on the part of large sections of the public, for long periods of
time.13 Since the democratic system appeared to survive this apathy rather well, it became
clear that the relations between political activism of the citizens and stable democracy are
considerably more complex than had once been thought. As in the case of exit, a mixture
of alert and inert citizens, or even an alternation of involvement and withdrawal, may
12
For a recent treatment in a comparative perspective see G. A. Almond and G. B. Powell, Jr., Comparative
Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966), ch. 4.
13
See Robert A. Dahl, Modem Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), ch. 6
for data and principal sources.
15
actually serve democracy better than either total, permanent activism or total apathy. One
reason, stressed by Robert Dahl, is that the ordinary failure, on the part of most citizens,
to use their potential political resources to the full makes it possible for them to react with
unexpected vigor—by using normally unused reserves of political power and influence—
14
whenever their vital interests are directly threatened. According to another line of
reasoning, the democratic political system requires “blending of apparent contradictions”:
on the one hand, the citizen must express his point of view so that the political elites
know and can be responsive to what he wants, but, on the other, these elites must be
allowed to make decisions. The citizen must thus be in turn influential and deferential.15
The essential reasoning behind this thesis is quite similar to the argument made earlier on
the need for exit to stay within certain bounds. Voice has the function of alerting a firm or
organization to its failings, but it must then give management, old or new, some time to
respond to the pressures that have been brought to bear on it.
Finally, then, the relation between voice and improvement in an organization’s efficiency
has considerable similarity with the modus operandi of exit. This does not mean, however,
that exit and voice will always both have positive effects at first and destructive ones at a
later stage. In the case of any one particular firm or organization and its deterioration,
either exit or voice will ordinarily have the role of the dominant reaction mode. The
subsidiary mode is then likely to show up in such limited volume that it will never
become destructive for the simple reason that, if deterioration proceeds, the job of
destruction is accomplished single-handedly by the dominant mode. In the case of
normally competitive business firms, for example, exit is clearly the dominant reaction to
deterioration and voice is a badly underdeveloped mechanism ; it is difficult to conceive of
a situation in which there would be too much of it.
Voice as a Residual of Exit
The voice option is the only way in which dissatisfied customers or members can react
whenever the exit option is unavailable. This is very nearly the situation in such basic
social organizations as the family, the state, or the church. In the economic sphere, the
theoretical construct of pure monopoly would spell a no-exit situation, but the mixture of
monopolistic and competitive elements characteristic of most real market situations should
make it possible to observe the voice option in its interaction with the exit option.
We return to the simple relationship between deterioration of a product and declining

sales, but look now at those who continue as customers. While they are not yet ready to
desert the firm, they are likely to experience different degrees of unhappiness about the
quality decline. Being presumably endowed with some capacity to articulate this
14
Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 309-310. This point is
remarkably similar to the one made by March and Cyert about the virtues of “organizational slack” in the
economic system. See The Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1963), pp. 36-38.
15
Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five
Nations (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), pp. 338-344. A similar thought is expressed by Robert Lane
who shows that, in certain respects, “one can assign different political roles to the political activists and the
indifferents and that a balance between the two can achieve beneficient results.” Political Life (New York:
Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1969), p. 345.
16
discontent, these non-exiting customers are therefore the source of the voice option. The
other determinant of voice is of course the degree of discontent of the non-exiting
customer which depends roughly on the degree of deterioration. In a first approximation,
then, voice can be viewed as a residual. Whoever does not exit is a candidate for voice
and voice depends, like exit, on the quality elasticity of demand. But the direction of the
relationship is turned around: with a given potential for articulation, the actual level of
voice feeds on inelastic demand, or on the lack of opportunity for exit.16
In this view, the role of voice would increase as the opportunities for exit decline, up to
the point where, with exit wholly unavailable, voice must carry the entire burden of
alerting management to its failings. That such a see-saw relationship between exit and
voice exists in fact to some extent is illustrated by the many complaints about quality and
service that have been prominently published for years in the Soviet press. With exit-
competition playing a much smaller role in the Soviet economy than in the market
economies of the West, it was found necessary to give voice a more prominent role.
Similarly, voice is in a much more commanding position in less developed countries

where one simply cannot choose between as many commodities, nor between as many
varieties of the same good, nor between as many ways of traveling from one point of the
country to another, as in an advanced economy. Therefore, the atmosphere in the former
countries is more suffused with loud, often politically colored protests against poor quality
of goods or services than it is in the advanced countries where dissatisfaction is more likely
to take the form of silent exit.
Turning now to the reaction function, that is, to the effect of voice on recuperation of
efficiency on the part of voice-exposed management, we shall assume that exit is the
dominant reaction mode. In a preliminary appraisal of the combined effect of exit and
voice, the possibility of voice having a destructive rather than constructive effect may
therefore be excluded. Obviously sales losses and complaints or protests of those who
remain members are not easily added to derive an aggregate recuperative effect.17 Both
the propensity to protest and the effectiveness of complaints vary widely from one firm-
customer complex to another. But three general statements can be made:
(1) In the simple model presented up to now, voice functions as a complement to exit,
not as a substitute for it. Whatever voice is forthcoming under those conditions is a net
18
gain from the point of view of the recuperation mechanism.
16
The relationship between the volumes of exit and voice that is indicated here is spelled out in more formal
terms in Appendix A.
17
Voice may cause direct monetary losses to the firm, as, for example, when dissatisfied consumers are able
to turn in defective merchandise. If voice appears exclusively in this particular incarnation, then its likely
effectiveness in making an impression on profit-conscious managers can be precisely measured against that of
exit. See Appendix A.
18
Voice could usefully complement competition also in a more familiar context. Economists who have
hopefully eyed competition’s ability to allocate resources efficiently have generally concluded that the most
serious impediment to the hope’s fulfillment is the existence of external diseconomies in production and
consumption (pollution, littering of beaches with beer cans, and so forth). Obviously, these diseconomies
could be contained or prevented through effective articulation of protests on the part of those who suffer
from them. In other words, the voice of the nonconsumer on whom the diseconomies are inflicted could
17
(2) The more effective voice is (the effectiveness of exit being given), the more quality-
inelastic can demand be without the chances for recuperation stemming from exit and
voice combined being impaired.
(3) Considering that beyond a certain point, exit has a destructive rather than salutary
effect, the optimal pattern from the point of view of maximizing the combined
effectiveness of exit and voice over the whole process of deterioration may be an elastic
response of demand to the first stages of deterioration and an inelastic one for the later
stages. This pattern has long been held to be characteristic of consumer responses to price
increases for certain commodities which are vitally needed in limited quantities even at
high prices, but whose consumption will easily expand beyond this point if prices drop. It
may similarly apply to quality elasticity of demand, especially if the only alternative
available for a deteriorating product is a higher-priced substitute. Eventually, of course, as
quality becomes abominable, demand will vanish (just as it does, because of the budget
constraint, when price increases indefinitely), but there may well be a number of goods
and services whose demand will move from quality-elastic to quality-inelastic for a wide
range of quality declines. The reason for which even such a pattern may be too much
weighted by exit will be commented on at some length in Chapter 4.
Voice as an Alternative to Exit
Up to now, the treatment of voice has suffered from a certain timidity: the new concept
has been viewed as wholly subordinated to exit. In judging the volume of voice to be
determined by the quality elasticity of demand, one implicitly assumes that customers who
are faced by a decline in quality first decide whether to shift to another firm or product
regardless of their ability to influence the behavior of the firm from which they usually
buy; only if they do not shift, does it possibly occur to them to make a fuss. If the matter
is put in this way it is immediately evident, however, that the decision whether to exit
will often be taken in the light of the prospects for the effective use of voice. If customers are
sufficiently convinced that voice will be effective, then they may well postpone exit.
Hence, quality-elasticity of demand, and therefore exit, can also be viewed as depending
on the ability and willingness of the customers to take up the voice option. It may, in fact,
be more appropriate to put matters in this way, for if deterioration is a process unfolding
in stages over a period of time, the voice option is more likely to be taken at an early
stage. Once you have exited, you have lost the opportunity to use voice, but not vice
versa; in some situations, exit will therefore be a reaction of last resort after voice has failed.
It appears, therefore, that voice can be a substitute for exit, as well as a complement to it.
What are the conditions, then, under which voice will be preferred to exit? The question
can be formulated more precisely as follows: If a competing or substitute product B is
available at the same price as the normally bought product A and if, because of the
deterioration of A, B is now clearly superior from the point of view of A’s customers,
under what conditions will a customer of A fail to go over to B?
become a valuable adjunct to the competitive mechanism. Once this is realized it is perhaps less surprising
that the voice of the consumer too has a role to play in complementing the mechanism.
18
Once voice is viewed as a substitute for exit, an important component of the voice option
consists in this decision to continue as a customer of the deteriorating and now inferior
product (or as a member of the deteriorating organization), for it will presumably be taken
only by those who wish for and expect A to recover its original superiority over B, and
not necessarily by all of them. Ordinarily, a customer or member will undergo the
sacrifice of staying with A because he feels that he wants and is able to “do something”
about A and because only by remaining a customer or member will he be able to exert
this influence. Nevertheless, the decision not to exit in the face of a clearly better buy (or
organization) could also be taken by customers (or members) who expect the complaints
and protests of others, combined with their own faithfulness, to be successful. Others may
not care to switch to B when they feel that they would soon want to switch back, because
of the costs that may be involved. Finally there are those who stay with A out of
“loyalty,” that is, in a less rational, though far from wholly irrational, fashion.9 Many of
these “loyalists” will actively participate in actions designed to change A’s policies and
practices, but some may simply refuse to exit and suffer in silence, confident that things
will soon get better. Thus the voice option includes vastly different degrees of activity and
leadership in the attempt to achieve change “from within.” But it always involves the
decision to “stick” with the deteriorating firm or organization and this decision is in turn
based on:
(1) an evaluation of the chances of getting the firm or organization producing A “back on
the track,” through one’s own action or through that of others; and
(2) a judgment that it is worthwhile, for a variety of reasons, to trade the certainty of B
which is available here and now against these chances.
This view of the matter shows the substitutability of B for A as an important element in
the decision to resort to voice, but as only one of several elements. Naturally, the
consumer will resort to voice if A’s original margin of superiority over B was wide enough
to make it worthwhile for him to forego a B that is superior right here and now. That will
hardly ever be the case if A and B are very close substitutes. But given a minimum of non-
substitutability, voice will depend also on the willingness to take the chances of the voice
option as against the certainty of the exit option and on the probability with which a
consumer expects improvements to occur as a result of actions to be taken by himself or
by others with him or just by others.
It is useful to compare this formulation with the related one provided by Edward Banfield
in his study of political influence: “The effort an interested party makes to put its case
before the decisionmaker will be in proportion to the advantage to be gained from a favorable
19
outcome multiplied by the probability of influencing the decision.
Banfield derived this rule from his study of public policy decisions in a large American
city and of the participation of various groups and individuals in the decisionmaking
process. He, like most political scientists looking at the “articulation-of-interests” function,
19
Edward C. Banfield, Political Influence (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 333. Italics in the
original.
19
was analyzing situations in which individuals or groups had essentially the choice between
passivity and involvement. The present model is more complicated because it allows for
exit, as a result of the availability of a substitute product. Banfield’s formulation correctly
states the benefits of the voice option,20 but for our purposes there is need to introduce
cost which so far has been identified as the foregoing of the exit option. In fact, in
addition to this opportunity cost, account must be taken of the direct cost of voice which
is incurred as buyers of a product or members of an organization spend time and money in
the attempt to achieve changes in the policies and practices of the firm from which they
buy or of the organization to which they belong. Not nearly so high a cost is likely to be
attached to the exercise of the exit option in the case of products bought in the market—
although some allowance should be made for the possible loss of loyalty discounts and for
the cost of obtaining information about substitute products to which one intends to
switch.21
Hence, in comparison to the exit option, voice is costly and conditioned on the influence
and bargaining power customers and members can bring to bear within the firm from
which they buy or the organizations to which they belong. These two characteristics point
to roughly similar areas of economic and social life in which voice is likely to play an
important role and to hold exit at bay, at least for a time. As voice tends to be costly in
comparison to exit, the consumer will become less able to afford voice as the number of
goods and services over which he spreads his purchases increases—the cost of devoting
even a modicum of his time to correcting the faults of any one of the entities he is
involved with is likely to exceed his estimate of the expected benefits for a large number
of them. This is also one of the reasons for which voice plays a more important role with
respect to organizations of which an individual is a member than with respect to firms
whose products he buys: the former are far less numerous than the latter. In addition, of
course, the proliferation of products tends to increase cross-elasticities of demand and to
that extent it would increase the probability of exit for a given deterioration in quality of
any one product picked at random. For these reasons, voice is likely to be an active
mechanism primarily with respect to the more substantial purchases and organizations in
which buyers and members are involved.
Similar conclusions with respect to the locus of the voice option are reached when one
focuses on the other characteristic which distinguishes voice from exit, namely, the
requirement that a customer must expect that he himself or other member-customers will
be able to marshal some influence or bargaining power. Obviously, this is not the case in
atomistic markets. Voice is most likely to function as an important mechanism in markets
with few buyers or where a few buyers account for an important proportion of total sales,
both because it is easier for few buyers than for many to combine for collective action and
simply because each one may have much at stake and wield considerable power even in
isolation.22 Again, it is more common to encounter influential members of an organization
20
It should be noted that our concept of voice, as defined at the beginning of this chapter, is much wider
than Banfield’s “influence,” which appears to exclude any expression of opinion or discontent that is not
addressed directly to the officeholding decisionmaker.
21
When loyalty is present, however, the cost of exit may be substantial. The point will be discussed in ch. 7,
below.
22
See Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
20
than buyers with a great deal of influence on the policies of firms from which they buy,23
and the voice option will therefore be observed more frequently among organizations than
among business firms.
Certain types of purchases may nevertheless lend themselves particularly to the voice
option, even though many buyers are involved. When the consumer has been dissatisfied
with an inexpensive, nondurable good, he will most probably go over to a different
variety without making a fuss. But if he is stuck with an expensive durable good such as an
automobile which disappoints him day-in and day-out, he is much less likely to remain
silent. And his complaints will be of some concern to the firm or dealer whose product he
has bought both because he remains a potential customer in one, three, or five years’ time
and because adverse word-of-mouth propaganda is powerful in the case of standardized
goods.
The upshot of this discussion for the comparative roles of voice and exit at various stages
of economic development is two-edged: the sheer number of available goods and varieties
in an advanced economy favors exit over voice, but the increasing importance in such an
economy of standardized durable consumer goods requiring large outlays works in the
opposite direction.
Although the foregoing remarks restrict the domain in which the voice option is likely to
be deployed, especially as a substitute for exit, the territory left to it remains both
considerable and somewhat ill-defined. Moreover, once voice is recognized as a
mechanism with considerable usefulness for maintaining performance, institutions can be
designed in such a way that the cost of individual and collective action would be
decreased. Or, in some situations, the rewards for successful action might be increased for
those who had initiated it.
Often it is possible to create entirely new channels of communication for groups, such as
consumers, which have had notorious difficulties in making their voice heard, in
comparison to other interest groups. Consumers have, in fact, made such progress in this
regard that there is now talk of a “consumer revolution” as part of the general
“participation explosion.” The former phrase does not refer to the long established and
still quite useful consumer research organizations, but to the more militant actions by or
on behalf of consumers that have been taken recently, the most spectacular and resourceful
being the campaigns of Ralph Nader, who has established himself as a sort of self-
24
appointed consumer ombudsman. The appointment since 1964 of a consumer adviser to
the President has been a response to this emergence of the consumer voice which was
quite unexpected in an economy where competition-exit is supposed to solve most of the
“sovereign” consumer’s problems. As a result of these developments, it looks as though
consumer voice will be institutionalized at three levels: through independent
entrepreneurship à la Nader, through revitalization of official regulatory agencies, and
23
See, however, the description of the influential buyer in John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The
Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), pp. 117-123.
24
The broad range of Nader’s work, with respect to both products and action, is brought out in his article
“The Great American Gyp,” The New York Review of Books, November 21, 1968.
21
through stepped-up preventive activities on the part of the more important firms selling to
the public.25
The creation of effective new channels through which consumers can communicate their
dissatisfaction holds one important lesson. While structural constraints (availability of close
substitutes, number of buyers, durability and standardization of the article, and so forth)
are of undoubted importance in determining the balance of exit and voice for individual
commodities, the propensity to resort to the voice option depends also on the general
readiness of a population to complain and on the invention of such institutions and
mechanisms as can communicate complaints cheaply and effectively. Recent experience
even raises some doubts whether the structural constraints deserve to be called “basic”
when they can suddenly be overcome by a single individual such as Ralph Nader.26
Thus, while exit requires nothing but a clear-cut either-or decision, voice is essentially an
art constantly evolving in new directions. This situation makes for an important bias in
favor of exit when both options are present: customer-members will ordinarily base their
decision on past experience with the cost and effectiveness of voice even though the
possible discovery of lower cost and greater effectiveness is of the very essence of voice. The
presence of the exit alternative can therefore tend to atrophy the development of the art of
voice. This is a central point of this book which will be argued from a different angle in the
next chapter…
7. A Theory of Loyalty
As was pointed out in earlier chapters, the presence of the exit option can sharply reduce
the probability that the voice option will be taken up widely and effectively. Exit was
shown to drive out voice, in other words, and it began to look as though voice is likely to
play an important role in organizations only on condition that exit is virtually ruled out. In
a large number of organizations one of the two mechanisms is in fact wholly dominant: on
the one hand, there is competitive business enterprise where performance maintenance
relies heavily on exit and very little on voice; on the other, exit is ordinarily unthinkable,
though not always wholly impossible, from such primordial human groupings as family,
tribe, church, and state. The principal way for the individual member to register his
dissatisfaction with the way things are going in these organizations is normally to make his
27
voice heard in some fashion.
25
Traditionally such firms have been engaged in considerable “auscultation” of voice through market
surveys.
26
For another, most vivid case in point, within the context of community action in Venezuela, see Lisa
Redfield Peattie, The View from the Barrio (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1968), ch. 7;
the “art” of eliciting voice, this time in low-income neighborhoods of American cities, is also the subject of
her article “Reflections on Advocacy Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners (March 1968), pp.
80-88.
27
There is no intention here to associate absence of exit with “primitiveness.” Edmund Leach has noted that
many so-called primitive tribes are far from being closed societies. In his classic study Political Systems of
Highland Burma (1954) he traced in detail the way in which members of one social system (gumsha) will
periodically move to another (gumlao) and back again. Exit may be more effectively ruled out in a so-called
advanced open society than among the tribes studied by Leach.
22
As an aside, it is worth noting that, with exit either impossible or unthinkable, provision is
generally made in these organizations for expelling or excommunicating the individual
member in certain circumstances. Expulsion can be interpreted as an instrument—one of
many— which “management” uses in these organizations to restrict resort to voice by
members; a higher authority can then in turn restrict the powers of management by
prohibiting expulsion, as is for example done to protect consumers when a public service
is supplied in conditions of monopoly. But when exit is a wide-open option and voice is
largely nonexistent, as in the relations between a firm and its customers in competitive
markets, expulsion of a member or customer is a pointless affair and does not need to be
specifically prohibited. One way of catching that somewhat rare bird, an organization
where exit and voice both hold important roles, may be to look for groupings from which
members can both exit and be expelled. Political parties and voluntary associations in
general are excellent examples.
The Activation of Voice as a Function of Loyalty
A more solid understanding of the conditions favoring coexistence of exit and voice is
gained by introducing the concept of loyalty. Clearly the presence of loyalty makes exit less
likely, but does it, by the same token, give more scope to voice?
That the answer is in the positive can be made plausible by referring to the earlier
discussion of voice. In Chapter 3 two principal determinants of the readiness to resort to
voice when exit is possible were shown to be:
(1) the extent to which customer-members are willing to trade off the certainty of exit
against the uncertainties of an improvement in the deteriorated product; and
(2) the estimate customer-members have of their ability to influence the organization.
Now the first factor is clearly related to that special attachment to an organization known
as loyalty. Thus, even with a given estimate of one’s influence, the likelihood of voice
increases with the degree of loyalty. In addition, the two factors are far from independent.
A member with a considerable attachment to a product or organization will often search
for ways to make himself influential, especially when the organization moves in what he
believes is the wrong direction; conversely, a member who wields (or thinks he wields)
considerable power in an organization and is therefore convinced that he can get it “back
on the track” is likely to develop a strong affection for the organization in which he is
28
powerful.
28
In terms of figure 3 of Appendix B, a person whose influence (that is, the likelihood that he will be able to
achieve full quality recuperation) is correctly expressed by a point as high as Vg will be willing to trade off
the certainty of the competing product against even a little hope of recuperation for the traditional product.
Thus he will choose voice. He who has little influence and knows it, on the other hand, is not likely to take
kindly to such a trade-off. If he is to opt for voice rather than exit, he will normally require the certain
availability of the competing product to be matched by the near-certainty of recuperation for the traditional
variety.
23
As a rule, then, loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice. It is true that, in the face of
discontent with the way things are going in an organization, an individual member can
remain loyal without being influential himself, but hardly without the expectation that
someone will act or something will happen to improve matters. That paradigm of loyalty,
“our country, right or wrong,” surely makes no sense whatever if it were expected that
“our” country were to continue forever to do nothing but wrong. Implicit in that phrase
is the expectation that “our” country can be moved again in the right direction after doing
some wrong—after all, it was preceded in Decatur’s toast by “Our country! In her
intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right!” The possibility of
influence is in fact cleverly intimated in the saying by the use of the possessive “our.” This
intimation of some influence and the expectation that, over a period of time, the right
turns will more than balance the wrong ones, profoundly distinguishes loyalty from faith.
A glance at Kierkegaard’s celebrated interpretation of Abraham’s setting out to sacrifice
Isaac makes one realize that, in comparison to that act of pure faith, the most loyalist
behavior retains an enormous dose of reasoned calculation.
When is loyalty functional?
The importance of loyalty from our point of view is that it can neutralize within certain
limits the tendency of the most quality-conscious customers or members to be the first to
exit…[T]his tendency deprives the faltering firm or organization of those who could best
help it fight its shortcomings and its difficulties. As a result of loyalty, these potentially
most influential customers and members will stay on longer than they would ordinarily, in
the hope or, rather, reasoned expectation that improvement or reform can be achieved
“from within.” Thus loyalty, far from being irrational, can serve the socially useful
purpose of preventing deterioration from becoming cumulative, as it so often does when
there is no barrier to exit.
As just explained, the barrier to exit constituted by loyalty is of finite height—it can be
compared to such barriers as protective tariffs. As infant industry tariffs have been justified
by the need to give local industry a chance to become efficient, so a measure of loyalty to
a firm or organization has the function of giving that firm or organization a chance to
recuperate from a lapse in efficiency. Specific institutional barriers to exit can often be
justified on the ground that they serve to stimulate voice in deteriorating, yet recuperable
organizations which would be prematurely destroyed through free exit. This seems the
most valid, though often not directly intended, reason for the complication of divorce
procedures and for the expenditure of time, money, and nerves that they necessitate.
Similarly the American labor law sets up a fairly complex and time-consuming procedure
for one trade union to take over from another as the sole certified bargaining agent at the
plant level. Consequently, when workers are dissatisfied with the services of a union, they
cannot switch easily and rapidly to another and are that much more likely to make an
effort at revitalizing the union with which they are affiliated.
The previous discussion of the alternative between exit and voice makes it possible to say
something about the conditions under which specific institutional barriers to exit, or, in
their absence, the generalized, informal barrier of loyalty are particularly desirable or
“functional.” It was shown, for one, that in the choice between voice and exit, voice will
24
often lose out, not necessarily because it would be less effective than exit, but because its
effectiveness depends on the discovery of new ways of exerting influence and pressure
toward recovery. However “easy” such a discovery may look in retrospect the chances for
it are likely to be heavily discounted in ex ante estimates, for creativity always comes as a
surprise. Loyalty then helps to redress the balance by raising the cost of exit. It thereby
pushes men into the alternative, creativity-requiring course of action from which they
would normally recoil and performs a function similar to the underestimate of the
prospective task’s difficulties. I have elsewhere described how such underestimates can act
as a beneficial “Hiding Hand” in just this manner.29 Loyalty or specific institutional barriers
to exit are therefore particularly functional whenever the effective use of voice requires a
great deal of social inventiveness while exit is an available, yet not wholly effective,
option.
Secondly, the usefulness of loyalty depends on the closeness of the available substitute.
When the outputs of two competing organizations are miles apart with respect to price or
quality, there is much scope for voice to come into play in the course of progressive
deterioration of one of them before exit will assume massive proportions. Thus, loyalty is
hardly needed here, whereas its role as a barrier to exit can be constructive when
organizations are close substitutes so that a small deterioration of one of them will send
customer-members scurrying to the other. This conclusion is a little unexpected.
Expressed as a paradox, it asserts that loyalty is at its most functional when it looks most
irrational, when loyalty means strong attachment to an organization that does not seem to
warrant such attachment because it is so much like another one that is also available. Such
seemingly irrational loyalties are often encountered, for example, in relation to clubs,
football teams, and political parties. Even though…parties in a two-party system are less
likely to move toward and resemble each other than has sometimes been predicted, the
tendency does assert itself on occasion. The more this is so the more irrational and
outright silly does stubborn party loyalty look; yet that is precisely when it is most useful.
Loyalty to one’s country, on the other hand, is something we could do without, since
countries can ordinarily be considered to be well-differentiated products. Only as
countries start to resemble each other because of the advances in communication and all-
round modernization will the danger of premature and excessive exits arise, the “brain
drain” being a current example. At that point, a measure of loyalty will stand us in good
stead. Also, there are some countries that resemble each other a good deal because they
share a common history, language, and culture; here again loyalty is needed more than in
countries that stand more starkly alone as was precisely implied by the comparison
between Latin America and Japan… Finally,…the danger of losing influential customers
when a higher-quality, higher price product is available “nearby,” points to another
conclusion on the comparative need for loyalty. If organizations can be ranked along a
single scale in order of quality, prestige, or some other desirable characteristic, then those
at the densely occupied lower end of the scale will need loyalty and cohesive ideology to a
greater extent than those at the top. There is much evidence that this need is being
appreciated both among various “left behind” groups of American society and, in the
international arena, among the countries of the Third World. In the next chapter it will be
29
Development Projects Observed (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1967), ch. 1.
25
shown that the most prestigious organizations and groups might, to the contrary, benefit
from a decline in the level of loyalty they command.
The loyalist’s threat of exit
Loyalty is a key concept in the battle between exit and voice not only because, as a result
of it, members may be locked into their organizations a little longer and thus use the voice
option with greater determination and resourcefulness than would otherwise be the case.
It is helpful also because it implies the possibility of disloyalty, that is, exit. Just as it would
be impossible to be good in a world without evil, so it makes no sense to speak of being
loyal to a firm, a party, or an organization with an unbreakable monopoly. While loyalty
postpones exit its very existence is predicated on the possibility of exit. That even the
most loyal member can exit is often an important part of his bargaining power vis-à-vis
the organization. The chances for voice to function effectively as a recuperation
mechanism are appreciably strengthened if voice is backed up by the threat of exit, whether
it is made openly or whether the possibility of exit is merely well understood to be an
element in the situation by all concerned.
In the absence of feelings of loyalty, exit per se is essentially costless, except for the cost of
gathering information about alternative products and organizations. Also, when loyalty is
not present, the individual member is likely to have a low estimate of his influence on the
organization, as already explained. Hence, the decision to exit will be taken and carried
out in silence. The threat of exit will typically be made by the loyalist—that is, by the
member who cares—who leaves no stone unturned before he resigns himself to the
painful decision to withdraw or switch.
The relationship between voice and exit has now become more complex. So far it has
been shown how easy availability of the exit option makes the recourse to voice less
likely. Now it appears that the effectiveness of the voice mechanism is strengthened by the
possibility of exit. The willingness to develop and use the voice mechanism is reduced by
exit, but the ability to use it with effect is increased by it. Fortunately, the contradiction is
not insoluble. Together, the two propositions merely spell out the conditions under which
voice (a) will be resorted to and (b) bids fair to be effective: there should be the possibility
of exit, but exit should not be too easy or too attractive as soon as deterioration of one’s
own organization sets in.
The correctness of this proposition can be illustrated by the extent to which parties are
responsive to the voice of the membership. The parties of totalitarian one-party systems
have been notoriously unresponsive—as have been the parties of multi-party systems. In
the former case, the absence of the possibility of either voice or exit spelled absolute
control of the party machinery by whatever leadership dominated the party. But in the
second case, with both exit and voice freely available, internal democracy does not get
much of a chance to develop either because, with many parties in the field, members will
usually find it tempting to go over to some other party in case of disagreement. Thus they
will not fight for “change from within.” In this connection it may be significant that
Michels’s “Iron Law of Oligarchy” according to which all parties (and other large-scale
organizations) are invariably ruled by self-serving oligarchies was based on first-hand
26
acquaintance primarily with the multi-party systems of Continental Western Europe. The
best possible arrangement for the development of party responsiveness to the feelings of
members may then be a system of just a very few parties, whose distance from each other
is wide, but not unbridgeable. In this situation, exit remains possible, but the decision to
exit will not be taken lightheartedly. Hence voice will be a frequent reaction to discontent
with the way things are going and members will fight to make their voice effective. This
prediction of our theory is confirmed by the lively internal struggles characteristic of
parties in existing two-party systems, however far they may be from being truly
democratic. Even in parties in nontotalitarian almost-one-party systems, as for example the
Congress Party of India and the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) of Mexico,
voice has been more in evidence than in many of the often highly authoritarian or
oligarchic parties of multi-party systems.30
In two-party systems, exit can happen not only as a result of a member or group of
members of one party going over to the other, but because it is always possible to launch a
third party. Hence, if voice is to be given a fair try by the members, such launching must
not be too easy —a condition that is usually fulfilled by the very existence and tradition of
the two-party system, as well as by the institutional obstacles ordinarily placed in the way
of third parties. On the other hand, if voice is to be at its most effective, the threat of exit
must be credible, particularly when it most counts. In American presidential politics this
set of conditions for maximizing the effectiveness of voice means that a group of party
members should be able to stay within the party up to the nominating convention and still
be able to form a third party between the end of the convention and election time. If exit
is made too difficult by requiring the group to qualify as a party at a date prior to the
convention, the dissenting group must either exit before the convention or go to the
convention without being able to make an effective threat of exit. More stringent
conditions for exit fail here to strengthen voice; rather they make for either premature exit
or for less effective voice. The point is well put by Alexander Bickel:
The characteristic American third party . . . consists of a group of people who have tried
to exert influence within one of the major parties, have failed, and later decide to work on
the outside. States in which there is an early qualifying date tend to force such groups to
forego major-party primary and other pre-nomination activity and organize separately,
early in an election year. For if they do not they lose all opportunity for action as a third
31
party later.
30
A related point of considerable importance is suggested to me by the recent article of Michael Walzer,
“Corporate Authority and Civil Disobedience,” Dissent (September-October 1969), pp. 396406. The strict
democratic controls to which supreme political authority is subjected in Western democracies are contrasted
in the article with the frequently total absence of such controls in corporate bodies functioning within these
same states. As the author shows, this absence or feebleness of voice in most commercial, industrial,
professional, educational, and religious organizations is often justified by the argument that “if [their
members] don’t like it where they are, they can leave” (p. 397), something they cannot do in relation to the
state itself. Walzer argues strongly that this argument is a poor excuse which should not be allowed to stand
in the way of democratization; but as a matter of positive political science, it is useful to note that the greater
the opportunities for exit, the easier it appears to be for organizations to resist, evade, and postpone the
introduction of internal democracy even though they function in a democratic environment.
31
Alexander M. Bickel, “Is Electoral Reform the Answer?” Commentary (December 1968), p. 51.
27
The author adds that this is counterproductive from the point of view of the two-party
system; the same judgment can be made from the point of view of achieving 4. 85 Exit,
Voice, and Loyalty party responsiveness to its members through the most effective mix of
voice and exit. Two conclusions stand out from this discussion: (1) the detail of
institutional design can be of considerable importance for the balance of exit and voice; (2)
this balance, in turn, can help account for the varying extent of internal democracy in
organizations.
Boycott
Boycott is another phenomenon on the border line between voice and exit, just like the
threat of exit. Through boycott, exit is actually consummated rather than just threatened;
but it is undertaken for the specific and explicit purpose of achieving a change of policy
on the part of the boycotted organization and is therefore a true hybrid of the two
mechanisms. The threat of exit as an instrument of voice is here replaced by its mirror
image, the promise of re-entry: for it is understood that the member-customer will return
to the fold in case certain conditions which have led to the boycott are remedied. Boycott
is often a weapon of customers who do not have, at least at the time of the boycott, an
alternative source of supply for the goods or services they are ordinarily buying from the
boycotted firm or organization, but who can do temporarily without them. It is thus a
temporary exit without corresponding entry elsewhere and is costly to both sides, much
like a strike. In this respect also it combines characteristics of exit, which causes losses to
the firm or organization, with those of voice, which is costly in time and money for the
member-customers…
28
Fuller, Elmore and Orfield provide us a general introduction to the issues surrounding the broad field
of school choice as well as a sense of the history of the evolution of the idea.
Document #2: Bruce Fuller, Richard F. Elmore, and Gary Orfield, “Policy-Making in
the Dark Illuminating the School Choice Debate,” Chapter 1 in Fuller and Elmore, Who
Chooses, Who Loses: Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice (New York:
Teacher College Press, 1996.
Many members of democratic societies, over the past two centuries, have evolved a
contentious love-hate relationship with central government and the concentration of
political power. Yearning for a more just society, worried about the widening effects of
poverty, or searching for a more cohesive culture, Americans often ask political leaders to
steer institutions with a stronger hand, to regulate citizens’ behavior more forcefully, even
to redistribute income and jobs to less advantaged families.
But this affection for decisive central action can be short-lived, especially when classic
individualistic instincts resurface in the American psyche. On the political Right, affluent
or aspiring social classes come to believe that the government is intruding too deeply into
economic matters or eroding old local values and familiar ways of life. The political Left
may claim that centralization undercuts local empowerment or leads to homogeneity in
local institutions, such as schools, just as society is becoming culturally more pluralistic.
And civic distaste may recur for the expansive bureaucracy required to carry out
centralized mandates.
Inventive policy-makers, rising above this cycle of affection or disdain for strong
government, eagerly search for new remedies to stubborn problems facing many local
communities. Shaking off the shackles of bureaucratic assumptions, these earnest policy-
crafters dash outdoors into the sunshine, joyfully announcing bold new reforms aimed at
improving local schools or strengthening the family. A sprinkling of social or economic
crises also helps to brew novel programmatic remedies. Indeed, a portion of these
innovations have proven to be effective, altering the government’s role and the character
of public institutions: the New Deal’s enactment of cash entitlements, notably Social
Security, or the cyclical decentralizing of social services to the states or to nonprofit
community agencies.
In education and family-policy circles, family choice is the newfound remedy, prescribed for
a variety of ills, from raising the quality of local schools and boosting religious freedom to
empowering inner-city parents. Contributors to this book focus on one particular variant:
school choice. Choice experiments, spreading rapidly across the land, restrict
government’s traditional ability to assign children to a particular school, shifting this
authority to parents. This transfer of power often is accompanied by efforts to diversify the
types of schools made available to children. Versatile forms of school finance advance this
power shift, such as vouchers or portable grants to schools enrolling students who opt to
participate in choice schemes.
29
The Broad Appeal Of School Choice
We may think that school choice is a new idea. But inventive policymakers first
discovered this broader family-choice strategy more than three decades ago. In the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the War on Poverty aimed to outwit arcane local
politicians and the welfare bureaucracy, channeling federal aid directly to ethnic-based
community action agencies and to families in the form of vouchers. Limited experiments
centering around the novel remedy of vouchers and tax credits quickly sprouted in
education, child-care, housing, and youth employment programs.
Few policy models in the postwar era have forced as much rethinking and soul searching
over the government’s basic role in society, and the decision-making power granted to
parents, as has family choice. The core tenets of this model challenge both the welfare
state’s habitual way of organizing schools and its traditional reliance on bureaucratic
management. Under family-choice arrangements, the government’s role is to intensify
local accountability, not by building bigger administrative structures but by encouraging
families to make their own decisions and to press for quality improvements. Rather than
funding the organizations and professionals who offer schooling or social services, public
monies flow directly to the consumer. Rather than assuming that state-chartered
organizations and licensed professionals are best qualified to shape school curricula or
social services, choice schemes assume that the family is highly rational, acts from clear
preferences, and is able to effectively demand action from local schools and teachers.
Originally advocated in the South as a way to avoid the desegregation of public schools,
school choice came to be seen by the Left as a way to empower poor and working-class
families to challenge paternalistic bureaucracies. Then, in the early 1980s, the choice
remedy was embraced by political conservatives who sought to improve the quality of
local schools and advance the cultural and political homogeneity of particular communities
(Levin, 1991). Many centrists also have come to support parental choice within the public
school system, allowing parents to exit their neighborhood school in order to choose
another public school.
An overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea of school choice, according to

various polls conducted over the past decade. One recent survey found that almost one-
fourth (23) of all parents would leave their child’s neighborhood school if granted the
freedom to do so; much larger percentages typically favor the political right to switch
schools within the public sector (Elam, Rose, & Gallup, 1991). Many Americans, too,
favor public-private vouchers. By 1993 almost 6 million families were choosing to send
their children to schools outside their neighborhoods. Fifteen percent of parents earning
under $15,000 a year opted for a “choice school” in the public sector; the same share of
families making more than $50,000 annually chose a private school (McArthur, Colopy, &
Schlaline, 1995).
But many political leaders—retaining faith in public education, worried about inequitable
effects, or simply fearing the wrath of teacher unions—continue to oppose giving parents
the freedom to choose between public and private schools. Traditional public school
interest groups oppose even public-private choice experiments aimed exclusively at low-
30
income families, such as those operating with considerable support in poor areas of
Milwaukee and San Antonio.
Ironically, the family-choice model has slowly and quietly become a sacred pillar of federal
antipoverty programs. Several experiments backed by the political Left that emerged from
the 1960s have matured into mainstream programs, often applauded by the Right for
relying so little on bureaucracy and so much on individual-level choice. At both edges of
the K-12 education sector, pro-school-choice financing schemes encourage students and
parents to actively think through school options. The $6.5 billion mixed market of
preschool organizations, for instance, is now supported largely by the $3 billion federal
child-care tax credit program and almost $2 billion per year in parental vouchers and fees.
At the higher education level, portable Pell Grants (dare we call them vouchers?) are the
biggest single source of federal aid. The largest antipoverty initiative in the nation is now
the earned income tax credit program, providing over $18 billion annually in refundable
credits to working-poor families. Poverty programs—with support that transcends the
Nixon White House and the Clinton administration—commonly allocate benefits in ways
that offer classically liberal authority to poor families to make their own choices among a
variety of service providers. And proposals for middle-class tax credits to families with
preschool-age youngsters, or those with children attending college, have returned to the
policy agenda.
Yet public educators have been slow to realize the implications for this pro-choice shift in
how government constructs its role and crafts its remedies. School choice acts as a
lightning rod for this debate over government’s optimal role. Should the State strongly
shape local institutions and help make society more fair and equitable? Or should the State
loosen organizational constraints on parents’ choices, and tighten up on authority and
resources granted to local school bureaucrats and professionals?
To set the context for this book, we ask: Why are school choice and the role of the
government in education so hotly debated at this particular point in history? What are the
underlying social and economic forces driving this controversy? We then describe how
this book addresses the pragmatic question: What are the demonstrable effects of school
choice programs?
Why Has School Choice Moved To The Center Of Policy Debates?
Who should choose where one’s child attends school? Who should choose the forms of
schooling made available to families? These questions are not new to American education.
Catholic parents have long sought alternatives to secular schooling; immigrant parents and
working-class progressives, since the early nineteenth century, have resisted upper-middle-
class domination of school politics; wealthy parents have long shopped around for the
most prestigious, effective prep schools for their children. But since the 1960s, the tandem
questions of the government’s proper role in shaping available forms of schooling and
controlling where one’s child attends school have come to be more loudly asked. Why are
these issues of choice now being put forward so forcefully by parents, civic activists, local
educators, and central policymakers?
31
Three telling conditions have arisen or intensified since the 1960s; together, they fuel the
contemporary school choice controversy.
The Civil Rights Movement
Choice first arose as a major strategy in the effort by conservatives to limit the racial
desegregation of public schools. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision. Brown v. Board of
Education, declared unconstitutional the school systems of 17 states and the District of
Columbia, which had mandated separate schools for blacks and whites. In response,
southern segregationists interpreted the Supreme Court decision as requiring nothing
more than a choice for black students to transfer between two racially separate systems of
schooling. This policy, euphemistically known as “freedom of choice,” was the dominant
southern position. A number of northern cities instituted “open enrollment,” a form of
choice permitting transfers to schools that had space but in many cases did not provide
transportation. Typically a very small proportion of students made such transfers.
By 1966 massive tests of choice were begun under court-ordered desegregation plans in
the South. In Atlanta, for example, every student was given a form on which to express
school preferences. Schools were required to accept transfer requests and to provide
transportation for transfer students. But even under these favorable policies, backed by
strong sanctions and a committed national administration, the choice system left schools in
the South overwhelmingly segregated, with no whites choosing black schools and many
black families afraid to choose white schools. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported
that freedom of choice was preserving segregation and placing the entire burden for small-
scale change on black students and their families (Orfield & Ashkinaze, 1991).
Only in 1973, after the Supreme Court ruled that northern cities must also desegregate,
did a new form of choice—magnet schools—come into the picture. Magnet schools
emerged first in Cincinnati and Milwaukee, then spread to many cities in both the North
and South. By minimizing mandatory requirements and creating educational incentives,
these cities hoped to achieve desegregation and hold onto their rapidly fleeing middle-class
white populations (Wells, 1993). Under the prompting of Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio),
whose state was faced with desegregation litigation in the 1970s, federal support for
magnet schools was added to Congress’s desegregation assistance program. Ironically,
white parents have proven to be more likely than ethnic-minority parents to choose
magnets within the framework of a mandatory desegregation plan. (Document #5 below
details the current extent and known effects of magnet schools nationwide.)
By the late 1980s, political conservatives had successfully detached the broadening debate
over choice from the more painful desegregation issue. Yet at the local level choice was
still deeply intertwined with the persisting question of how to reduce race-based inequity.
Hundreds of communities were still under desegregation orders or maintained plans, and
many were shifting to choice-driven models. Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance,
pioneered controlled choice, requiring all parents to rank their school preferences; school
authorities honored these preferences to the greatest extent possible within desegregation
guidelines. Parent information centers were created. All schools in the city developed
clearer identities and curricular strengths. Local school authorities exercised leadership in
32
pursuing the public interest in desegregation while maximizing responsiveness to parents’

own preferences.
The Fading American Dream
Profound change in a quite different arena is further spurring support for radical school
reform: the reduced upward mobility felt by millions of Americans since the mid-1970s.
For two centuries political leaders and educators have promised that more spending for
public schools and higher school achievement would boost upward mobility and spark
economic growth. Indeed, during much of the past century, the American middle class
grew steadily as school achievement rose. But since the 1973 oil crisis, real income for
many families has leveled off. Between 1979 and 1987, for example, the median real
earnings of young, male high-school graduates fell by 12%. The share of young high
school graduates who earned over $20,000 annually was almost 60% in the late 1970s but
fell to 46% by 1987. As Levy and Murnane (1992) have shown, the American job
structure is becoming “hollowed-out” in the middle: Minimum-wage jobs are growing
rapidly in the service sector, as are highly paid technical occupations in the professions and
in high-technology manufacturing. But semiskilled manufacturing and service sector jobs
are drying up, many of them moving overseas, where labor costs are lower.
With upward mobility becoming more elusive, many parents are redoubling their pressure
on the public schools. Close behind are employers, especially in fast-growing service
industries, who are having difficulty finding young workers with basic literacy and
communication skills. Ironically, the wage returns for basic cognitive skills are rising,
while the capacity of public schools and families to impart these proficiencies remains
static at best (Murnane, Willett, & Levy, 1995). As political pressure on schools builds and
prior reform strategies fail to yield observable gains in achievement, the appeal of more
radical remedies, such as school choice, continues to grow.
The Impact of Cultural Pluralism
The growing ethnic diversity of American society drives attempts to offer variable forms
of schooling to differing communities and parents. Contentious debates over education, of
course, involve not only who gains access to material benefits but also deeply held values
about how one’s children should be raised and socialized, through what language, and
according to which cultural rules and norms. This source of contention is not new to
urban schools. But since the 1960s, urban and suburban communities have become vastly
more diverse ethnically. For example, by 1994 Latinos comprised 15% of all public school
students; in 1960, they made up just 3% of national enrollments. Urban school districts are
often dominated by “minority” families. The Los Angeles school district is now two-thirds
Latino and 18% African-American. In California, soon after the year 2000, children of
white origin will comprise the minority of all students. No ethnic group is made up of
homogeneous families that hold identical expectations for child socialization or uniform
commitments to schooling. But growing numbers of Latino, black, and Asian families are,
without doubt, pressing a more diverse set of expectations and goals on public schools,
compared to the narrower white middle-class agenda that held widespread credibility just
33
a generation ago. In turn, “white ethnics” and religious communities are seeking
alternatives to schools they see as dominated by secular-humanist values.
Demands placed on the public schools are even more intense when ethnic diversity
coincides with pluralistic forms of family structure. Just 51% of all children (33 million)
live in conventional families with two natural parents. Another 15 million children live in
single-parent households. Among black children, 49% live with just one parent; among
Latino youths, 31%. Single-parent households, in general, have much lower incomes.
These parents (mainly mothers) have less time to read to their children, supervise
homework, or interact with school staff (Astone & McLanahan, 1991; Fuller, Eggers-
Pierola, Holloway, Rambaud, & Liang, in press; Schneider & Coleman, 1993).
These demographic patterns are intensifying in ways that are exogenous to the public
school institution. In-migration of families from Latin America, the Caribbean, and
southeast Asia has risen since the early 1970s. The erosion of conventional black family
structures and the implosion of inner-city labor markets are beyond the control of public
educators. Yet the implications of these demographic and economic shifts are enormous
for public schools. The family structure, when brittle and breaking, is often less supportive
of children’s learning, yet lower levels of achievement are attributed to alleged weaknesses
of the local school. An eroding tax base, felt in many urban areas, makes it more difficult
to respond to new and diverse demands. Families and employers grow more frustrated
over graduates’ low levels of literacy and basic skills. Civic and ethnic groups predictably
begin to mobilize around more radical school reform strategies—such as school choice.
Mobilizing Political Will
The three social and economic conditions discussed above have thoroughly shaken how
we think about society, mobility, and the motivations of culturally diverse communities—
sustaining the nation’s resilient interest in educational change. But what structure should
educational reform take? The political process by which varied interest groups come to
craft credible reform strategies also fuels the school choice debate. Central controls, of
course, are rarely popular in the decentralized political structure of the United States.
Until the 1960s, however, big and uniform social institutions—schools, universities, health
care and welfare systems—were viewed as the best way to organize democratic and
equitable forms of social support. The common school was to educate all children toward
universal cognitive and moral goals. Welfare systems would efficiently distribute cash
benefits and humanely aid impoverished mothers and their young children.
But the heyday of grand institutions came to a crashing end in the 1960s, primarily
attacked by social critics and the political Left. The civil rights movement, the rise of black
pride, and similar rediscovery of ethnic commitments (and their now-confident political
expression in civil society) challenged the largely white, upper-middle-class bases of many
social institutions, including public schools and universities. Other large institutions—from
hospitals to basic government services—came to be seen as out of touch with local people,
as alienating and impersonal. In the early 1980s, and again in the mid-1990s, the political
Right surged back, struggling to uphold the cultural agenda and fading universals that
once characterized Anglo-American society. At the same time, the Right argued that the
34
social welfare bureaucracy, which had grown rapidly since the 1960s, had become bloated,
costly, and, most damning, ineffective. Billions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on
compensatory education, opportunity programs within universities, and welfare benefits to
families. But was poverty going down? Were the test scores of poor children going up?
The new policy medicine of family choice thus emerges with great force. If antipoverty
remedies lodged in sluggish institutions are not working, why not simply allocate cash
benefits to the family—allowing parents to choose their school, child-care provider, or
form of subsidized housing? And even if this policy strategy is not more effective, it
certainly is more popular, more “democratic.” Family-choice remedies shed two crucial
political liabilities: They do not require hiring more government workers, and they set
aside the assumption that universal remedies fit diverse ethnic neighborhoods and families.
The first helps diffuse opposition to the expansion of antipoverty initiatives. The second
appeals to social democrats on the Left who believe that central government should
forcefully redistribute income but allow pluralistic communities and families to pursue
their own preferences. This latter force will only increase in urban and suburban areas of
the United States, as they become more diverse culturally and more strongly organized
along ethnic lines.
Family-choice remedies are sold, in part, as being rooted in the decentralized magic of
markets. For example, if families are empowered (with vouchers or tax credits) to act from
their particular preferences and definitions of high quality, the array of schools and service
providers will diversify and become more accountable. What is fascinating—surfacing in
several chapters of this book—is that the local political economy of ethnic neighborhoods
at times complements neoclassical economic thinking. When benefits (redistributed by
central political agencies) are targeted to low-income families, many parents do actively
choose a school that they believe better fits their educational agenda than does the
neighborhood school.
Community action strategies—building public remedies from the ethnic neighborhood’s

distinct leadership structure and culture—came to be strongly endorsed by architects of the
War on Poverty. Domestic advisors to presidents Kennedy and Johnson argued that
antipoverty programs would only work if local school and social welfare bureaucracies
could be bypassed, lessening their authority relative to the new power being awarded to
poor and working-class families (Katz, 1989). This strategy was brought to life by school
voucher experiments, such as the now-infamous Alum Rock program serving working-
class communities on the edge of San Jose, California. Advocated by the first federal
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the project held only modest effects on parents’
rate of exit from their neighborhood school and on real organizational reform of
alternative schools (Jencks, 1970). But Alum Rock represented the first volley from
contemporary progressives, who argued that direct empowerment of communities via
liberalized (yet guided) market conditions would spark school improvements and broader
gains for poor families.
These origins of school choice were distinguished by two important elements, which were
largely shed as conservative political leaders took up the charge. First, the OEO
experiments with vouchers were embedded within a larger community-organizing
35
strategy. Vouchers were not the only tool made available to families that lacked political
voice and solidarity. The intent of the Kennedy White House was to move resources into
agencies crafted by local activists. These fledgling organizations would create alternative
social services, including new schools, to serve local families. Vouchers would help finance
innovative education and social services. (This is largely what is happening with the
contemporary voucher experiments in Milwaukee and San Antonio.) Second, under the
initial OEO experiments with choice, vouchers and cash transfers were targeted for low-
income and working-class families. The aim was not to privatize the entire school system,
which would surely exacerbate inequities in school quality and per-pupil spending, but to
help equalize the purchasing power and involvement of poor families.
The tandem goals of community-level organizing and targeted vouchers remain very
much alive in the current financing of preschools and child-care centers. Original
community action agencies still run many Head Start centers. And while state and federal
preschool funding now flows both to service providers and directly to parents via
vouchers, both funding streams are targeted on impoverished and working-poor families
(Fuller & Holloway, in press).
Sustaining a political focus on these two key elements within the public school arena,
however, has proven difficult, in part due to democratic government’s preoccupation with
balancing civil authority between institutions (acting on behalf of the defined public
interest) versus awarding power to the individual family. The welfare state’s concern with
assimilating individuals into the secular nation-state increasingly conflicts with the
pluralistic agendas of many local communities and families, be they middle-class white
ethnics. Latinos, African Americans, or immigrant Koreans.
Contemporary family-choice remedies have undoubtedly succeeded in mobilizing wider

political support for antipoverty programs. While support for institutional or bureaucratic
remedies has collapsed in many policy circles, political will behind tax programs and
vouchers for educational and social services has climbed dramatically over the past decade,
even when targeted on the working poor or families living below the poverty line. But
political mobilization is only the first step. The next is to determine whether family-choice
and school choice remedies are more effective in bringing about their promised benefits,
from lessening poverty to boosting children’s school achievement. This is the question that
motivates this book.
What Are The Effects Of School Choice Programs? Grand Claims, Modest
Evidence
The debate over school choice is rich in rhetoric but dismally poor when it comes to hard
evidence. Activists of all shapes and sizes, arriving at the doorsteps of legislatures or school
boards with the choice remedy firmly in hand, advance strong claims about the magical
benefits that allegedly will flow to children, parents, and schools. Opponents parry with
equally impassioned claims about the damage that choice schemes will do to public
schools. Yet despite the breathtaking emotion and steady rise of choice programs across
the country, little is known about the actual effects of these experiments. And scholars
have been slow to study the dynamics of mixed educational markets and choice remedies.
36
The simple aim of this book is to close the gap between grand rhetorical claims and scarce
empirical findings. The new evidence reported in this volume simply begins to test the
claims made by choice advocates and opponents. As these research studies are completed,
we begin to see patterns in how school choice programs operate and the effects these
programs have on families and school organizations. For example, better-educated parents
who already attend most closely to their children’s schooling and performance are
significantly more likely to participate in choice programs, whether we look at inner-city
Milwaukee or suburban Minnesota. Delineating these kinds of patterns is the first step
toward providing empirically grounded advice to policymakers, local educators, and
parents.
Claims of School Choice Proponents
Proponents of choice argue that eliminating the school bureaucracy’s power to assign
children to particular schools will make parents effective market actors who actively
compare the qualities of alternative schools and push for greater accountability at the
neighborhood level. This claim raises two important empirical questions: Are certain types
of parents more likely to exercise choice and exit their neighborhood school (Issue 1)? If
so, and if parents’ tendency to exercise choice varies according to their affluence or
ethnicity, will school choice reinforce social-class inequality (Issue 2)?
Choice proponents also argue that, by unleashing market dynamics and incentives, schools
will be held more accountable than at present, and school principals, presently entangled
in bureaucratic rules and hog-tied by teacher unions, will be able to reward strong
teachers and prune their schools of weak teachers. To determine whether this claim is
true, we need to focus empirical research on a third question: Do choice programs and
liberalized market conditions spark the creation of more effective forms of schooling (Issue
3)?
Finally, choice advocates claim that parental satisfaction and involvement with their child’s
schooling will rise. They assume that if parents are more satisfied, they will more eagerly
attend to their children’s schooling and socialization. This brings us down to the bottom-
line question: Will student achievement rise as a result of stronger accountability, more
discriminating and involved parents, and the rise of novel forms of schooling (Issue 4)?
Recognizing the evidential poverty surrounding the school choice debate, we began in
1992 to invite empirical papers from research teams around the country that spoke to
these four empirical issues. The Harvard Seminar on School Choice and Family Policy,
with generous support from the Lilly Endowment, hosted presentations by most of this
book’s contributors. We commissioned additional papers to include findings from other
research groups. Together, the chapters selected represent the most recent empirical
findings on school choice programs—speaking to which parents actually exercise choice
and whether inequities emerge, innovative schools sprout, and children learn more.
Emerging Evidence: A Story of Cultural and Political Logics
37
Readers of this book may search for patterns among the many empirical findings reported.
Crisp and clean answers are difficult to pinpoint. Our final chapter delineates a few
patterns observed thus far, and we link evidence presented in the chapters to earlier
research on school choice. One fundamental conclusion from this emerging research is
that the effects of choice programs are highly dependent on local conditions: the
organizational structure of the particular choice initiative, the community situation facing
parents, and parents’ range of resources and educational commitments. Keeping this
crucial proviso in mind, certain patterns are discernible across different communities and
choice programs; two basic conceptual frameworks have emerged over the course of this
project that help to explain these patterns.
The Cultural Logic of Families.
Activists and academics, of course, are engulfed in their own ideas about how society and
government should operate. Some implicitly link social progress to breaking down the
ethnic, sectarian, and social-class boundaries that divide local communities. These schisms
also may undermine the government’s own legitimacy and effectiveness. Indeed, defining
a clear role for central and local policy-makers becomes more slippery as the American
polity becomes more pluralistic culturally and politically. Other activists and analysts—
including proponents of school choice—assume that the post-Depression age of great
public ideas that once unified civil society is over. The government has simply gone too
far in pushing equity and the redistribution of income and jobs, in homogenizing the basic
structure and content of public schooling, and in creating school institutions that protect
the interests of teachers and managers but seem unresponsive to children’s needs and
parents’ particular ways of raising their children.
This polarization around the choice issue is unfolding largely within empirical darkness.
Many policy wonks and commentators know very little about the cultural logics employed
by different types of families as parents attempt to make sense of, and benefit from, public
schools. Gross generalizations, for instance, are made about parents in low-income
communities: Either they are incapable of making wise choices for their children and need
a lot of guidance from professional educators, or choice programs will instantly
“empower” them, resulting in positive pressure on the local schools. But as several
chapters in this book illustrate, low-income families are quite diverse in their commitment
to their children’s schooling, in the time they can afford to aid their child at home, and in
their market behavior—that is, how they search out school alternatives and participate in
choice programs.
It may be surprising to read that when choice schemes are established, many inner-city
parents choose not to participate, continuing to send their daughter or son to the
neighborhood school even when they suspect it is of lower quality than alternative schools
newly made available. Why? Parents report, both in surveys and during in-depth
interviews, that they are attracted to the familiarity and proximity of the local school and
that they want their children to feel comfortable. These are the same things that white
middle-class parents seek in a “nice neighborhood”: cultural familiarity, a sense that fellow
parents share their values, beliefs, and customs. This is the first cultural logic that appears
to drive the impassive reaction of some parents to school choice experiments.
38
But few local cultures simply reproduce themselves over time without some penetration
by outside social forces. Indeed, many parents jump at the chance to exit their
neighborhood school and enter an alternative school that appears to be of higher quality.
When St. Louis schools, for instance, began to allow inner-city children to attend
predominantly white suburban schools, over 13,000, mostly black, families chose to
participate, despite the anxiety and costs they incurred… The phenomenal growth of
magnet school enrollments provides further evidence of many parents’ willingness to
exercise choice to find a higher-quality school [see Document #5 below].
Thus we cannot see inner-city or middle-class family cultures as uniform or unchanging.

Parents formulate their educational agendas in diverse ways; they are shaped not only by
indigenous norms and values but also by outside incentives and influences. In Milwaukee,
the vibrant inner-city voucher program was begun by ethnic activists on the Left who
sought higher-quality schools (implicitly linked to the goal of assimilation) and-schools
that would focus directly on African-American or Latino topics within the curriculum (a
particularistic, community-centered goal). Historically, the modern state has seen ethnic
localisms as provincial or backward, threatening to nation-building. But many parents in
pluralistic America seem to want both assimilation and particularistic forms of socialization.
The complexity of local cultures and the multiple ideals that shape different parents’
educational preferences comprise the second facet of cultural logic explored in this book.
(For empirical work on how educational preferences may vary among groups between
and within social classes, see Fuller et al., in press; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Ogbu, 1978; ...)
The cultural logics employed by low-income families are becoming more differentiated,
due largely to the distinct successes of the civil rights movement and Great Society
reforms. For example, Elijah Anderson’s (1990) long-term study of poor Philadelphia
families details how many blacks, aided by affirmative action programs, have joined the
middle class and fled the ghetto. These parents move into neighboring communities that
have safer streets and higher-quality schools. Left behind are families that typically have
less education and fewer job options. Nouveau middle-class black parents essentially vote
with their feet; parents remaining within impoverished city blocks more frequently invoke
the conventional script of sending their child to the local school, no questions asked. The
cultural logics of low-income parents related to school choice are somewhat pliable, but
only when the broader opportunity structure opens in recognizable ways. In the absence
of real improvement in job opportunities or educational openings, the scripted behavior of
many low-income and even middle-class parents will be more difficult to alter.
The Political Rationality of School Institutions.
The original political logic of schooling in North America was quite simple: Local
communities built a one-room schoolhouse, hired a teacher, and used available readers.
Within this standard pedagogical technology, variable community norms about religion,
virtue, and literacy did at times penetrate into the classroom. Central government was
nowhere to be found in the administration of local schools until the Progressive era,
beginning in the late nineteenth century. As late as 1890, the average state department of
education had just two employees (Meyer, Tyack, Nagel, & Gordon, 1979). But as
39
American society became more urban and culturally pluralistic (through recurring waves
of European immigration and northward migration of blacks from the South), the school’s
political rationality became more complex, depending on local priorities.
First, urban school districts sprouted, growing into classic bureaucracies, often explicitly
following the tenets of factory-like and allegedly more efficient firms (Tyack, 1974). This
allowed urban authorities to expand the number of schools and the scale of public
schooling. Administrative progressives at the turn of the twentieth century argued that
bureaucracy would offer more uniform types of school organization and pedagogy,
expressing faith that standardization would ensure orderly expansion of schooling and
buffer the diversity of demands being placed on urban schools. Even in the absence of
strong government involvement, at either the state or federal level, the organizational
form and content of public schooling became remarkably similar as professional
organizations formed and the legitimacy of bureaucratic administration rose (Meyer, Scott,
Strang, & Creighton, 1988).
Second, moving the clock forward to the 1960s, bureaucratic school administration
proved quite successful in responding to democratic pressures to serve nonmainstream
students in novel, rather than uniform, ways. Programs were begun to aid desegregation in
the South, to boost achievement of low-income children, to help Spanish-speaking
children assimilate more rapidly, and to address the complex needs of disabled children. In
each case, school districts-still largely under local political control yet often responding in
standardized ways to specific mandates—added staff to implement these categorical
programs emanating from Washington and state capitals. Thus local school bureaucracies
became larger and more complex, responding to democratic pressures from various
interest groups. These more differentiated urban interests began to argue that their
children were diverse and different, requiring the panoply of programs that have been
enacted since the Great Society, from bilingual to vocational to special education programs
(Cohen & Spillane, 1992; Fuller & Izu, 1986; Rowan, 1990). Yet the classroom
institution remained largely unchanged and remarkably similar across diverse communities
(Goodlad, 1984).
This contradiction entraps many school districts and drives their cautious political logic.
On the one hand, school leaders and their bureaucratic forms of management earnestly try
to respond to a variety of democratic pressures and vocal interests, advanced by parents,
civic and ethnic activists, teacher unions, and employers critical of the public schools.
Pivotal to the argument put forward by school choice advocates is that over time the locus
of educational decision-making has become the faceless, unapproachable district office
downtown. This is where school authorities are centrally trying to mediate contradictory
pressures. No longer can the local school principal or head teacher sit with parents and
town leaders, talk through concerns held by the local community, and act on these
problems (Chubb & Moe, 1990). This is undoubtedly true in a good number of local
areas.
At the same time, deep-seated organizational scripts, not only surface-level administrative
practices, reinforce the status quo and the infamous uniformity found in American schools
and classrooms. Indeed, schools are resilient, often impenetrable institutions: Actors behave
40
within age-old social roles, and basic structural elements persist (during 50-minute periods
kids are expected to sit and absorb knowledge solely within the walls of classrooms,
reading textbooks that must have universal acceptability, since they are designed by
national publishers). The classroom’s technology remains simple and highly routine.
Advocates of choice programs threaten to shake up these institutional routines and rituals.
Choice programs also rattle the established micropolitics surrounding school districts,
comprised of interdependent administrators, teacher unions, and civic activists. To begin
with, choice schemes threaten to alter budget allocations between traditional
neighborhood schools and alternative schools. As Jeffrey Henig shows in his study of
Montgomery County’s magnet school program…, these resource shifts may be limited
and kept very quiet so as not to rile parents and interest groups that remain tied to
neighborhood schools. The starting point for charter schools is simply to discard education
laws and regulations that teacher unions have spent generations setting in place to enhance
their members’ interests. And powerful progressive interests—watching over bilingual and
special education programs—are nervous about uncontrolled choice programs that render
the implementation of categorical programs more difficult. In sum, a large part of school
administrators’ political logic is to move reform ever so slowly, so as not to threaten the
institution’s legitimacy or to risk opposition from vocal interest groups.
The political logic around choice also involves a broader debate over the importance of
public ideas and the desirability of a national culture. Government’s fundamental
legitimacy and the credibility of policymakers rest on popular faith in political goals that
are national or regional in scope. These involve unifying ideals, such as making society
more fair and equitable, advancing traditional “family values,” or assuring economic
growth and upward mobility. What is most threatening to the central government about
choice remedies is that they place local social-class and ethnic commitments on an equal
par with national civic ideals. School choice implies, for instance, that if young white
professionals want to have schools serving their particular educational interests, they
should have a right to a share of public resources to pursue their private interests. Of
course, the liberal democratic state has long struggled with this contradiction between
government for the common good and government for the pursuit of individual interests.
Which way should the government move? Which interests of what particular social
groups should receive priority? And how is the government’s own legitimacy (including
the credibility of school authorities) best advanced in the long run
The Limits Of Empirical Evidence
Many political leaders and local activists are anxious to know more about the local effects
of school choice programs. Proponents hope to observe novel, robust schools rising within
newly liberalized market conditions. Opponents eagerly hope to read of no or slight
effects on parental satisfaction and student achievement. But until recently choice
programs have been small in number and modest in size. Larger programs and richer
empirical evidence are coming from overseas, most notably from England and Scotland
(Willms & Echols, 1993). We can learn one major lesson from the chapters in this book:
Local economic and cultural conditions, as well as the structure of a particular choice
scheme, make an enormous difference in its effects. We should be extremely careful not to
41
generalize findings from one setting to another. Within the United States, it will take time
before we have sufficient evidence to judge the efficacy of the national school choice
experiment.
Readers also must be aware of the technical limits of the extant empirical work. First,
almost no longitudinal data exist on how student learning changes over time and as a result
of participating in a neighborhood versus a choice school. This volume includes the most
soundly constructed longitudinal evaluation in the United States: John Witte’s work in
Milwaukee (Chapter 6). Sophisticated quantitative analysis can do a lot of things. But
without longitudinal data, it is impossible to unambiguously attribute learning gains to
program participation. Second, most studies to date assess family background and
educational parental practices only in a limited way. Parents of differing social classes and
ethnic groups vary enormously in how they encourage their children to do well in school.
Patterns of school choice certainly vary with these parenting practices. If we fail to remove
the effects of these parenting practices, we can incorrectly attribute gains in achievement
only to schools. This has occurred in the school-effects literature in general and is already
spilling over into school choice research (Fuller & Clarke, 1994; Lockheed & Jimenez,
Chapter 7, this volume). Third, researchers are still not digging into the crucial issue of
why private or non-neighborhood schools at times boost parental satisfaction and student
achievement. Does the civic “right” to choose your child’s school result in a feeling of
efficacy and invite involvement? Do selected schools really differ in their ability to
incorporate parents’ preferences and participation? How do the organizational features of
choice schools differ from the typical neighborhood school? And is the contingent fit
between parental practices and the school’s attributes, not simply the school’s
characteristics, the key? A small number of scholars are just beginning to dig into these
basic issues (most notably, the 1993 Bryk, Lee, and Holland study of Catholic schools).
In short, this empirical work should be read carefully and critically. Government’s
commitment to family choice and to empowering local communities is here to stay. We
are just beginning to study the real effects of this appealing policy remedy. We still have
much to learn about its benefits, unanticipated outcomes, and negative effects on different
children, parents, and schools.
REFERENCES
Anderson, E. (1990). Street wise: Race, class, and change in an urban community. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Astone, N., & McLanahan, S. (1991). Family structure, parental practices, and high school completion.
American Sociological Review, 56, 309-320.
Bryk, A., Lee, V., & Holland, P. (1993). Catholic schools and the common good. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (1992). School choice: A special report. Princeton, NJ:
Author.
Chubb, ]., & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
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Cohen, D., & Spillane, J. (1992). Policy and practice: Relations between governance and instruction. In G.
Grant (Ed.), Review of research in education (Vol. 13; pp. 3-49). Washington, DC: American Educational
Research Association.
Elam, S., Rose, L., & Galiup, A. (1991). The 23rd annual Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward the
public schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 73, 41-56.
Fuller, B., & Clarke, P. (1994). Raising school effects while ignoring culture? Review of Educational Research,
64(1), 119-157.
Fuller, B., Eggers-Pierola, C., Holloway, S., Rambaud, M., & Liang, X. (in press). Rich culture, poor
markets. Teachers College Record.
Fuller, B., & Holloway, S. (in press). When the state innovates: Institutions and interests create the preschool
sector. In A. Pallas (Ed.), Sociology of education and socialization. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Fuller, B., & Izu, J. (1986). What shapes the organizational beliefs of teachers? American Journal of Education,
94, 501-535.
Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Jencks, C. (1970, July 4). Giving parents money to pay for schooling: Education vouchers. The New
Republic, pp. 19-21.
Katz, M. (1989). The undeserving poor. New York: Basic Books.
Levin, H. (1991). The economics of educational choice. Economics of Education Review, 10, 137-158.
Levy, F., & Murnane, R. (1992). U.S. earnings levels and earnings inequality: A
review of recent trends and proposed explanations. Journal of Economic
Literature, 30,1333-1381.
Liang, X., & Fuller, B. (1994). School choice and family policy: annotated bibliography. Unpublished
manuscript. Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA.
Matute-Bianchi, M. (1986). Ethnic identities and patterns of school success and failure among Mexican-
descent and Japanese-American students. American Journal of Education, 95(1), 233-255.
McArthur, E., Colopy, K., & Schlaline, B. (1995). Use of school choice (Education
Policy Issues Bulletin #95-742). Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics.
Meyer, J., Scott, W. R., Strang, D., & Creighton, A. (1988). Bureaucratization without centralization:
Changes in the organizational system of American public education, 1940-1980. In L. Zucker (Ed.),
Institutional patterns and organizations (pp. 139-167). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Meyer, J., Tyack, D., Nagel, J., & Gordon, A. (1979). Public education and nation-building in America.
American Journal of Sociology, 85, 591-613.
Murnane, R., Willett, J., & Levy, F. (1995). The growing importance of cognitive skills in wage
determination. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 77, 251-266.
Ogbu, J. (1978). Minority education and caste: The American system in cross-cultural perspective. New York:
Academic Press.
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Orfield, G., & Ashkinaze, C. (1991). The closing door: Conservative policy and black opportunity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Rasell, E., & Rothstein, R. (Eds.). (1993). School choice: Examining the evidence. Washington, DC: Economic
Policy Institute.
Raywid, M. (1985). Family choice arrangements in public schools: A review of the literature. Review of
Educational Research, 55, 435-468.
Rowan, B. (1990). Commitment and control: Alternative strategies for the organizational design of schools.
In C. Cazden (Ed.), Review of research in education (Vol. 16; pp. 353-389). Washington, DC: American
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Schneider, B., & Coleman, J. (1993). Parents, their children, and schools. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Tyack, D. (1974). The one best system. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wells, A. (1993). Time to choose: America at the crossroads of school choice policy. New York: Hill & Wang.
Willms, D., & Echols, F. (1993). The Scottish experience of parental choice. In E. Rasell & R. Rothstein
(Eds.), School choice: Examining the evidence (pp. 49-86). Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
Teske and Schneider walk us through some of the research that has been conducted on the effects of
school choice on educational outcomes.
Document #3: Paul Teske and Mark Schneider, “What Research Can Tell Policymakers
about School Choice,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 20:4 (2001) 609-631.32
Introduction
The fights over various forms of school choice are akin to religious wars, where
dogged faith in markets or in the importance of traditional public schools often
matters more than evidence. Increasingly, however, researchers are providing sound
information to guide policymakers in their decisions about school choice. In this
article, the authors assessed the accumulating evidence about the effects of school
choice on a variety of educational outcomes. Important conclusions from each of
more than 100 studies were then categorized. This combination of evidence is
important in a domain in which economists, political scientists, sociologists,
educational scholars, and others often read work only in their own discipline.
Moreover, while other researchers have reviewed various pieces of the choice
literature, most are focused on only one aspect or type of choice. Here a broader
33
analysis is sought.
32
The initial research behind this project was supported by the Brookings Institutions Brown
Center on Education Policy. Paul Teske is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Political
Science Department at SUNY Stony Brook. Mark Schneider is Professor and Chair of the Political Science
Department at SUNY Stony Brook.
33
The recent reviews include those prepared by education scholars—Elmore and Fuller (1996), Fuller et al.
(1999), Goldhaber (1999), Ogawa and Dutton (1994); those prepared by economists—Cohn (1997) and
Levin (1998); and those prepared by political scientists—Henig (1998), Moe (1995), and Peterson (1998).
44
It is important to note that school choice is not a single reform, but comes in many
varieties that differ on important characteristics. It is also important to remember
that choice is not new: Many families have long exercised it through residential location
decisions. Other forms of choice began at least in the 1960s with magnet schools,
alternative public schools, intradistrict public choice, and interdistrict public choice.
The most recent and most controversial reforms are charter schools and vouchers
(Henig, 2000).
These forms of choice vary on important characteristics.34 Magnet schools,

alternative schools, and most forms of intra- and interdistrict choice can all be
characterized as option-demand systems, where parents can decide to choose schools
for their children, but the local school remains the default option, which most parents
use. Charter schools and vouchers are also option-demand alternatives in which
parents must “choose to choose.” In contrast, there are relatively few “universal choice
plans” in which there is no default neighborhood school so that all parents must
choose a school for their children.
Magnet schools were introduced in many metropolitan areas in the 1960s, largely
to encourage voluntary desegregation and to provide specialized curricula. Intradistrict
public school choice, either option-demand or universal, was introduced into areas
like East Harlem. New York, Montclair, New Jersey, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in the 1970s. A few states encouraged interdistrict option-demand public choice in
the 1990s, especially so to enable inner-city residents to send children to suburban
public schools. Charter schools—public schools of choice that relax the extent of
regulation governing the school’s activities—were introduced in Minnesota in 1991
and are now the most rapidly growing choice segment. Vouchers provide parents
with portable funds to take to any school, public or private, and they may be supported
by public funds, as in Milwaukee and Cleveland, or by private philanthropic funds.
They too gained in popularity throughout the 1990s. Much of the intense debate
about vouchers has focused on the use of public money to support private schools,
especially with private school vouchers. However, some of the other differences
between choice programs may be as important in defining the balance between public
and private control—the selection mechanisms, the degree of public accountability,
and the degree to which schools can control their curriculum—and may be as
important as the flow of money in defining the “public-ness” of a choice school.
Some conclusions discussed here cut across almost all forms of choice, while
elements of the institutional design of choice programs critically influence several of
the outcomes. In addition to the type of choice, these elements include the number of
options available, the manner in which officials make information available about
choice programs, the rules about how schools can select students, and socioeconomic,
financial, and other barriers to family entry in the choice process. While the different
Levin’s analytic review, for example, focuses only on vouchers, as do Moe’s and Petersons.
34
See Schneider, Teske, and Marschall. (2000), especially chapters 1 and 2, for a discussion of these forms
of choice, and also Henig (2000).
45
types of choice—such as magnet schools, interdistrict choice, charter schools, and

voucher programs—share some institutional elements, even within each of these
categories some programs differ from others, and these differences affect outcomes.
Parents have choice when they can actively choose to what school to send their
child. Of course, choice over residential location is the traditional, and still dominant,
mode of choosing schools. Although school choice made by residential choice can
provide a valuable research base (e.g.. Hoxby. 1999), the focus of this paper is mainly
on alternate schooling arrangements that increase the opportunity for parents to
choose their children’s schools without having to change residence. Also, it is important
to compare the effects newer forms of choice have on a variety of desired outcomes
with the reality of current school arrangements, rather than to compare choice systems
with some theoretical ideal…
The most firmly established outcomes of choice are: parents who choose report
being more satisfied with their children’s schools; most parents say they care mainly
about academic values in choosing schools; and parents who choose tend to become
more involved in schooling. There is some controversy about how widely disseminated
information about choice is, whether choice enhances students’ performance, and
whether choice exacerbates levels of stratification.
This paper highlights results of the studies that come closest to what Hoxby (2000)
calls the “gold standard” of policy-focused social science research. When applied to
the study of school choice this standard includes a randomly drawn control group,
detailed baseline data on not just demographic characteristics, but on the behaviors
of parents and students before receiving the opportunity to choose, longitudinal
assessment, and data on attrition.
CHOICE AND THE PARENTAL DECISIONMAKING MODEL
This review is organized by the steps of the choice process that parents can be assumed
to follow. Essentially, this contrasts with a “straw-man”—a non-choice—model, in
which parents happen to live in a particular place, send their children to their local
school, and live (happily, ever after) with whatever happens there.
In this model of choice, first, like any “rational consumer” of a good or service,
parents decide on what they want from a school for their child, based on their
preferences and values about education. Then, parents determine how and from whom
to get information about schools in their potential choice set that might offer what
they want in their child’s schooling. With at least some of this information in hand,
they then decide which school is best for their child. This placement is subject to
constraints by districts or schools, including elements such as racial integration,
income limits, limited transportation, or a lottery, which may not allow parents to get
exactly what they want. This choice of school for a child then either works out well or
not. If it does not work out, and parents are dissatisfied, some may seek a different
choice for their children the following year.
46
At the same time other parents are making choices, and there may be important
peer effects on the education of children (Bishop, 1999; Ferguson and Ladd, 1996;
Gamoran, 1992; Steinberg, Brown, and Dornbusch, 1996). Thus, the choices of
others, made at the same time, also matter. As a result of the possible empowering
effect of choice (or even a written “contractual” requirement for parental
involvement, as in some private and charter schools), parents may become more
involved in the school and in their child’s education, which may improve educational
outcomes. If this process works well, the school fits the child and vice versa, and
satisfaction increases all the way around. As a result, objective performance,
measured, for example, by test scores, graduation rates, and college attendance, might
be expected to improve over previous outcomes.
All parents may not employ all aspects of this decision model, and some may make
their decision using shortcuts or in a more passive manner. But, this general
decision-making model helps to establish the hypotheses that various researchers have
examined and helps structure the following analysis.
Choice and Parental Preferences
Do parents who make active school choices display different sets of preferences from
others? The bulk of the evidence suggests that parents who choose schools are different
in some ways from parents who do not. The exact nature of these differences varies
by the type of choice system and the context of choice.
As noted above, one common form of choice is option-demand, in which alternative

schools are offered along with traditional neighborhood schools. Children are assigned
to their neighborhood school by default and parents are not forced to choose. Most
studies find that in such option-demand choice programs, parents of higher
socioeconomic status (SES)—measured by education, income, or other factors—and
white parents are more likely to exercise the option to choose. The values these parents
hold may differ, as well: They seem more oriented to progressive-type school curricula,
35
while lower SES, minority parents tend to prefer more traditional academic programs
(Schneider, et al., 2000).
Despite these differences, almost all studies of public school choice find that most
parents say that academic programs and high performance motivate their choices.
Armor and Peiser (1998) find that Massachusetts parents report choosing a school in
a different district because they seek, in order: high standards, curriculum, facilities,
safety, small size, and good teachers. In Milwaukee, Witte (2000) shows that high
academic standards, good teachers, and other academic factors are important to low-
income parents who choose schools. Goldring (1997) finds that parents in Cincinnati
chose magnet schools mainly on the basis of academic criteria. In their study of
parental attitude toward charter schools, Vanourek and colleagues (1998, pp. 198-
199) found that parents generally (as well as parents in the lowest-third of the income
distribution) choose charter schools because they seek: small size, higher standards,
35
The authors use the term “minority” even though in central city American public school districts blacks
and Hispanics are often the majority in numbers.
47
program closer to parental educational philosophy, greater opportunity for

involvement, and better teachers.
In the Cleveland voucher program, which is limited to low-income parents, Greene,

Howell, and Peterson (1998) find that parents report academic quality (85 percent)
and safety (79 percent) as the primary reasons for participation. Beales and Wahl
(1995) find that educational quality is the most important reason low-income families
in Milwaukee cite for participating in the private PAVE voucher program. Martinez
and colleagues (1995) in San Antonio and Heise, Colbum, and Lamberti (1995) in
Indianapolis find that educational quality is the most critical factor low-income parents
cited for using private vouchers.
A problem is that most of the studies are based on surveys of what parents say they
want from the schools and very few are based on the actual choice behavior of parents.
While there is no doubt that low-income parents at least report making school choices
based mainly on academic issues, there is more debate about their actual behavior.
Some have questioned whether parents have the ability to determine which schools
are appropriate for their children (Boyer, 1992; Bridge, 1978; Wells, 1993). Some
studies find evidence that some parents use choice to avoid sending their children to
schools filled with racial minorities.36 Given that a majority of private schools are
religious-affiliated, it is not surprising that some studies show that parents who select
private schools are much more likely to emphasize values than are other parents
(Martinez et al., 1995; Smith and Meier, 1995; Schneider, et al., 2000; Williams,
Hancher, and Hutner, 1983).
When the racial composition of the district is largely minority, as in many inner
cities, parents who exercise choices do not differ much racially from others, but may
differ on educational attainment or other aspects of SES. Lee, Croninger, and Smith
(1996), using survey data and hierarchical linear modeling, find that the better-educated
subset of low-income parents near Detroit are more likely to use choice.
Studies of vouchers in Milwaukee and San Antonio suggest that even when income
restrictions are built into the eligibility requirements, more educated parents are
more likely to apply (Moe, 1995). There is also evidence within schools that, given
options, white and Asian-American students select more academic courses than do
black and Hispanic students (Bryk, Lee, and Holland, 1993; Ravitch, 1997).
Regardless of the type of choice examined, academic factors are most important in what
virtually all parents say they are looking for in making school choices. Confirming the
survey evidence is Hoxby’s (1999) study of residentially based school choice: Assessing
parents’ actual behavior in different metropolitan areas, Hoxby finds that parents in areas
with more choice end up with schools that are more rigorous and academically oriented.
Nevertheless, in terms of behavior, higher-SES parents and white parents appear

more likely to favor schools with fewer low-income students or minorities. Expanded
36
See Henig (1996, p. 106) on magnet schools in Montgomery County, Maryland; Smith and Meier (1995)
on evidence from Florida; and Cookson (1994) generally.
48
choice systems therefore could exacerbate stratification or segregation because

different types of parents systematically make different choices. However, such
stratification depends partly on the specific institutional selection mechanisms that
choice systems actually implement. And, in an already highly stratified American
public school system, not a theoretical one with schools thoroughly mixed by parental
income, education, and race, the issue is whether choice would significantly worsen
segregation and stratification.
Do Parents Gather Accurate and Useful Information?
Theories linking information and choice are based on the assumption that parents
will engage in more purposeful information searches when school systems are designed
to make their choices matter more—that is, when the benefits of being informed
increase. However, the level of information parents have is also a function of how
costly it is to acquire that information, which schools and districts can influence.
Chubb and Moe (1990, p. 564) argue that choice will change the incentives to become
informed. As Coons and Sugarman (1978, p. 188) summarize the situation: “In a
system with no options, ignorance might be bliss. In a system based on choice,
ignorance is ruin.”
Basic information about local schools can be hard to find. Principals and the school
board in the federally sponsored 1970s voucher experiment in Alum Rock, California,
did not provide much information to parents about school performance (Henig, 1994,
p. 120). Wilson (1992) found that even the most basic information about schools in
the districts he studied was not generally available, and Carver and Salganik (1991,
p.75), Schneider and Buckley (2000), and Schneider and colleagues (2000) could not
gather information about test scores, grade retention, graduation, and college
attendance rates from many schools of choice.
Some evidence indicates that incentives provided by school choice affect

information-gathering behavior, but that it varies by parents as well as by institutional
setting (see, e.g. Glenn, McLaughlin, and Salganik, 1993; Martinez, Godwin, and
Kemerer, 1995,1996; Witte and Rigdon, 1993). In Alum Rock, parents who participated
in the voucher program were consistently more knowledgeable than non-participants
and their information level increased over time and then dropped off rapidly when
the demonstration program ended (Bridge and Blackman, 1978, pp. 27-45). In
contrast, Bridge (1978, pp. 512-514) found that parents with lower education, income,
and educational aspirations for their children were less informed at first, leading
Bridge to call it “the Achilles’ heel of choice.” However, Lines (1994) reanalyzed the
Alum Rock data and finds that the differences between groups of Alum Rock parents
largely disappeared over time, a result consistent with findings by Bauch (1989, pp.
301-302), who used a different choice data set.
Studies have found that lower-income and minority parents are less aware of magnet
schools options (Henig, 1996). For urban public school choice, Schneider and colleagues
(2000) find that minority and low-income parents tend to have smaller and lower-quality
social networks about education, an embedded reality that choice does not alter. This is
49
important because several recent studies confirm that friends and relatives are one of the
most frequent sources of information about school choice alternatives (e.g., Beales and
Wahl, 1995; Heise et al., 1995; Rubenstein and Adelman, 1994).
In terms of information actually held, using a large database and a quasi-experimental

research design, Schneider and colleagues (2000) find that urban parents
do not have high levels of accurate information about test scores, class size and other
objective data, and that choice does not increase their levels of accurate information.
But, they find that parents with choice are more likely to be able to provide more
basic information, specifically the name of their school principal. These authors also
find that suburban parents with public school choice (in Montclair, New Jersey)
generally have more accurate information than comparable parents without choice,
which is probably a function of incentives working in an information-rich environment
for information-hungry, better-educated parents.
Thus, parents appear more likely to gather basic information about schools than
specific, detailed information, although some parents—particularly low-income and
minority—lack even simple information. But policy designs can at least partly influence
information access; how well parents become informed is partly a function of the
availability and mechanisms of information the schools provided (for organizational
report cards see Gormley and Weimer, 1999). Better-educated and more involved
parents are more likely to get more accurate information under any institutional
mechanisms. The implications of this disparity are less clear; perhaps less-informed
parents can use shortcuts, such as visual indicators of cleanliness, safety, and
attractiveness that they observe by walking near or into schools to get “enough”
information to make reasonable choices (Bickers and Stein, 1998; Schneider et al.,
2000). Or, such disparities in information may lead to further school stratification.
This issue is far from resolved.
Parent Satisfaction with Choice
Researchers agree almost completely on at least one outcome: Parents who choose
report being more satisfied with the school than those who do not choose. Peterson
(1998, p. 17) summarizes results from the Milwaukee, Indianapolis, San Antonio,
and Cleveland voucher programs, stating: “If the only thing that counts is
consumer satisfaction, school choice is a clear winner.” There is, however, some
disagreement about the causes of higher satisfaction and how long the effect
can be expected to last.
Driscoll (1993) finds significantly higher levels of satisfaction in selective public

schools, compared with the matched non-selective schools in her NELS data set.
Ogawa and Dutton (1994) report that choice leads to greater parental satisfaction.
McArthur, Colopy, and Schlaine (1995, p. 2) find that 82 percent of private school
parents reported being “very satisfied” with their schools, compared with 61 percent
for parents with children in public schools they had chosen, compared with 52 percent
in assigned public schools. Martinez and colleagues (1995, 1996) report increased
levels of satisfaction for parents whose children were accepted into the selective
50
alternative public schools, compared with their previous school. Schneider and
colleagues (2000) find higher levels of satisfaction among public school and private
school parents who have found schools that match their preferences for different
aspects of education.
Among parents who had chosen charter schools, Vanourek and colleagues (1998,
pp. 193-195) report considerably higher levels of parental satisfaction than at their
previous school; parents are most satisfied with opportunities for participation,
class size, curriculum, school size, and teachers’ attention to individual students.
Parents of special needs children also report higher levels of satisfaction in these
charter schools.
Studies of voucher programs often have examined satisfaction. According to Bridge

and Blackman (1978), satisfaction among Alum Rock parents increased in the first
two years of that choice experiment, but declined after the fifth year, as frustration
and disappointment with the struggling program set in. In the Cleveland scholarship
program, Greene and colleagues (1998) report that about 63 percent of parents who
used the scholarship were very satisfied, while only 30 percent of those who were
awarded a scholarship but did not use it (because of lack of family funds to supplement
the voucher, not being accepted into a private school, or another reason) report being
very satisfied with their child’s public school. Witte (2000) finds that after using the
voucher, Milwaukee parents’ satisfaction increased greatly, a finding confirmed by
Peterson and Noyes (1997, p. 143). Beales and Wahl (1995) find that 56 percent of the
PAVE voucher parents give their school an “A” grade, compared with only 26 percent
in the Milwaukee public schools. From the studies of private vouchers he reviewed,
Moe (1995, p. 30) concludes: “For now, data on parent satisfaction offers the best
evidence available on the impact of vouchers.”
To some, higher levels of satisfaction represent prima facie evidence that choice is
working. If the point is to let parents be consumers who can use their “market-like”
power of “voting with their feet” to decide what is good for their child, what evidence
of success could be stronger than higher reported satisfaction?
On the other hand, others do not believe that the satisfaction issue is fully resolved.
Fuller, Elmore, and Orfield (1996, p. 19) write: “researchers are still not digging into
the critical issue of why private or non-neighborhood schools at times boost parental
satisfaction.” Some suggest it may be an “ex post” rationalization that since the parent
went through the extra effort of choosing a school, it must be better; otherwise the
process was a waste of time (on this phenomenon generally, see Festinger, 1957). Or,
it may be a rationalization that because the school involved a selection process, it
must be better. For example, Erickson (1982, p. 105) finds: “Citizens who actively
choose the schools which their children attend, from among a variety of options,
seem far more satisfied with their schools than are parents who simply do the ‘normal’
thing, with little thought.” According to Erickson, even if there are no visible reasons
for choice to increase satisfaction, many parents may seek to justify their investment
of resources by selectively gathering and interpreting information about performance
and by indicating increased satisfaction.
51
Schools of choice may also have done a better “marketing” job in convincing parents
that they have purchased something valuable even if the real performance of the
schools is low (see, e.g., Rothstein, 1998). Ogawa and Dutton (1994) suggest that
higher satisfaction might be a temporary phenomenon that will stop when high
expectations are not met over time.
Still, some advocates of choice argue that it does not matter why parents report
greater satisfaction than other comparable parents. In political terms, such
parental satisfaction is also likely to provide support for policies that further expand
choice. Moe (2001) and other surveys reveal that low-income and minority parents
support and use choice programs at higher percentages than the rest of the
population, a finding associated with their greater dissatisfaction with current
schooling arrangements.
Parents are not the only relevant actors who report higher satisfaction in choice
schools. Sometimes, students have also been surveyed, and they too report being
more satisfied with schools they have chosen (Peterson, 1998). Driscoll (1993, p. 158)
finds that choice students were more likely to report that “they got along well with
teachers, that the quality of teaching was high, and that teachers praised them and
listened to them.” Vanourek and coworkers (1998) report higher levels of satisfaction
in charter schools for students and for teachers, as well as for parents, compared
with their previous school. Peterson (1998, p. 19) also notes that voucher studies
suggest greater teacher satisfaction and lower student turnover.
Student Performance Outcomes
For many policy analysts, and increasingly for politicians, the most important “bottom
line” in education is student performance. Standardized test scores are the outcome
most often examined, but other important student performance outcomes include
dropout and turnover rates, high school graduation rates, and college attendance. In
most of the studies reviewed here, scholars focus on the performance of the students
who make choices, compared with a control group. The control group is usually
made up of students who did not make a choice, but in some recent studies, the
control group is made up of those who applied for private scholarships, but did not
win a “lottery.” Only a few studies examine whether the existence of choice for some
students influences the performance of non-choosers, positively through schoolimproving
competition, or negatively through the loss of possible positive “peer effects”
on those students “left behind.”
First examined are the studies that analyze the performance of active choosers.
The evidence for magnet and selective alternative public schools is mixed. Driscoll
(1993) did not find achievement test differences between the selective and non-selective
schools she examined. In the Alum Rock experiment, researchers find no consistent
differences in student outcomes for those using the vouchers. Blank (1990, p. 93)
examines several magnet programs in 15 cities in great detail, but data over time on
achievement and proper controls were extremely limited, leading him to argue that
52
“no statistical comparisons of outcomes across the studies, or comparisons with a

national standard, would be possible.” Orfield (1990, p. 123) argues that these studies
of magnet schools give us no reliable data on student performance.
More recently, Henig (1994, p. 138) discusses limited evidence of some performance
improvements in the magnet school program in Montgomery County, Maryland for
students in the program the longest, but does not attribute it to choice. Although
Plank and colleagues (1993) do not specify their statistical results carefully, based on
NELS data, they report positive effects from grades 8 to 10. In a model that
incorporates selection effects and multiple controls, Gamoran (1996) finds positive
performance results for magnet schools and public school choice schools.
Similarly, Martinez and colleagues (1995, 1996), in their study of selective public
alternatives schools in San Antonio, find significant positive effects on reading and
math test scores of those students in the alternative schools.
While more data should be streaming in during the next few years, for now the
evidence on charter school performance is limited. Vanourek and colleagues (1998,
pp. 190-193) report that charter parents and students self-report much higher
performance in the charter schools compared to in their previous school.
Scholars have developed a large literature on whether students in private schools

generally, and Catholic schools in specific, perform better than comparable students
in public schools. After some initial studies found positive effects from private schools
(e.g., Coleman and Hoffer, 1987), more careful controls for student differences were
added, leading Gamoran (1996) and Goldhaber (1996) to find no significant positive
test score effects for private schools. In other national studies that examine high
school graduation rates and college attendance rather than test scores, Evans and
Schwab (1995) and Neal (1997) do find significantly higher performance for students
in Catholic schools. Thus, for now, the evidence on the comparative performance of
private schools is not clearly in favor of higher test scores, but researchers find that
other valuable outcomes may occur from attendance in Catholic or other private
schools (Bryk et al., 1993).
Perhaps the most well-known recent debate on choice and student test scores is
from the Milwaukee voucher program. After studying the issue for several years,
Witte (2000) reported no test score improvement effects for voucher students compared
with students still in the Milwaukee public schools. Greene and coworkers (1996)
and Peterson and Noyes (1997) find positive test score effects after 3 years in the
program, using the students who applied, but were not selected, for the voucher
program as a control group. Witte argues that these studies did not adequately deal
with the large numbers of students who dropped out along the way, thus biasing the
results. Rouse (1998) finds positive effects for math scores, though smaller than the
Peterson and Greene results, but not for reading. Rouse notes that the critical
methodological issues are the control groups used, family background controls, and
student mobility issues. Some of the issues in this debate are based on legitimately
different approaches to the question, while others are covers for deeper ideological
53
battles. Given the disagreement, however, the mixed results of the Rouse study are
perhaps the most plausible for Milwaukee.
In his review of private voucher programs, Moe (1995, p. 29) argues: “The best data
on student performance, oddly enough, come from the Student-Sponsor Partnership,
which in most respects is the least studied of the four [privately funded voucher]
programs.” In that study of 1300 “at risk” students supported since 1986, Hill (1995)
finds that 70 percent graduate from high school, compared with 39 percent across
New York City public schools; that 90 percent of these graduates attend college; and
that they earn higher SAT scores than the control group.
Further studies of privately funded voucher programs are underway, in New York
City, Washington, D.C, Dayton, and other cities, as well as more in-depth studies
over long time periods in Milwaukee, Cleveland, San Antonio, and Indianapolis. These
studies use experimental controls based on random selection from the outset, and
are beginning to generate better data not only on test scores, but also on other
outcomes, such as student turnover, graduation rates, and parent involvement. Early
results from DC, Dayton, and New York City (Howell et al., 2000) show clear
performance gains for some groups of students using the vouchers, particularly blacks,
compared with the control group.37
In assessing the totality of the results from these studies, the studies that come
closest to the “gold standard” in research methodology appear to be the new voucher
analyses (e.g., Howell et al., 2000). From reviewing these studies, and the others, the
best conclusion is that choice programs demonstrate modest to moderate test score
improvements for some, but not all, students who participate, compared with a similar
control group. It is too early to know whether these improvements will be sustained
over time or whether they will grow as more students get adjusted to their new schools.
In addition to the question of whether choice improves the performance of the

choosers themselves, only a few studies have examined the broader performance
effects of choice. Because this is so difficult to do, in an experimental sense, several
scholars have used residential choice and the resulting school competition to examine
performance. Smith and Meier (1995) examine 64 school districts in Florida and find
that the percentage of students in private schools, a measure of competitive pressure,
was either insignificant or negatively associated with public school performance. In
contrast to Smith and Meier, Borland and Howsen (1992) find that greater competition
from private and other public schools in Kentucky is associated with higher public
school student performance. Couch, Shughart, and Williams (1993) also find that
greater private school competition improves the math performance of public school
students in North Carolina (see also Borland and Howsen, 1996).
In perhaps the most comprehensive research of this type Hoxby, in a series of studies
(1994a, 1996, 1999), finds that metropolitan areas with more public school districts
(controlling for population and other metropolitan characteristics) achieve slightly
37
While there was some apparent public disagreement among some members of the assessment team, this
is addressed in Peterson et al. (2000).
54
higher test scores, educational attainment, and future wages, all at lower costs. With
greater private competition, measured at the county level, she finds (1994b) increased
educational attainment and higher future wages by public school students.
Schneider and colleagues (2000) have studied the effect of public school intradistrict
choice on all students in District 4, East Harlem. Considerable anecdotal evidence
had shown a positive effect of choice, both over time and compared with other New
York City districts today. Using empirical data and both time-series and cross-sectional
statistical techniques, they find clear evidence of test score improvements, especially
in reading, that are sustained today, after 25 years of choice. They also find that
District 2 in New York City significantly improved its test scores after implementing
choice programs in the 1990s (Teske et al., 2000a). While many students in these
districts make active choices, not all do, and performance has improved across both
schools of choice and others—suggesting that public school choice does not leave
behind non-choosers in this district.
While not all of these studies conclude that choice enhances performance, it is
significant to note that the best ones do, and that the authors did not find any study
that documents significantly lower performance in choice schools, controlling for
student’s background. While it would be nice to have more unambiguous evidence,
the level of disagreement can be viewed as comparable to the contentious literature
on school resources, where questions of the proper controls and methodology have
become paramount, but where the preponderance of evidence is beginning to link
better outcomes to well-used school resources.
The Effects of Choice on Stratification and Segregation
In the analysis of parental preferences, subject to the constraints of the institutional

rules of choice, systematically different preferences might lead to further
stratification and segregation. For example, Crain (1993) finds that the student
selection and assignment criteria and mechanisms can have a major influence on
the extent of stratification, in his detailed studies of the large New York City magnet
high school program.
These issues raise important policy issues about choice and student performance.
Do citizens and analysts care most about the average level of student performance, or
the distribution around the mean? And, what is the appropriate baseline of comparison
in assessing any stratification? Some have compared the current bleak situation in
inner city schools to the Titanic, a sinking ship with too few lifeboats. If all low-income
students cannot escape poor schools, can some escape through choice or
vouchers? If so, what allocation mechanisms should or will be used: parental resources,
38
aspirations, a lottery system, or something else?
38
As noted, it is important to remember that the greatest stratification comes from the 40 percent of
Americans who report making a school choice based on residential locations. In Hoxby’s (1994a, b, 1999)
studies of choice based on the number of school districts in a metropolitan area, she finds that although
this form of choice leads to slightly greater ethnic and income segregation, performance improves for all
types of students.
55
In the following summary of some studies of stratification, readers should recall

that institutional mechanisms may matter more here than anywhere else. What is
true for one type of public school choice may not be true for other forms, and the
results may be quite different in voucher programs that include private schools.
There is some evidence that minority and lower SES students, as well as those who
perform below average on standardized tests, are often underrepresented in magnet
schools (Blank, 1990; Chriss, Nash, and Stern, 1992; but compare Driscoll, 1993).
For example, while Goldring (1997) finds similar racial composition in magnet and
non-magnet schools in Cincinnati, the SES of parents is higher in the magnet schools.
Most recently, Archbold (2000) demonstrates that magnet school students generally
have parents who are of higher SES than the parents of non-magnet school students
in the same district.
For intradistrict public school choice, Martinez and colleagues (1996) find that
while prior student test scores are important (not surprising in a program that selects
based on student performance), parents education, and educational expectations also
have independent effects on the students that are selected into the program. Schneider
and colleagues (2000) find that parents with children in choice schools in District 4,
New York, are better educated, suggesting some skimming, although racial segregation
is not a major issue in this largely minority district. But, their detailed analysis of
changing test score performance in the 10 worst non-choice neighborhood schools in
District 4 demonstrates that these scores did not decline over time, but actually
improved for the most part, even as more alternative schools were created in the
district. This suggests that a possible counterpoint to any stratification is the
competition that might develop in choice systems as schools try to attract and to
retain their students (Teske et al., 2000b).
In an analysis of interdistrict public choice in Massachusetts, Armor and Peiser

(1998) find that students who moved from one district to another have a higher SES,
are higher achievement test performers, and are more likely to be white than students
in the districts they leave. They matriculate into more affluent, more white, and higher
performing districts. In these receiving districts, they are still higher than average in
parental education and student educational aspirations.
Most studies of charter schools find that the percentage of minorities and low-income
students is similar to that in the states of these schools, although some
stratification shows up in some districts. This is partly a function of “lottery” selection
mechanisms, but also of which parents apply to the charter schools. Vanourek and
coworkers (1998) report very similar percentages of disadvantaged students in charter
schools to the broader RPP International (2000) sample. Chubb (1997, p. 117) reports
that contract schools run by the Edison Project are serving racial groups in similar
proportions to their numbers in the districts as a whole.
Given tuition payments and many religious-based private schools, it is not surprising
that private school students are more likely to be white. Catholic or Jewish, and from
families with higher incomes and more educated parents (Coleman, Hoffer, and
56
Kilgore, 1982; Gamoran, 1996; Goldhaber, 1996; Plank et al., 1993; but see Buddin,
Cordes, and Kirby, 1998).
The private vouchers program sponsored by Golden Rule attracts more white
students than the average in Indianapolis (Heise et al., 1995). But the biggest
differences between participants and non-participants are parents’ education and
educational expectations. Martinez and colleagues (1995) also find, for private
vouchers in San Antonio, that the mother’s education level is critical to whether a
choice is made, as well as to school dissatisfaction, to educational expectations, and
to involvement. The most recent summary of the multi-city voucher studies (Howell
et al., 2000) demonstrates that the students attending private schools with privately
funded vouchers are quite comparable in SES terms to the control group and to the
public school population at large.
Residential choice and the locally based provision of public schools (Orfield et al.
[1996] demonstrate that these are far more influential than the option of private
schools) have resulted in an extreme degree of income stratification and racial
segregation, especially in the largest central cities. Americans are not likely to accept
policies that limit residential mobility or to assign the federal government significantly
greater control over education. Again, it can be argued that the question is whether
the kinds of more active school choices discussed here are likely to exacerbate this
problem within the minority population that makes up a majority of central city
public school student bodies. Sometimes data do not support commonly held notions;
for example, Greene (1998, p. 99) uses national data to show that significantly more
students in private schools report more positive racial interactions in their schools
than are reported by students in public schools.
An important element of how those who do not choose, or who are “left behind,”
are affected, is how large peer effects are in education. Some scholars argue that peer
effects are currently a major reason for low school performance of inner city youth
(Link and Mulligan, 1991; Waters, 1992). On the other hand, Jencks and Mayer (1990;
see also Bryk, Lee, and Smith, 1990) find mixed results in studies of peer effects:
While students may learn more from more capable associates, they also may get
discouraged when they cannot keep up with them.
Complex interrelationships can sometimes be clarified with complex models.

Computational or simulation models can shed some light on these complex
relationships that purely empirical work might miss, especially for stratification. In
interpreting his simulation model, Manski (1992) suggests that vouchers are likely to
lead to large inequities. Moe and Shotts (1995), however, use Manski’s own model.
but argue that the internal logic of the simulation shows that vouchers do not
exacerbate stratification. Epple and Romano’s (1998) model suggests that, with
significant peer effects, vouchers will lead to more able children grouping together
and less able low-income children being “left behind” and performing less well. In
their model, this will occur unless system competition forces these schools to improve,
which they recognize is a possibility. Nechyba’s (2000) recent simulation models
demonstrate more stratification than Epple and Romano’s. Thus, while computational
57
models identify key relationships and interactions, better empirical evidence will be
required to determine the actual size of peer and competitive effects.
While the performance implications of stratification are perhaps the most important,
some scholars are also very concerned that schools of choice will socialize children
differently than public schools, which many argue have provided a more consistent
and democratic socialization experience (Barber, 1997; Guttman, 1999; Henig, 2000;
Macedo, 2000). This argument has several dimensions, including a possible loss of
common curricular content, especially on civic issues, that might lead to intolerance
and a loss of group ability to deliberate about issues while maintaining mutual respect.
However, there is little empirical evidence about the baseline amount and type of
public education that fosters these outcomes.
In contrast to theoretical arguments supporting the public schools as a better venue

for socializing children into democratic norms, some scholars have provided empirical
information that consistently demonstrates that students in private schools, and
particularly students in Catholic schools, are either more tolerant of others and know
more American civic values than others, or are statistically equal to public school
students (Campbell, 2000; Greene et al., 1999; Niemi and Junn, 1998; see also Greeley
and Rossi, 1966). Thus, while stratification of curriculum and separation into
educational groups that might emphasize different values may be exacerbated by
choice, evidence so far suggests that this is not yet a major problem.
Parental Involvement
School officials and education scholars have long seen parental involvement as central
to creating more effective school communities and to improved performance. Scholars
find some evidence that parental involvement at school is also associated with greater
involvement in their own child’s education at home, by reading to them, working
through homework problems, or discussing what happened in school that day
(Schneider and Coleman, 1993).
In a variant of the stratification issue, some observers worry that choice will siphon
off more-involved parents and students, harming school communities. For example,
Anderson (1990, pp. 197-198) argues that expanded citizen choice, at best, will cultivate
only a “passive understanding” of the demands of democratic participation and that
this “consumer’s skill” is not a sufficient basis for “competent citizenship.” Carnoy
(1993, p. 187) and Henig (1994, pp. 201-203, 222) both argue that school choice will
increase the social stratification between parents who are more involved and interested
in their children’s education and others, thereby reducing the ability of communities
to address collective problems. And Handler (1996, p. 185) notes that while choice
plans require parents to choose, they cannot force parents to become actively engaged
in school activities.
In contrast, other scholars argue that choice can increase parental involvement. As
Ravitch (1997, p. 253) notes: “The act of choosing seems to make parents feel more
responsible and become more involved.” Witte (2000) finds that parents who are
58
more satisfied are also more likely to be more involved in school activities, and vice
versa. Martinez and colleagues (1996) find that parents whose children were selected
into choice public schools in San Antonio were both more satisfied and more involved,
although they also had been more involved in their previous schools. Goldring (1997)
finds greater involvement by parents in magnet schools in Cincinnati. Ogawa and
Dutton (1997) find greater involvement from parents in both intradistrict public choice
programs and voucher programs. Rothstein (1998, p. 58) concedes that parental
involvement in charter schools is often higher, but notes that it is often required,
something that normal public schools cannot mandate.
There is conflicting information on how much importance parents themselves place

on school involvement. While Hoxby (1999) focuses on parental involvement as one
of six attributes parents seek in schools. Van Dunk (1998, p. 10) does not find that
most parents she surveyed focus on the amount and opportunities for parental
involvement when they make school choices. Thus, the desirability to parents of greater
involvement may vary by region or by types of schools.
Greater involvement is closely related to the stratification issue. A critical methodological

problem for these studies, as with many studies of school performance, is that parents who
make the effort to choose may also have characteristics that cannot easily be observed but
that make them more likely to be involved in schools as well. Thus, unless parents are
selected randomly for a program, the authors may wrongly attribute to the act of choosing
an increase in involvement that is purely a selection effect. Again, the random lottery
experiments with vouchers are beginning to obviate this methodological problem and help
provide a clearer answer. Before these data have been available, however, other scholars
have had to model the selection process.
Schneider and colleagues (2000) use a two-stage econometric technique, in the

context of public school choice in District 4, New York City, and Montclair, New
Jersey, to examine three measures of reported parental involvement: PTA membership,
voluntary activities in their child’s school, and how many parents they talk to about
school matters. They find that active choosers are significantly more likely to do
these things, controlling for a range of demographic factors, and the amount of the
increases are generally 10 percent or more.
Thus, while data are far from complete here, there is evidence that parents who
make choices are more involved in their child’s school. A few studies have modeled
this process better, so that it does not seem to be purely a selection effect. Of course,
in some charter and private schools, parental involvement is a part of the “contract”
that parent’s sign in return for having their child attend that selective school.
What Researchers Know And Where They Should Go
Compared with just a few years ago, there are now far more (and often far better)
studies of school choice. However, there is still much disagreement about what these
studies mean and how they accumulate into reliable and usable guidance to researchers
59
and decision-makers alike. And, there are not yet enough good studies…to be confident
about drawing definitive conclusions about some issues. Furthermore, few studies meet
the “gold standard” of social scientific research by assessing outcomes of an experimental
design, over a long period, and with a large enough number of schools, districts, or
students.
Still, the accumulated evidence suggests that choice leads to many kinds of
improvements, certainly for the parents and students involved in the choice programs.
Given the lack of demonstrable success of many other kinds of school reform, this is
far from a trivial set of findings.
Based on the evidence in these studies, policymakers should expect that most
parents, including low-income and minority families, will make educational choices
based on preferences that society considers “legitimate.” Most parents who choose
will be more satisfied with their choice, or at least with having the opportunity to
make one. Many parents who make choices will become more active in their child’s
education. Some evidence indicates that the children in schools they have chosen
will perform somewhat better—though this evidence is mixed and controversial
because isolating the effects of choice is a complicated research endeavor requiring
considerable controls for a variety of factors. Still, the best studies tend to show test
score improvements, few or none show test score declines in choice programs, and a
growing number of studies are beginning to show some improvements in graduation
rates and college matriculation from being in choice schools, as well.
While these positive results from choice are important, policymakers should also
be concerned about several issues. Some evidence shows that higher SES parents are
more likely to exercise choice when given the opportunity and that they might choose
to avoid schools with larger numbers of lower SES children or racial minorities. This
fits with the post-World War II pattern of suburbanization of middle- and upper-income
parents choosing better-funded and more homogeneous public schools for
their children. Society at large may decide that this is inappropriate choice behavior,
at least for parents residing within a particular jurisdiction, and might want to
constrain these actions, though they are already evident in school choices driven by
residential location decisions.
While information may be the Achilles’ heel of choice, many of the existing
treatments of the flow of information have been limited. Evidence suggests that many
parents, given the right to choose, seek out school information, though the extent to
which they actually get it seems marked by some degree of stratification. Because the
supply of school information is so critical, evidence suggests that special efforts must
be made to reach lower SES parents in this effort. Policies designed to provide more
basic information must be developed, along with any school choice program. Several
innovative efforts that tap the power of the Internet may point to a way information
39
can be disseminated more efficiently.
39
See for example, GreatSchools.Net that covers schools in California, the Epic site {www.uwm.edii/EPIC)
that presents information about schools in Milwaukee, and DCSchoolSearch.com for DC schools. These
sites also hold great promise for research on such issues as the digital divide and how information about
60
The combination of different levels of choice activity among parents and differential
ability to gather information leads to the conclusion that stratification is the most
important question related to school choice. The baseline criterion must be agreed
upon: stratification compared with what? Currently, jurisdictional boundaries largely
dictate who goes to which public school with whom. Some argue that racial segregation
has been getting worse in recent decades in most metropolitan areas, as previous
judicial remedies are repealed (Orfield et al., 1996). Compared with this, can choice
really increase stratification significantly?
Of course, stratification may be addressed or controlled somewhat by the institutional

mechanisms of choice that are implemented. Here, the type of choice mechanism and
how it is implemented are critical. Subject to legal or constitutional concerns, racial and
income percentages may be established and enforced in at least some systems of choice.
Some kinds of public school choice are far less likely to be prone to traditional
stratification concerns of race and income, because nearly all inner-city students in some
urban districts are poor and from minority households. Certainly stratification by parental
education and student aspirations can still occur in this context, but that is a very different
level of question, which may require a different kind of policy response, than segregation
along racial or income lines.
The various forms of choice that have emerged raise interesting questions about
the “public-ness” of various schools. Charter schools clearly are more popular
politically than vouchers because the schools themselves are officially public, not
private. Yet, different forms of choice can blur the line between public and private.
While charter schools are public and open by lottery to all students in most states,
not all parents are aware of them, many are run in cooperation with for-profit
providers, and many parents seem to regard them as substitutes for private schools,
but without the burden of family-paid tuition (see Teske et al., 2000b). On the other
hand, private schools with many voucher students may be more diverse economically
and racially than traditional public schools in urban areas—and may do a better job
than traditional public schools in teaching respect for the growing diversity of the
American population and for democratic principles (Greene, 1998).
It is also possible that public school choice can retain or bring back some students
who would otherwise flee the public school system completely for private schools
(Hoxby [1999] and Schneider and colleagues [2000] show some evidence of this).
Keeping such parents in the public system is likely to increase political support for
public schools and public school funding. Questions arise, however, as to whether
there are likely to be any positive peer effects from keeping these students in the
public schools, if they are mainly placed in the high-performing alternative or magnet
schools, or in separate, more homogeneous class tracks within a larger public school
that is more diverse (on tracking, see Loveless, 1999).
While much progress was made in the late 1990s, there is plenty of need for more
schools is actually used by parents.
61
good research. Future studies of charter schools can provide valuable data on virtually
all of the outcomes central to the study of school choice. The number of students and
schools involved are large enough and the variation in the type of charter schools big
enough that interesting and rigorous work relating the institutional design of choice
to outcomes should be expected. The large numbers involved in some districts and
states also allow for excellent designs of studies of the non-charter schools and how a
certain percentage of students exiting to charters affects the other public schools (for
promising first attempts, see Rofes, 1998; Teske et al., 2000b). The inherent nature of
charter school accountability offers states an incentive to analyze performance, which
should provide better data than the impressionistic and anecdotal evidence to date.
The studies of the increasing number of low-income urban voucher experiments also
should provide solid evidence on student performance and several other measures
over time.
While it is difficult to argue that any area of school choice research does not require
more studies, the authors believe that there have been almost enough general surveys
of parents. These have provided a strong knowledge base for reported parent preferences
and for reported levels of satisfaction, and to a lesser extent school involvement and
information. Moreover, some comprehensive work on a large national survey is now
available (Moe, 2001), as well as detailed survey evidence from a large set of urban and
suburban parents (Schneider et al., 2000). However, more work is needed in connecting
what parents say in surveys to what really happens in school selection and in the schools
themselves.
Finally, the central issue that requires much more careful study is linking stratification to
specific forms of choice. Some evidence suggests, perhaps counter- intuitively, that
option-demand choice systems may not be more vulnerable to stratification than full
choice systems (e.g., Fiske and Ladd, 2000; Schneider et al. 2000). The various formal and
computational models that have emerged recently are valuable here because they establish
logical implications of institutional design mechanisms and can be compared internally.
But better empirical data on the effects of choice on non-choosers and those “left behind”
are needed. This means that one of the most critical elements of choice involves the
degree to which choice stimulates competitive improvements in the non-choice schools
and the degree to which these gains are accompanied by more or less stratification along
race, SES, or other lines, and a possible loss of “peer effects.” Many thoughtful critics of
choice have argued that inner city schools filled with students whose parents are the least
involved and educated will have little incentive to “compete” or improve (e.g., Rothstein,
1998). Some evidence suggests that this may not be true, but policymakers need more
careful and creative research.
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68
We turn now to a pair of articles that focus in on magnet schools as a specific tool for providing
parents with school choice. In the first, Christine Rossell looks at the research that had been
conducted on magnet schools up through the time of her writing, some twenty years ago—shortly
after Montclair opened its first magnet schools as a form of voluntary desegregation. Rossell offers
some recommendations to education policymakers based on the research she has reviewed.
40
Document #4: Christine H. Rossell, “What is attractive about magnet schools?” Urban
Education 20:1 (April, 1985) 7-22.
Interest in magnet schools as a desegregation tool has increased greatly in the last five years
with the near unanimous agreement among social scientists that school desegregation
involving mandatory white reassignment to black schools significantly accelerates white
flight in the year of implementation of a plan, and in some school districts in the post-
implementation years (see Rossell, 1983b, for a more detailed review of these studies).
This has prompted local administrators, state departments of education, the federal
government, and the courts to search for alternatives that rely on attracting students rather
than forcing them to attend desegregated schools. In one sense, this is a return to the
1950s and 1960s. An important difference, however, is the expectation that whites will
volunteer for desegregated magnet schools, often located in minority neighborhoods, if
offered incentives in the form of unique and innovative educational programs.
What we know about the effectiveness of magnet schools, however, is rather limited. The
literature is characterized by anecdotal, first-person descriptions of the curriculum and
interracial contact in one or two schools. There are few systematic, comparative analyses
of the school characteristics that are attractive to parents and students, or their overall
desegregation effectiveness, and even fewer systematic analyses of the educational
effectiveness of the magnet curriculum, presumably one of the factors that motivates
parents to enroll their children. In addition, most studies fail to distinguish between two
types of plans: (1) magnet-voluntary plans in which the choice is between one’s
neighborhood school and a desegregated magnet school (as in Houston and Milwaukee),
and (2) magnet-mandatory plans in which the entire school system is mandatorily
desegregated and the magnets are primarily a curricular alternative (as in Boston; see
Rossell, 1979). It is much harder to attract students to magnet schools in the former
situation than in the latter, and the relative importance of various school characteristics
may also differ. Consequently, although over 100 documents were read for this review,
the reference section cites only 33 because, of those read, these are the only relevant
studies with reliable findings.
School Characteristics
One important issue to policymakers is how to design magnet schools so that they
overcome the strong inclination of parents, particularly white parents, to continue to send
their children to their neighborhood school. Obviously, some magnet schools are more
attractive than others, although this may vary with the desegregation context. The
literature, however, typically treats school characteristics as a constant and offers such
40
Boston University
69
uninformative advice on successful implementation as: plan effectively, mount an

extensive publicity campaign, and appoint supportive, innovative principals and teachers—
all things that most school administrators and policymakers have known for decades. This
review, and the policy recommendations that follow from it, by contrast, will be devoted
to discussing school characteristics rather than the planning process about which much has
already been written.41
Location And Percent Minority
It is perhaps by now a truism that schools located in black neighborhoods, regardless of

whether assignment is mandatory or voluntary, have difficulty in attracting whites. In
desegregation plans with mandatory assignment, on average, 50 of the whites assigned to
schools formerly above 90 black will not show up (Rossell, 1983a, 1980; Pride, 1980;
Rossell and Ross, 1979; Giles et al., 1975). It should not be surprising then, that when
attendance at a formerly black school is voluntary, it is also difficult to get whites to enroll
(Royster et al., 1979: 92; Fleming et al., 1982: 117; Weaver, 1979; and Larson, 1980:
42
5). We also know that the rate of return to a magnet school in subsequent years of those
already enrolled is a function of the percent minority attending the desegregated magnet
school (Rossell and Ross, 1979; Rossell, 1983b; Larson, 1980: 5). It stands to reason then
that initial success in attracting whites is not just a function of past racial composition, but
also of the new projected racial composition. That is to say, one reason many whites may
not volunteer for formerly minority schools is that they expect few others to.
Policy recommendation: Schools in black neighborhoods should be projected, and

widely publicized, to be predominantly white and the more racially isolated the
school, the higher this projected white percentage should be. The enrollment
process should be closely controlled so that this occurs and is maintained in
subsequent years.
41
Two useful planning guides are Bennett (1978) and Blank et al. (1983b). The former can be obtained from
ERIC or from the author. Deputy Superintendent, Milwaukee Public Schools, P.O. Drawer 10K,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201, phone (414) 475-8004. The latter can be obtained by writing to James H.
Lowry and Associates, 303 East Wacker Drive, Suite 1340, Chicago, Illinois 60601, phone (312) 861-1800.
42
One exception to this is found in the Lowry and Associates study that concludes, in apparent contradiction
of 20 years of research, as well as common sense, that there is no significant correlation between magnet
location and desegregation success within magnets themselves (Blank et al., 1983a: 88). Their measure of
desegregation success (pp. IV-3, IV-4), however, is so strange as to render the entire chapter IV,
“Desegregating Public School Systems,” unintelligible. Rather than using any of the precise mathematical
measures of racial balance or interracial contact developed in the last two decades, magnet desegregation
success is constructed from the sum of interviewer ratings from 0 to 100 of 4 factors, only 1 of which
measures student desegregation. They are the following: (1) magnet school desegregation success: 100 = 3
sites fully desegregated (defined as “equalized access” and “substantial mix,” p. 78), 0 = none of three sites
desegregated; (2) voluntariness: 100 = 3 sites’ students are there by parent preferences, 0 ~none of sites have
students there by parent preference; (3) extent of staff desegregation: 100 = 3 sites’ staffs desegregated, 0 =
none desegregated, and (4) a quality integration scale composed of interviewer ratings of 10 items of equal
status contact. Their 4 measures of district desegregation and the role of magnets are composed in the same
way—as a function of interviewer ratings from 0 to 100 of the “vigorousness” of the effort, and “singular
role” of magnets. As one might expect, the conclusions drawn from the statistical analyses of such variables
make no sense, and in some cases, run counter to all previous research. Therefore, this review will simply
ignore their findings on desegregation.
70
Curriculum
A characteristic of the literature on magnet schools is the degree to which it ignores

research demonstrating that social class is related to values and attitudes toward education
and desegregation. Class differences in racial attitudes have been documented and
publicized in three decades of survey research and hardly need to be discussed again here.
In general, the higher the social class, the greater the racial tolerance and support for
integration. Less well publicized, but of importance to the development of magnet
schools, is that there are strong class differences in educational values and preferences that
might interact with the more well known racial attitudes.
Kohn (1976), for example, found that although parents of all social classes appear to share
the same values with regard to child rearing, their priorities differ. Working-class parents
stress conformity to external standards and external control, as well as obedience to
authority. Middle-class parents place more emphasis on self direction and inner control.
Similarly, Sieber and Wilder’s (1983) analysis of parental preferences for teaching styles
showed that working-class parents preferred adult-centered teaching styles whereas
middle-class parents preferred child-centered practices. When asked to evaluate the
relative importance of six basic high school goals (teach job skills, teach academic skills,
develop respect for authority, provide a setting for making friends, keep children out of
trouble, and make them aware of their cultural identity), all classes rated teaching job skills
highest and making them aware of their cultural identity lowest. However, those with less
education placed substantially greater emphasis on respecting authority and keeping
children out of trouble whereas those with higher education showed greater concern for
academic skills and making friends.
Thus the research on class differences in racial attitudes and educational preferences
suggests two things. First, among those who have their children in public schools, whites
who volunteer for magnet schools in black neighborhoods will tend to be of higher social
class than those who do not, and second, that they will prefer more child-centered,
nontraditional instructional styles.
Unfortunately, one serious problem with much of the research on magnet schools is the
failure to control for race when analyzing the class composition and academic achievement
of schools (see, for example, Fleming et al., 1982: 134a). Those few that have done so find
that whites who volunteer for magnet schools tend to be of higher socioeconomic status
than those that do not (Comerford, 1980: 51). This is also true of black students (Levine et
al., 1980: vi), although they are still of lower social class than the whites in those schools
(Comerford, 1980: 52) and tend to have the educational preferences of working-class
parents—more inclined to practice authoritarian control, and more supportive of teacher
authoritativeness rather than teacher friendliness (Levine et al., 1980: vii).
Accordingly, the Abt Associates study of 18 school districts (Royster et al., 1979: 91)
found that at the elementary school level, the most successful magnet schools in attracting
whites— most were in minority neighborhoods—were those that had nontraditional
programs that stressed the need for the child to follow his or her own interests and to
71
proceed through the learning process at his or her own pace. At the senior high school
level, they found that academic programs were more attractive to white students than to
minorities and often had notable problems meeting minority enrollment goals while at the
same time overenrolling whites (Royster et al., 1979: 91). This difficulty in enrolling
minorities, of course, may have also been a function of the selection criteria.
Examples of successful magnets found in the literature substantiate the conclusions of the
Abt study. The three magnets discussed in Levine and Eubanks (1980) as being able to
attract nonminority students to minority neighborhoods were a gifted and talented magnet
in Milwaukee; a childcentered magnet program, including preschool, in Stamford,
Connecticut, developed at the Bank Street College of Education; and a magnet in St. Paul
emphasizing laboratory-based instruction, basic skills (taught in ability groups), and
creative minicourses in foreign languages, computers, and so on.
Similarly, Rosenbaum and Presser (1978) describe a magnet in a minority neighborhood

that attracted whites because it was a gifted and talented program with individualized
instruction.43 The minority neighborhood magnet that Stancill (1981) claims is the most
popular elementary school magnet in Houston is a Montessori program that accepts
children at age three. The Los Angeles Monitoring Committee’s (1979: 8) report argues
that the reason two magnets placed in 99 minority schools succeeded in attracting whites
was their gifted and talented program. Flood (1978: 8, 10) notes two minority
neighborhood magnets successful in attracting whites: an extended day program and a
gifted and talented program. Finally, the Lowry and Associates interim report (Fleming et
al., 1982: 125) notes that a common characteristic of the academically selective magnet
schools is that they are effective in racially integrating their student body.
Indeed, an academic program in an extremely racially isolated minority neighborhood that

is not selective, or perceived as selective, may have great difficulty attracting whites.
Weaver (1979: 16) found that an academic science magnet located in a racially isolated
minority neighborhood in Los Angeles was not able to attract a single white student. It
could not compete with the gifted and talented programs offered in similar minority
neighborhood magnets. Indeed, there is some evidence that the selectivity, or perceived
selectivity, of magnet schools is more important to many parents than the specific magnet
theme. This may be more true, however, when the magnet theme is a teaching style, as in
most elementary schools, than when it is more clearly curricular, as in secondary schools.
A 1977 survey of parents whose children were in magnet schools in Boston and
Springfield (both mandatory desegregation plans) found that 87 did not know the magnet
theme of their child’s school. Their attraction to the magnet school was based on a
perception of them as “good schools” (Citywide Educational Coalition, 1978). A survey
of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland elementary magnet schools (a voluntary
plan) found that, although 64% knew their child’s school was a magnet, only 36% (48% of
the whites, and 24% of the minorities) could name a magnet program feature (Larson,
1981: 43). Nevertheless, ignoring curriculum would be foolhardy because it is important
to many individuals, and probably generally important in creating a school’s image, even if
many parents cannot remember its content.
43
The individualized instruction emerged as a grouping scheme that placed blacks in the slower groups, a
problem common to this instructional technique
72
Policy recommendations: Magnet schools located in racially isolated minority schools

should be nontraditional at the elementary school level and highly academically
oriented at the secondary level.
The more racially isolated the school, the greater selectivity or perception of
selectivity, there should be.
Magnet schools with fundamental themes should be located in white

neighborhoods.
Principal
The research on magnet schools, like the research on “effective schools,” argues that
successful schools are characterized by strong, innovative leaders. The research in both
fields is of such poor quality that there is no reliable empirical evidence that this is true,
nor is there any writing operationalizing these concepts. As a result, this recommendation
is of little use in planning because one can apparently only know after the fact if one has a
strong, innovative principal. The Lowry and Associates study of 15 school districts, for
example, defines a “high quality principal” as “an exceptionally capable leader and
administrator who has usually exercised extraordinary entrepreneurial drive and skills in
building the magnet from the ground up” (Blank et al., 1983a: 67). Hence, if the magnet
succeeds in attracting a racially balanced student body, it has a strong, innovative principal.
If it is not successful, it does not have a strong, innovative principal.44
Their cross-sectional correlational analysis, not surprisingly, found that principal quality
was highly related to all three educational quality measures, including one measure of
reading achievement and one of math achievement. If the students who enroll in magnet
schools tend to be of higher socioeconomic status and achievement than those who do
not, and if the more white students attracted, the higher the median school achievement,
then by definition “high quality “principals will have students with higher achievement.
Furthermore, if as with teaching assignments more experienced and/or more highly
regarded principals are rewarded by being assigned to the schools expected to have high
achieving students, then it is hard to see how a “high quality” principal would not be
related to high student achievement. The causal direction, however, is not that principals
cause high achievement as the Lowry and Associates report assumes, but that high
achieving students “cause” high quality principals.
One piece of evidence that is useful in planning is reported in the Abt Associates study of
18 school districts (Royster et al., 1979). They found that many school districts overcame
the unattractiveness to whites of a magnet school in a minority neighborhood by assigning
popular white principals and teachers to it. Similarly, a magnet school in a white
neighborhood likely to have difficulty in attracting minority students would be more
desirable if it had a popular, minority principal (Royster et al., 1979: 32).
44
The research on effective schools also tends toward circular reasoning. Strong, innovative principals are
identified by the fact that their students are happy and achieving. Then it is concluded that strong,
innovative principals cause happy and achieving students.
73
Policy recommendations: Schools located in racially isolated minority neighborhoods

likely to have difficulty in attracting whites should have popular white principals
and teachers (but no more of the latter than is necessary to have a racially balanced
staff).
Schools located in racially isolated white neighborhoods likely to have difficulty

attracting minority students should have popular minority principals and teachers
(but again no more of the latter than is necessary to have a racially balanced staff).
Pupil-Teacher Ratio
Most published parent surveys are conducted after the implementation of magnet schools
to determine how satisfied parents are.45 They are of little use to planners because they fail
to ask more than one or two questions regarding school characteristics. One question,
however, that has been asked in several surveys is the importance of a low pupil-teacher
ratio. The Houston school district found that a lower pupil-teacher ratio was cited as the
most, or second most, attractive feature of magnet schools by both magnet and nonmagnet
parents (Stanley, 1982:9,12). Similarly, parents of children attending a formerly black
magnet school in St. Paul, Minnesota, also indicated the most important factor to be the
low pupil-teacher ratio (Levine and Eubanks, 1980: 57).
Survey responses, however, are constrained by the available choices, and these and other
published surveys are remarkably vague in that respect. None, for example, ask questions
about the desirability of different racial mixtures or specific curriculum themes, and the
interaction between the two. In short, they fail to structure their questions to reflect the
real policy choices open to parents and the individual benefit-cost analyses they are likely
to conduct.
Policy recommendation: Magnet schools should be projected, and widely publicized,

to have low pupil-teacher ratios, and the more racially isolated the minority school
is, the lower the pupil-teacher ratio should be, at least at the outset when such
information is one of the few facts parents may have about a school.
Physical Appearance
Levine and Eubanks (1980: 57) note that one of the characteristics shared by the 3
successful minority neighborhood magnets they studied is that they all had an attractive
building, even though old and remodeled. Similarly, a survey of parents in Houston found
that 48 of the magnet school parents and 40 of the non-magnet parents agreed that the
physical appearance of the school would influence their decision to enroll their child
(Stanley, 1982: 8, 12). The Abt Associates study maintains, on the other hand, that
although newer physical plants with newer equipment and more extensive facilities are
added inducements for parents to enroll their children, the physical plant per se is not a
critical element (Royster et al., 1979: 33). Comerford (1980: 52-53) argues similarly,
45
Many of the surveys conducted by school districts before implementation are probably more informative,
but a search of ERIC documents and published articles did not turn up the results of any of these.
74
although finding that the lower the social class of a parent, the greater the importance of
an attractive school building.
Policy recommendation: The more difficult it is to attract students to a school because

of location or other factors, the more attractive the physical appearance of the
school plant and the newer the equipment should be, at least at the outset.
Distance
When magnet schools are part of a mandatory desegregation plan as in Pasadena and
Boston, the distance from home to school is not much of a problem in attracting parents
because students are already being reassigned long distances anyway. The magnet schools
in Boston, for example, had much longer travel times than the neighborhood desegregated
schools, but achieved a higher percentage of their projected enrollment (Massachusetts
Research Center, 1976: 54). Busing distance is a problem, however, when there is no
neighborhood mandatory desegregation stimulating magnet school enrollment. In
Houston, for example, the most frequently cited major weakness of the magnet school
program is the long busing distance (Stanley, 1982: 12).
It is sometimes argued that parents will be more motivated to volunteer for magnet
schools if the attendance zone is limited to their area and they do not feel they are putting
their child into a lottery where they might end up anywhere in the city. Accordingly, the
Abt Associates study found magnets with limited attendance areas to be more successful in
meeting their projected enrollment than those with citywide attendance areas (Roysteret
al., 1979:94). It is not clear, however, whether this is due to the fact that magnets with
citywide attendance zones tend to be in black neighborhoods and those with limited
attendance zones tend to be in white neighborhoods.
Policy recommendations: Magnets should be strategically placed to minimize busing

distances.
School districts should experiment with limited attendance zones where there is a
geographically limited constituency for a magnet school.
Add-On Programs
Because of the difficulty of attracting enough white students to fill an entire minority
neighborhood magnet school, many school districts have created magnet school “add-on”
programs within an otherwise racially segregated school. Although the magnet school
literature is silent regarding the desirability of such programs, the research discussed above,
as well as that on school desegregation in general, suggests that they would have two
serious disadvantages. First, because the school remains basically racially identifiable, it is
even more difficult to recruit the nonresident race to a school than usual. Second, because
there is a segregated enclave, intergroup hostility is always a problem.
Policy recommendation: Magnet school programs should not be “add-ons” to other

schools, but should have their own facilities.
75
The Reassignment Process
When magnet schools are part of a mandatory school desegregation plan, the research on
“white flight” suggests that there should be a two-stage reassignment process in which the
first stage is the “voluntary” selection of magnet schools in minority neighborhoods
(Rossell and Hawley, 1982: 213-214). The common procedure of randomly assigning
whites to minority neighborhood schools aggravates white flight because whites are
assigned who would never go under any circumstances, and those who might be willing
to go may not be assigned. After parents have been notified of magnet school assignments,
any additional seats in minority neighborhood schools can then be filled by mandatory
reassignment.
When magnet schools are part of a voluntary school desegregation plan, all parents should
still be forced to make a choice, only in this case they would have the option of choosing
their neighborhood school (Bennett, 1978). Being forced to make a choice motivates
some parents to select a magnet school who would normally have continued at their
neighborhood school out of inertia. This is the process used successfully in Milwaukee.
Policy recommendations: In a magnet-mandatory desegregation plan, minority

neighborhood magnet school selection, and notification of parents, should precede
mandatory assignment.
In a magnet-voluntary desegregation plan, all parents should have to make a choice

as to what school their child will go to.
Educational Benefits
It is strange that although one major goal of magnet schools is presumably to improve
education in a school or school district, I could not find a single experiment, and only one
quasi-experimental design, controlling for the self-selection of students. As a result,
although numerous studies document that magnet school students generally have higher
achievement (although not always because race is rarely controlled for; see Weber et al.,
1983; Comerford, 1980:51;Larson, 1981: 55; Smith, 1978: 212; Black et al., 1983a: 41;
Fleming et al., 1982: 126a, 134a; Alkin, 1983: 7-8; Bortin, 1982: 256,266-273, 280-283)
and that they have fewer absences and suspensions (Bortin, 1982: 256,266-273,280-283;
Smith, 1978: 212; Weber et al., 1983: 10), there is little evidence that magnet schools
46
“caused” this because only one of the studies controlled for initial differences. Magnet
schools may simply attract students with these characteristics.
46
Weber, McBee, and Lyies (1983) used analysis of covariance and correlated t-tests to control for initial
aptitude differences between regular and fundamental school students. They found that the latter achieved
more over a two-year period than the former. Their analysis, however, cannot control for selection-
maturation differences and so should be considered a tentative finding.
76
Summary
This article has reviewed the research on magnet school attractiveness and educational
benefits and found it to be generally anecdotal and uninformative. Nevertheless, there are
some reliable studies with findings that were used to formulate the above policy
recommendations.
If one were to rank the issues discussed in the order of their importance to parents, they
might be the three factors said to be most important in real estate purchases: location,
location, location. A recent survey in East Baton Rouge Parish school district, for
example, found that although parents were asked to identify what special programs would
interest them, nearly two-thirds responded that the most important factor in their decision
to enroll their child in a magnet school was its location (Davis and Bryant and U.S. v. East
Baton Rouge Parish School Board. 19S3).
After location, location, location, the research suggests that school characteristics will differ
in importance depending on where the magnet school is located and the social class of the
parent. In general, however, in order to motivate sufficient white students to volunteer for
a desegregated magnet school, the school district will have to offer them at least what they
had in their neighborhood school—a critical mass of white students, preferably a majority,
plus an environment that is perceived to be more academically stimulating or selective.
Moreover, the more racially isolated the minority school location, the more social and
educational advantages are necessary to draw students.
In light of the above research, a successful magnet school located in a racially isolated
neighborhood should have, at a minimum, a projected 55 white racial composition,
maintained by restricting enrollment if necessary. If it is an elementary school, the
curriculum should include all of the following components: computer/math/sciences with
1 computer for every 2 or 3 students, a Montessori preschool program beginning at age 3,
and an extended day-care program from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. for those parents who worked or
went to school full time. If it is a secondary school, the curriculum should also include a
similar computer/math sciences program, but have selection based on achievement, either
grade point average or examination.
Such a program is expensive—an additional S200-S400 per pupil in start-up costs,

excluding the cost of publicizing the magnets—but it would have an excellent chance of
opening and remaining desegregated because it would offer parents educational benefits
they could not get in their neighborhood school or a private school. Funding such “super-
magnets” becomes prohibitively expensive, however, when more than two or three are
needed and thus the chances of eliminating school district segregation by magnet schools
becomes more problematical. Many school districts simply close such schools, or allow
them to remain segregated.
If the research is to be more helpful to desegregation planners, there needs to be more

systematic analysis of the school factors that influence choices for different people in
different situations, and the interaction between all these elements. In addition, we need
to know how effective magnet schools are in increasing interracial contact at the school
77
district level, not just in the time period immediately following implementation (Royster
et al., 1979; Rossell, 1979), but over a period of many years. If mandatory desegregation
plans continue to produce greater white flight than voluntary plans in post-
implementation years, the latter may ultimately produce more interracial contact.
REFERENCES
ALKIN, M. C. (1983) “Magnet school programs evaluation: Assessing a desegregation effort.” Presented at
the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, April.
BENNETT, D. A. (1978) “Community involvement in desegregation: Milwaukee’s voluntary plan.”

Presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, March.
BLANK, R. K., R. A. DENTLER, D. C. BALTZELL, and K. CHABOTAR (1983a) Survey of Magnet

Schools, Analyzing a Model for Quality Integrated Education. Chicago: James H. Lowry and Associates.
———(1983b) Guide to Magnet School Development. Chicago: James H. Lowry and Associates.
BORTIN, B. H. (1982) Magnet School Program: Evaluation Report, 1980-1981, Milwaukee ESAA Title
VI. Milwaukee Public Schools, Department of Educational Research and Program Assessment.
Citywide Educational Coalition (1978) Survey of Magnet School Parents in Three Cities. Report to the
Massachusetts Department of Education, Boston.
COMERFORD, J. P. (1980) “Parent perceptions and pupil characteristics of a senior magnet school
program.” Integrated Education 18: 50-54.
Davis and Bryant and U.S. v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board No. 81-3476. (1983) Appeal from the
United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, Brief for the United States.
FLEMING, D. S., R. K. BLANK, R. A. DENTLER, and D. C. BALTZELL (1982) Survey of Magnet

Schools, Interim Report. Chicago: James H. Lowry and Associates.
FLOOD, D. E.( 1978) “The magnet school concept in North Carolina.” Presented at the International
Magnet School Conference, New Orleans, January.
GILES, M. W., E. F. CATALDO, and D. S. GATL1N (1975) “White fight and percent black: The tipping
point re-examined.” Social Science Q. 56: 85-92.
KOHN, M. L. (1976) “Occupational structure and alienation.” Amer. J. of Sociology

82: 111-130.
LARSON, J. C. (1980) Takoma Park Magnet School Evaluation: Part I. Rockville, MD: Montgomery County
Public Schools.
———et al. (1981) Takoma Park Magnet School Evaluation: Part II, Final Report. Rockville, MD:
Montgomery County Public Schools.
LEVINE, D. U. and E. F. EUBANKS (1980) “Attracting nonminority students to magnet schools in

minority neighborhoods.” Integrated Education 18: 52-58.
78
LEVINE, D. U., E. EUBANKS, C. CAMPBELL, and L. S. ROSKOSKI (1980) A Study of Selected Issues
Involving Magnet Schools in Big-City School Districts. Report to the National Institute of Education (June).
Los Angeles Monitoring Committee (1979) Proposed Expanded and New Magnet Programs, 1979-1980. Report
to the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, April.
Massachusetts Research Center (1976) Education and Enrollments: Boston During Phase II. Boston:
Massachusetts Research Center.
PRIDE, R. A. (1980) Patterns of White Flight 1971-1979. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University.
ROSENBAUM, J. E. and S. PRESSER (1978) “Voluntary racial integration in a magnet school.” School
Review 86: 156-187.
ROSSELL, C. H. (1983a) A School Desegregation plan for East Baton Rouge Parish. Report to the U.S.
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., February.
———(1983b) “Applied social science research: What does it say about the effectiveness of school
desegregation plans.” J. of Legal Studies 12: 69-107.
———(1980) Is it the Distance or the Blacks? Boston: Boston University.
———(1979) “Magnet schools as a desegregation tool: The importance of contextual factors in explaining
their success.” Urban Education 14: 303-320.
———and W. D. HAWLEY (1982) “Policy alternatives for minimizing white flight.” Educ. Evaluation and
Policy Analysis 4: 205-222.
ROSSELL, C. H. and J. M. ROSS (1979) The Long Term Effect of Court-Ordered Desegregation on Student
Enrollment in Central City Public School Systems: The Case of Boston, 1974-1979. Report prepared for the
Boston School Department.
ROYSTER, E. C., D. C. BALTZELL, and F. C. SIMMONS (1979) Study of the Emergency School Aid Act
Magnet School Program. Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.
SIEBER, S. D. and D. E. WILDER (1973) The School in Society. New York: Free Press.
SMITH, V. H. (1978) “Do optional alternative public schools work?” Childhood Education 54: 211-214.
STANCILL, N. (1981) “Houston’s strongest little magnet.” Amer. Education 17: 19-22.
STANLEY, C. (1982) “Parent and student attitudes toward magnet schools—do the decision makers care?”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Southwest Educational Research Association, Austin, February.
WEAVER,R.A.(1979) “Magnet school curricula: Distinctly different?” Presented at the annual meeting of
the American Educational Research Association. San Francisco, April.
WEBER, L. J., J. K. McBEE, and J. H. LYLES (1983) “An evaluation of fundamental schools.” Presented at
the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, April.
79
Blank, Levine and Steel summarize the findings of a U.S. Department of Education study of
magnet schools across the country. DOE does not appear to have conducted a comparable study of
magnet schools in the intervening years since 1990-91, though some more recent statistical
information is available on the Department’s Web site. Where the 1990-91 study found 2,433
schools serving as magnets or containing magnet programs. In 2001-02 the Department collected
data from 45 states and found 1,736 magnet schools enrolling 3% of students nationwide.
California and Illinois have the largest number of magnet schools.47
Document #5: Rolf K. Blank, Roger E. Levine, and Lauri Steel, “After Fifteen Years:
Magnet Schools in Urban Education,” Chapter 8 in Bruce Fuller and Richard F. Elmore,
Who Chooses? Who Loses? (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).
Magnet schools have become a significant factor in urban education. They offer a means
for further desegregating schools, while at the same time enhancing the quality of
education. Since magnet schools were initiated, however, there has been growing concern
over whether they contribute to inequalities in American education. In this chapter, we
examine the development, distribution, and unique characteristics of magnet schools, and
discuss their impact on desegregation, school quality, and equity.
Our discussion draws largely on data collected in the 1991-92 school year as part of a
48
national study of magnet schools. This national survey reveals that the number of magnet
schools has grown rapidly in large urban school systems since the later 1970s. Magnet
schools and programs within schools have unique curricular emphases; a majority have
flexibility in staff selection. Other significant findings concern student composition and
enrollment. For example, the ethnic composition of magnet schools is the same as that of
the districts in which the schools are located. Most magnet schools enroll students by
lottery; one-third use some criteria for student selection.
Magnet schools now represent a fundamental shift in how public schools are organized.
But the extent to which they offer real choice to parents and learning gains to children
depends on magnets’ institutional characteristics. For the first time we can now provide a
detailed portrait of the magnet school movement and describe its organizational variability.
Evolution Of Magnet Schools
Magnet schools have their roots in districtwide specialty schools, such as the Bronx High
School of Science, the Boston Latin School, Chicago’s Lane Tech, and San Francisco’s
Lowell High School, some of which have been in existence since the turn of the century.
Like their forebears, magnet schools offer special curricula, such as mathematics, science or
performing arts programs, or special instructional approaches, such as individualized
education, open classrooms, or team teaching.
47
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics
(http://nces.ed.gov/Pubs2003/Overview03/tables/table_09.asp). Statistics from 2006 indicate a further
decline of the number of magnet schools to approximately 1,350.
48
The Magnet Schools Study was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education (contract No.
LC90043001) and carried out by the American Institutes for Research. The views expressed here are those
of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Education.
80
During the 1970s, school districts began to use magnet schools both as an incentive for
parents to remain in the public school system and as a means of desegregation. Often
magnet school programs were placed in racially isolated schools or neighborhoods to
encourage students of other ethnic groups to enroll. If sufficient numbers of white and
minority students enrolled in schools outside their neighborhoods, districts could promote
school desegregation without resorting to mandatory measures. At the same time, by
introducing innovative curricula and instructional approaches, magnet schools could
strengthen the educational program in those schools, contributing to overall
improvements in educational quality.
With the 1975 court endorsement of magnet schools as a voluntary desegregation strategy,
magnet schools expanded to encompass a broad range of programs. Some districts added
such programs as humanities, languages, or career exploration to the more traditional
program emphases. Other magnet programs provided distinctive instructional approaches,
such as alternative education, individualized education, accelerated learning, Montessori,
and open classrooms. Typically, student and parent input provided the basis for
determining the specific programs provided in a community. Many districts carefully
monitored interest and enrollment in the various magnet programs, adding, expanding, or
dropping programs as necessary to remain consonant with student and parent interests.
Magnet schools have received federal support since 1976, primarily through two
programs: the Emergency School Assistance Act (ESAA) and the Magnet Schools
Assistance Program (MSAP). ESAA, a federal program designed to provide funds to school
districts attempting to desegregate, was amended in 1976 to authorize grants to support
the planning and implementing of magnet schools. Between 1976 and 1981, ESAA
provided up to $30 million a year to magnet school programs (Blank, Dentler, Baltzell, &
Chabotar, 1983, p. 8).
The climate of educational reform after the publication of A Nation at Risk (National
Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) further stimulated interest in magnet
schools as a tool for reform. In particular, attention was directed to the programmatic
aspects of magnet schools: What makes them distinctive? Are they more effective in
enhancing student learning? In 1984, the federal government resumed support for magnet
schools with the enactment of the Magnet Schools Assistance Program. The MSAP
explicitly identified both program improvement and desegregation as objectives of magnet
schools. Between 1985 and 1991, a total of 117 school districts received federal magnet
school grants, totaling $739.5 million. Evidence strongly suggests that MSAP funding has
been a significant factor in the development and operation of magnet programs. Districts
currently receiving MSAP funds have proportionately more magnet programs than magnet
districts that had not received MSAP support (Steel & Levine, 1994). When MSAP
funding ended, however, a majority of districts were forced to modify their programs in
some way, with one in five indicating they cut back the number of magnet schools and
programs offered.
The school choice movement also contributed to a favorable climate for the growth of
magnet schools. Magnet schools embody the principles of parental choice as well as
81
competition, school-site autonomy, and deregulation. These same principles are central to
the arguments supporting choice as an effective reform (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Raywid,
1989).
1991 National Magnet School Study
The first national study of magnet schools in the early 1980s found that the number of
districts offering magnet programs had increased dramatically since the courts accepted
magnets as a strategy for desegregating schools in 1975: from 14 to 138 in five years (Blank
et al., 1983). By 1983, over 1,000 individual magnet schools and programs within schools
were being offered in these 138 districts.
As magnet schools have become more prevalent, debate over their merits has accelerated
commensurately. Several studies have found that magnet schools contribute to school
desegregation and to improving educational quality (cf. Archbald, 1988; Blank, 1990;
Rossell, 1990; Witte & Walsh, 1990). At the same time, critics express concern over the
potential for elitism and inequity that may result (Moore & Davenport, 1989).
In the 1991 study we assessed the status of magnet schools within public school systems by
surveying a nationally representative sample of school districts. This survey was limited to
multischool districts, that is, districts providing more than one school at one or more grade
levels. A total of 600 such districts, representing 6,389 multischool districts nationwide,
were randomly selected. Further studies were completed with magnet school
administrators in all districts with magnet schools. We addressed three questions:
1. How many magnet schools and programs are there, and how are they distributed
across local school systems?
2. What is unique or distinctive about magnet schools?
3. Do magnet schools offer equal opportunities for students to enroll?
These questions led us, in turn, to consider the significance of trends in magnet school
distribution, the quality of the education offered in magnet schools, and the participation
of ethnic minority and at-risk students in magnet schools and programs.
Growth And Distribution Of Magnet Schools
The number of school districts offering magnet schools increased from 138 in 1982 to 230
in 1991. Although these 230 districts represent only 4% of the nation’s multischool
districts, they serve nearly a quarter of all students nationwide. The number of students
enrolled in magnet schools has nearly tripled, from 441,000 to over 1.2 million; the
number of individual schools offering such programs has more than doubled, from 1,019
to 2,433 (Blank et al., 1983; Steel & Levine, 1994). In 1991, there were 3,171 magnet
schools or distinct programs situated within 2,433 schools.
82
The 1.2 million students in magnet schools represent nearly one-sixth of the public school
population in districts offering magnet schools, indicating the growing popularity of these
programs. As of 1991, substantially more students were enrolled in magnet programs than
the 681,000 enrolled in nonsectarian private schools (National Center for Education
Statistics [NCES], 1993). Further, the demand for magnet schools is much greater than the
current supply. Over three-quarters of the districts with magnet schools cannot
accommodate all students who want to enroll; more than 123,000 students are on waiting
lists for specific magnet programs. (In the remainder of the chapter, the term magnet
program will refer to magnet schools or programs within schools.)
Distribution Across School Systems
Because one objective of magnet programs is to promote desegregation, these programs

are most likely to be found in districts in which racial imbalance and desegregation are
important issues. As of fall 1991, 11% of multischool districts operated under a formal
desegregation plan that assigned students to schools in order to attain a specified racial
composition; these tended to be the larger districts, serving almost a third of the nation’s
students. While magnet programs are rarely the sole desegregation strategy chosen, by
1991, 29% of these districts offered magnet programs to nearly two-thirds of the more
than 10 million students in all districts with current desegregation plans. Other strategies
include rezoning, forced busing, controlled choice, and majority-to-minority transfer
plans.
Desegregation plans and magnet programs are more commonly found in urban school
districts than in rural or suburban areas (see Table 8.1). A majority of the large urban
districts and a significant proportion of the smaller urban districts in the country were
operating under desegregation plans in 1991-92, and almost the same proportion of these
districts also offered magnet school programs.
Table 8.1: Percentage of Multischool Districts with Magnet Programs by

District Size and Location (n = 6,389)
District Enrollment/ Percent with Percent with Number with

Location (# Districts) Desegregation Magnet Magnet Programs
Plans Programs
<5,000 or rural (5105) 6.0 0.6 31
Suburb 5-10,000 (317) 17.0 4.7 15
Suburb >10,000 (237) 21.5 8.9 21
Urban 5-10,000 (139) 42.4 21.6 30
Urban >10,000 (230) 58.7 53.5 123
Not reported (301) 18.6 1.9 6
In rural and small districts, where desegregation pressures are much lighter than in the
large and urban districts, the relative prevalence of magnet schools is low. Only about 10%
of suburban districts offer magnet school programs. As of 1991, over 8 of every 10 magnet
programs were located in large urban school districts; 7 of 10 programs, in districts with a
83
predominance of minority students; and over half, in districts enrolling mostly low-
income students.
Distribution of Magnets by District and Grade Level
Our survey showed that the number of magnet programs offered in a district varied
widely, from 1 to 175, and the mean number of magnet programs per district was 14.
However, half of the districts had 4 or fewer programs, and 20% had only a single magnet
program. This number is somewhat dependent on the total number of schools within a
district; small districts are clearly limited in the number of magnet programs they might
offer. Of the remaining districts, 14% had between 11 and 20 magnet programs; 9% had
between 21 and 50; 6% had more than 50; and only 1% had more than 100 magnet
programs.
The proportion of a district’s schools that had magnet programs also varied greatly (1% to
100%). In half the districts, at least 12 of the schools included magnet programs. Since
many magnet schools operated as programs within a school, however, the proportions of
students within magnet districts who were enrolled in magnet programs tended to be
somewhat lower (1% to 80%).
Over half of magnet programs were located in elementary schools in 1991 (elementary
schools comprise 60% of all U.S. public schools; NCES, 1993). One-fifth were at the high
school level (compared to 19% of high schools among all public schools), and an
additional 15% of magnet programs were at the middle level (middle level schools
comprise 15% of all public schools).49 The remaining 11% of magnet programs were found
in nongraded or multilevel (e.g., K-12, K-8) schools.
Distribution and Growth Compared to Other Public School Choice Programs
…[M]agnet schools largely originated with the desegregation movement in the 1970s. But
they have become part of the broader debate around school choice. The 1991 national
survey also solicited information on the prevalence and location of specialty schools other
than magnet schools and on other programs offering voluntary choice. Among
multischool districts nationwide, more than one in five offered either magnet or
nonmagnet specialty schools, and one district in four offered some form of school choice,
through either magnet programs or nonmagnet programs of choice (see Table 8.2).
Unlike magnet programs, however, nonmagnet specialty schools and programs of choice
were as likely to be found in small or rural districts as in large urban districts; they were
also more likely to be found in districts with predominantly white student populations and
less likely than magnet programs to be found in poorer districts.
49
Elementary school is defined as no grade higher than grade 6; middle level, as low grade 6-8, high grade
7-9; high school, as low grade 7-10, high grade 12; and combined as other grade combinations.
84
Table 8.2: Percentage of Multischool Districts with Magnet Programs and

Other Choice Programs (n = 6,389)
Type of Program Offered Number of Districts Percentage of Percentage of
with Program All Districts All Districts
By Enrollment
Magnet schools/programs 230 4 24
Specialty schools (nonmagnet) 1,057 18 31
Programs of choice (nonmagnet) 1,189 23 26
While magnet districts comprised a relatively small portion of the districts offering choice
in 1991, they tended to be those with much larger enrollments. The magnet programs
were also considerably more extensive and diverse than nonmagnet specialty programs.
The average number of magnet programs in a magnet district (mean = 14) was over twice
the average number of specialty schools in a specialty school district, and the range of
options offered by magnet schools was considerably broader. The total number of
nonmagnet specialty schools in the nation was 2,217 (compared to 2,433 magnet schools);
the curricular themes of nonmagnet specialty schools were predominantly in only three
areas: career vocational (41%), instructional approach (33%), and gifted and talented (20%).
What Is Distinctive About Magnet Schools And Programs?
The educational designs developed in magnet schools have become a primary method of
innovation and reorganization in urban education. The basic idea of a magnet school is to
attract and enroll students based on their interest, not by assignment or ability level. To
this end, magnet schools and programs focus on either an instructional approach or a
particular academic subject or career path. In theory, all magnet schools and programs are
distinctive because of this feature. Magnet schools are also structured differently from
traditional schools; some exist as programs within schools, while others are whole schools.
And magnets may differ from traditional public schools in class size, student-teacher ratio,
and selection of teaching staff. Our survey results provide useful data on the variability in
how magnet programs are organized.
The data on magnet programs are based on self-administered questionnaires completed by

magnet program directors. This initial phase of the study did not include independent
observations, interviews, or analyses of school or program quality. The effects of magnet
schools on student learning could not be analyzed with survey data. These critical
questions comprise the primary aim of a planned second phase of the study.
Curricular Emphases
Across the nation, magnet programs provide a wide variety of distinctive curricula,
including aerospace technology, travel and tourism, junior ROTC, biotechnology,
mathematics, music, fine arts, science, drama, bilingual programs, cosmetology, and small
85
animal care programs. In addition, they offer a variety of instructional approaches,

including open classrooms, individualized education, Montessori, and basic skills.
Magnet programs have sometimes been thought to be primarily gifted-and-talented

programs, but at the time of the survey, such programs comprised only one-eighth (12%)
of the magnet programs nationwide. Most commonly, magnet programs had specific
86
subject-matter emphases (38%) or provided a distinctive instructional approach (32%). Of

the rest, 17% were career vocational and 15% centered on the arts. One-fifth of magnet
programs combined different themes and approaches: self-paced instruction in programs
together with a computer science or foreign-languages emphasis, for example, or a
combination of vocational or subject-matter programs (such as technical training and
science).
To attract students (and parents), school systems also design magnet program offerings that
differ by grade level (Figure 8.1). Magnet programs emphasizing an instructional approach
were more often found at the elementary level than at the high school or middle levels
(one-third of elementary magnet programs versus only 12% of high school magnet
programs). Recent innovations in primary education have coincided with the growth of
magnet schools, and parents view magnet schools as an opportunity to take advantage of
diversity offered in their districts.
The survey results reveal that subject-matter themes were found even more often at the
elementary level (38% of programs) and the middle level (40%) than were instructional
approach magnets. However, only 26% of high school magnet schools had a subject-
matter theme. At the high school level, 42% of magnet programs were career-oriented or
vocational. Some career-oriented and vocational magnet programs existed prior to the
development of magnet schools, adding the objective of racial desegregation as the magnet
school concept grew in their districts.
Program Structures
Magnet programs can be differentiated by whether all students in the school are included
in the magnet program (whole-school magnets) or only some of the students in the school
participate in the magnet program (program within school, or PWS, magnets). Whole-school
magnet schools can be further differentiated by how students enroll: (1) dedicated magnet
schools, comprised only of students who apply and are accepted by the magnet program,
and (2) attendance-zone magnet schools, comprised of students who apply and enroll from
across a district, plus students from a school’s regular attendance zone who are
automatically enrolled in the magnet program.
In PWS magnet schools only a portion of students in the school participate in the magnet
program. These programs are often semiautonomous. Students may take some or all of
their classes apart from the rest of the school. In the 1992 survey, a total of 38% of the
nation’s 3,171 magnet programs were classified as PWS magnet schools. However, since
these programs, by definition, are smaller than schools, only about 20% of the population
of magnet students were in such magnet schools. A significant proportion (about one-
fourth) of PWS magnet schools housed more than one magnet program, with an average
of 2.2 PWS magnet programs per school. PWS magnet schools can also be embedded
within whole-school magnet schools. Approximately 200 PWS magnet schools, or 16% of
the total, were embedded within attendance-zone or dedicated whole-school magnets.
The enrollments of PWS magnet schools are considerably smaller than regular schools at
the same grade level. Whole-school magnets, on the other hand, are slightly larger than
87
average at the middle and high school level, probably due to their predominant location in
large urban districts. Whole-school magnets comprised about one-third (32%) of the
nation’s magnet programs. Unlike PWS magnet schools, all students in the school
participate in the magnet program, and all must have explicitly chosen to participate. A
problem some dedicated magnet schools face is attracting enough students to be filled to
capacity (from 500 to 2,000 students). Dedicated magnet schools sometimes offer one or
more PWS programs, open to subsets of the students in the school as an added incentive.
Attendance-zone magnet schools, which comprised more than one-quarter (26%) of all
programs, emerged in response to parents’ concerns about restricted access to the special
88
programs provided by magnets. In PWS magnet schools, participation in the magnet

program is governed by racial balance guidelines or goals, thus restricting access of students
in the neighborhood. Attendance-zone magnet schools extend access to magnet programs
to students in the surrounding neighborhoods, regardless of their ethnicity. In this way,
they help alleviate concerns regarding the elitism of magnet programs. However, there are
two potential drawbacks to attendance-zone magnet schools: Students enrolled in the
magnet based on their residence may be less interested in the magnet’s distinctive program
or approach, and the desegregation impact of the magnet may be reduced.
Most elementary magnet schools are whole schools; most high school magnet schools are
programs within schools (see Figure 8.2). In 1991, nearly three-quarters of the
elementary-level magnet schools were school-wide programs (36% attendance-zone and
31% dedicated magnet schools) and only 27% were programs within schools. At the high
school level, 69% were structured as programs within schools.
Because elementary schools are generally smaller, it may be easier to implement a school-
wide program and to attract sufficient students interested in the magnet program’s special
focus or approach to fill the schools. PWS magnet schools, on the other hand, may be
more amenable to the departmentalized structure characteristic of secondary schools. PWS
magnet schools also allow the school to provide a number of distinctive programs, thus
attracting a wider range of students. The greater prevalence of whole school-attendance
zone magnet schools at the elementary level may also reflect parents’ concerns about access
to the special programs offered by magnet schools. Such concerns may be especially
pronounced at the elementary level, where greater importance is typically attached to the
concept of a “neighborhood school.”
Class Size
A key component of any educational program is personnel. In our survey of magnet

program directors, a substantial minority of magnet programs were reported to have lower
student-teacher ratios. At the elementary level, 24% of the districts reported that smaller class
sizes characterized their magnet schools; only 4% reported larger class sizes. Similarly, for
middle schools, 22% of the districts reported smaller class sizes, and for high schools, 36%
of the districts reported smaller class sizes for magnet schools. Only 3% of the districts
reported larger class sizes for middle school or high school magnet programs. PWS
programs averaged four fewer students per class than the regular programs in their schools.
Smaller class size in a proportion of magnet programs reflects the fact that nearly three-
fourths (73%) of the magnet programs had additional staff funding. These allowances often
provide additional teachers, permitting instruction in specialty areas or lower student-
teacher ratios. The potential implications of lower ratios for educational quality and costs
are significant. Nearly 15% of the districts reported that additional staffing allowances were
used for instructional and administrative aides, and another 15% reported supporting
additional administrative staff.
89
Assigning Teachers
Teacher assignment policies and practices in magnet programs differed from those
characterizing non-magnet schools in a majority of the magnet school districts (58%).
Principals in magnet schools were significantly more likely to be permitted to actively
advertise for and recruit new teachers, possibly due to the special skills and knowledge
needed for the magnet curricula themes. The process of assigning existing teachers within
a district is generally more selective in magnet schools, with preference given to teachers
with experience and commitment to the program’s theme or approach. In some districts,
seniority is not given the same consideration in magnet teacher assignment as in typical
teacher assignment procedures.
Do Magnet Schools Offer Equal Opportunities For Students To Enroll?
A common view about magnet schools is that they are oversubscribed and that methods of
selecting students produce magnet schools dominated by higher-achieving students.
Another view is that students (and parents) more familiar with magnet schools and the
processes for applying have a major advantage in enrolling.
One way to assess opportunities for enrollment in magnet schools is to examine

differences in participation by race and student background. The survey data also provide
information on the degree of selectivity of magnet school programs, and we can examine
the demand and accessibility of magnet schools through data on waiting lists and
transportation services to magnet schools.
Participation of Minority Versus White Students
From the 1991-92 survey of magnet schools, we estimate that approximately 1.2 million
students were enrolled in magnet programs. Of the total magnet enrollment, 61% of all
students were black, Hispanic, or other minority. This percentage is very close to the 62%
of all students who were minorities in the districts with magnet programs. However, the
enrollment rates differed by type of magnet program structure. In the 1,081 PWS magnet
programs, 61% of the magnet students were minorities. However, in the 556 schools in
which the programs were located, 71% of the students were minorities. Thus magnet
programs within schools do appear to have attracted white students in order to reduce
isolation and improve racial balance.
At the time of the survey, the ethnic composition of magnet programs varied widely
depending on the ethnic composition of the district. In districts where black, Hispanic, or
other minority students were the majority, the proportion of minority students enrolled in
magnet programs was lower than the average proportion of minority students in the
districts (68% versus 80%). In districts where a majority of students were white, the
opposite was true: The proportion of minority students in magnet schools was higher than
in the districts overall (46% versus 31%). It thus appears that magnet programs are more
likely to attract and enroll students from the non-dominant ethnic group.
90
Participation of At-Risk Students
One criticism frequently leveled at magnet programs is that they are elitist—the
population of students served is an advantaged one. To examine this issue, the proportion
of students enrolled in magnet programs who were eligible for free or reduced-price
lunches, the proportion who were limited or non-English proficient (LEP or NEP), and
the proportion who had individualized education plans (IEPs) were compared with overall
district characteristics.
Students from low-income families comprised nearly half of magnet program enrollments
but were still underrepresented in magnet programs relative to their prevalence in the
district: Low-income students, on average, comprised 47 of magnet enrollments but 51 of
all students in magnet districts. In majority white and more affluent districts, however,
low-income students were somewhat overrepresented in magnet programs. Students who
were limited or non-English proficient and special education students (i.e., students with
IEPs) were less likely than other students to be enrolled in magnet programs. On average
the proportions of LEP or NEP and special education students in magnet programs were
only two-thirds of their overall prevalence in the districts.
Selection Criteria
In 1991-92, 24% of districts could accommodate all students who wanted to enroll in
magnet programs. For the other 76% of school districts, one or more criteria were used to
select students who applied.
Over half (58%) of districts with magnets that use selection procedures used a lottery
system (i.e., random selection). Many districts also applied rules or guidelines for magnet
student selection, including sibling enrollment, grade-level preference, time on waiting
list, and attendance zone (for attendance-zone magnets).
More than one-third of the 3,171 magnet schools and programs reported using specific
admission criteria in addition to the district procedures and rules. More than half of these
programs used standardized test scores (17% of all programs) or teacher recommendations
(16%). Grade point average and artistic or creative ability were used in a significant
portion of programs. Other commonly used selection criteria were attendance or conduct
requirements, specific course requirements, student interest in the focal area or approach,
grades in specific courses, interviews, parental involvement, writing samples,
recommendations (from other than teachers), and sibling attendance. Specific selection
criteria were much more common among secondary-level magnet programs, where 54%
had specific criteria compared to only 24% of elementary magnet programs.
Demand and Outreach
Not all students who want to attend magnet schools are able to do so. Thus, in addition to
looking at levels of participation in magnet programs, it is also useful to look at unmet
demand.
91
Waiting Lists.
The popularity of magnet programs and the effectiveness of outreach strategies can be
inferred from the large proportion of programs with waiting lists. One program (a K-12
arts program in a large city) reported a waiting list of more than 3,400 students; another
program had a waiting list of 3,000. Overall, more than half (53%) [of] the magnets
reported that they maintained waiting lists, indicating a demand in excess of capacity for a
majority of magnet programs. Among the different types of magnet programs, those most
likely to have waiting lists were gifted-and-talented magnet programs (62%), followed by
career or vocational programs (58%) and arts programs (56%). Overall, approximately 60%
of the students on waiting lists were black, Hispanic, or from another minority group,
which corresponds to the overall proportion of minority students in magnet districts
(62%).
Outreach Strategies.
At the time of this survey, the typical magnet district employed more than six different
outreach strategies to attract students (see Table 8.3). This high level of outreach effort is a
Table 8.3: Percentage of Districts Using Various Outreach Strategies (n = 230)

Information/applications to students 95
Printed brochures 92
Information/applications mailed by request 86
Visits and tours of programs 79
Presentations by magnet teachers or students at other schools 70
Advertising in local media 64
good indicator of the serious commitment that most districts have made to their programs.
Without such outreach, the chances of magnet programs successfully attracting students
from other neighborhoods are negligible.
Relatively few districts routinely sent information or application forms to all parents (39%)
or provided transportation for those visiting magnet schools (32%). More than one-third
(36%) of the districts employed other means to disseminate information about their
services, including presentations at fairs, forums, and expositions; use of videotapes; parent
and student outreach programs, such as telephoning to inform them about program
opportunities; and full-time parent information centers or full-time staff to disseminate
information.
Transportation.
Transportation is an important factor in the accessibility of magnet programs to students

throughout the district. Districts can facilitate enrollment at specific schools through the
provision of transportation (or transportation subsidies). Conversely, the absence of
transportation can strongly discourage out-of-neighborhood enrollment. Transportation
subsidies were most widely available for elementary school magnet schools, with nearly
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five out of six districts providing full or partial subsidies to elementary magnet students.
For middle and high school magnets, however, more than one district in five did not
provide transportation subsidies—presenting a significant barrier for students who might
wish to enroll in magnet programs.
Conclusions
The 1991 national survey of magnet schools provides a general picture of magnet schools
as a major strategy for voluntary choice and desegregation in large urban systems. In the
past decade, the number of districts with magnet schools has almost doubled. The number
of magnet schools has more than doubled, and the number of students has tripled. More
than half the magnet districts and eight of every ten magnet schools and programs are
located in urban districts with more than 10,000 students.
To meet their desegregation goals, magnet schools must vigorously compete for students.
The main attractions for students and parents are the special curricular themes and
instructional methodologies offered by these programs. In order to be attractive to
students, a diversity of programs that reflect the demands and interests of the community
must be offered. The curricular emphasis most frequently found in magnet schools at
elementary and middle levels is “subject matter” (e.g., mathematics, science, or foreign
language); at the high school level, the most common emphasis is career-vocational.
Magnet schools have often been viewed as havens for high-achieving students within
urban school districts. The national survey results present a quite different picture. A
majority of districts (58%) assign students to their magnet schools by lottery. Only one-
third of magnet schools and programs reported using specific selection criteria— 23% use
test scores, 22% use teacher recommendations, and 17% use grade point average. These
statistics reveal that while a portion of magnet schools and programs do serve higher-
achieving students, primarily the gifted-and-talented programs, most magnet programs
serve a broad distribution of students in big city school systems.
There is evidence from the national data to suggest that magnet schools and programs may
be contributing to desegregation goals. In minority-dominant districts, magnet programs
enroll higher-than-average proportions of white students (relative to the overall
proportion of white students in the district). In white-dominant districts, the reverse is
true.
Magnet programs not only compete for students, they may also improve the quality of
schools, recruiting skilled teachers with areas of expertise related to the special focus of the
curriculum. Special staffing allowances also characterize magnet programs. As a result,
more than one-fourth of magnet programs have smaller class sizes than regular schools at
the same grade level.
To understand the effects of magnet schools on urban education, further studies and
analyses need to examine the local decisions and context in which magnet schools operate,
the extent to which magnet schools actually change the education process, and the extent
93
to which student learning is improved. The second phase of the Magnet Schools Study
will attempt to examine these critical questions.
REFERENCES
Archbald, D. (1988). Magnet schools, voluntary desegregation and public choice theory: Limits and
possibilities in a big city school system. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Blank, R. (1990). Analyzing educational effects of magnet schools using local district data. Sociological Practice
Review, 1, 40-51.
Blank, R., Dentler, R., Baltzell, C, & Chabotar, K. (1983). Survey of magnet schools: Analyzing a model for
quality integrated education. Prepared by James H. Lowry and Associates and Abt Associates for U.S.
Department of Education, Washington, DC.
Chubb, J., & Moe, T. (1990). Politics, markets, and America’s schools. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Moore, D. R., & Davenport, S. (1989). The new improved sorting machine. Madison, WI: National Center on
Effective Secondary Schools.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (1993). Public and private elementary and secondary education
statistics: School Year 1992-93 (NCES Report 93332). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational
reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.
Raywid, M. (1989). The mounting case for schools of choice. In J. Nathan (Ed.), Public schools by choice:
Expanding opportunities for parents, students, and teachers (pp. 13-40). Bloomington, IN: Meyer-Stone.
Rossell, C. H. (1990). The carrot or the stick for school desegregation policy: Magnet schools vs. forced busing.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Steel, L., & Levine, R. (1994). Educational innovation in multiracial contexts: The growth of magnet schools in
American education (Report No. 1 from the Magnet Schools Study). Prepared by American Institutes for
Research for U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC.
Witte, J., & Walsh, D. (1990, Summer). A systematic test of the effective schools model. Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 12(2), 188-212.
• • •
94
We turn now to our case study district, Montclair, New Jersey.
Background information on Montclair and its public schools

Population.
Population (2007 est.) 37,309
Ethnic composition:
White 59.8%
African American 32.1
Hispanic (of any race) 5.1
Asian American 3.2
Native American 0.2
Other 4.8
Median household income (2008) $74,894
95
Map #1: Distribution of African American residents in Montclair
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
96
Map #2: Distribution of income in Montclair
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
97
History50
For thousands of years before the beginning of European settlement, the area we know
today as Montclair was part of the homeland of the Lenape Indians, who hunted and
trapped here and passed over the mountains on their way to gather shellfish at the shore.
Such place names as Watchung (on the hill) and Yantacaw (place of dancing) bear witness
to their heritage.
The story of Montclair as a settled community, however, begins with the founding of
Newark by English people from Connecticut in 1666. The lands of the Newark
settlement extended westward to First Mountain, and having acquired acreage at “the foot
of the mountain,” Azariah Crane, his wife Mary Treat Crane, and their son Nathaniel,
built a home in 1694 near the present intersection of Orange Road and Myrtle Avenue.
Other pioneers arrived soon after, and the frontier settlement of Cranetown came into
being in what is now the southern part of Montclair.
In 1679 Dutch settlers acquired land from the Lenape Indians west of the Passaic River
and north of Newark, an arrangement later confirmed by the British government. Early in
the 1700’s John Speer, a member of the Dutch community, built a home that stands today
on Upper Mountain Avenue just north of the Montclair border. Other Dutch settlers
established farms in what is now the northern half of Montclair. This community became
known as Speertown. Later Valley Road was laid out, thus providing a link between the
two settlements.
During the Revolutionary War, First Mountain provided observation points for following
the movements of the British to the east. A strong tradition holds that both George
Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette were in Cranetown briefly in October of 1780.
The boulder at the corner of Claremont Avenue and Valley Road marking the site of
“Washington’s Headquarters” is one of Montclair’s better-known landmarks.
Speertown would remain a rural hamlet well into the 19th century; however, beginning
about 1800, several developments led to the transformation of Cranetown into a small
commercial center. One development was the opening of a general store by Israel Crane,
who received trade from a wide area. In 1806, Crane led a group of businessmen in
obtaining a charter from the State for building the Newark-Pompton Turnpike.
Constructed over the next several years, the turnpike came through Montclair as
Bloomfield Avenue and vastly increased the flow of commerce. Israel Crane broke new
ground as well in opening a wool mill on Toney’s Brook. Other small industries followed.
Also important for the economic development of the area was the completion of the
Morris Canal in 1831. Meanwhile, in 1812, the Bloomfield ward of Newark became a
separate township, which included the future Montclair. The village of Cranetown now
became known as West Bloomfield and a post office was established under that name.
The most decisive event for the emergence of Montclair was the coming of the railroads.
In 1856, the Newark and Bloomfield Railroad Company inaugurated regular service to
West Bloomfield. By changing trains at Newark and taking a ferry from Hoboken, people
could travel from the future Lackawanna Plaza to New York in an hour and twenty
50
Montclair Township Web site (http://www.montclairnjusa.org/content/view/342/507/)
98
minutes. Attracted to the country setting with its panoramic views, people in the cities
began riding the train to West Bloomfield, some for Sunday excursions, others for
vacations, and still others seeking to make their home here. By 1860 West Bloomfield was
becoming a commuter town with its own marked identity and influential residents
persuaded the post office to adopt the name Montclair.
Dissatisfaction with existing service led to a move to bring a second railroad to town.
When Bloomfield authorities declined to authorize a bond issue to underwrite another
railroad, Montclair residents were successful in securing from the State legislature a charter
for a separate township. Thus in 1868, the Township of Montclair was created. The plan
for another railroad went forward and by 1873 the Greenwood Lake line was completed
with five stations in Montclair. In time, as many as six-thousand people would commute
daily from Montclair via the two railroad lines. Trains also ran on Sunday.
The population of the community grew rapidly as New York businessmen and their
families began building homes along the mountainside. The new residents sought to create
in Montclair a model “country town” with convenient access to the city. Their vision was
shared by a notable artist colony that began forming in the 1870’s. A central figure was the
landscape painter, George Inness. Able and dedicated community leaders endowed the
town with superior schools, an excellent public library, a distinguished art museum and
many large and influential churches.
By the opening of the 20th century, a richly diverse population characterized the
community. A new influx of New Englanders was joined by African-Americans from the
South and by Irish, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians and others newly arrived from
Europe. Great mansions went up, but so did many modest homes. Between 1880 and
1930, Montclair’s population leaped from 5,147 to 42,017. Talented people continued to
be attracted to the community and by the 1930’s more than 130 Montclair residents were
listed in each issue of Who’s Who In America.
The period following World War II was marked by tremendous expansion of the
metropolitan area. New suburbs popped up in the hinterland along with shopping malls
and corporate offices. No longer a country town, Montclair faced the challenge of
preserving its character as a gracious residential community while at the same time
sustaining its aging commercial centers. Social changes of the 1960’s and 70’s brought
further challenges. In 1977 the Board of Education established a system of magnet schools
with the aim both of achieving racial balance and of enriching the curriculum. After many
years under the commission form of government, the community adopted the manager-
council plan. Revenue considerations led to the Town of Montclair returning to the status
of Township.
Today Montclair is a community of about 39,000 inhabitants. Never content to be merely
a “bedroom community,” Montclair is nevertheless a family-centered town. Its heritage in
education has been enhanced by its innovative public and private school educational
programs and the expanded offerings at Montclair State University. Once again our
hillside has become a haven for artists and writers. This is a seasoned community whose
many old houses enhance its charm, yet at the dawn of a new century, Montclair remains
alive to the spirit of the times.
99
Exhibit #1: School system statistics51
Student population (2007) 6,582
Ethnic composition:
White 57.7%
African American 37.7
Hispanic (of any race) 6.5
Asian American 4.7
Native American 0.2
Other 7.9
School budget $85,970,000
Per student expenditure $13,061
Sources of school funding:

Federal 2.0%
State 16.0
Local 81.0
Teachers 567
Teacher to student ratio 1:11.6
51
Data drawn from the Department of Education Common Core of Data (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/
100
Exhibit #2: Montclair School Governance

Governor
Jon Corzine (D)
New Jersey State
Legislature
(Democratic
majority in both State Board of
houses) Education
(13 members
appointed by
governor)
Mayor
Ed Remsen (D) Board of Education
(7 members, elected at large)
Commissioner
Lucille Davy
Superintendent
Frank Alvarez New Jersey
(Appointed by Board of Department of
Education) Education
11 Schools:
7 Elementary Schools
3 Middle Schools
1 High School
101
Map #3: Location of Montclair public schools
102
52
Exhibit #3: Montclair Public Schools: 2006 Racial distribution by School (%)
School White Black Hispanic Amer. Ind. Asian PI

Elementary Schools
Bradford (K-5) 55.7 27.4 7.2 0.2 9.5
Edgemont (K-5) 46.1 34.7 9.8 0.0 9.4
Hillside (3-5) 50.5 38.0 5.7 0.5 5.3
Nishuane (K-2) 45.3 40.1 9.2 0.4 5.0
Northeast (K-5) 50.0 30.5 11.1 0.0 804
Rand (K-5) 51.1 39.4 5.7 0.3 3.5
Watchung (K-5) 62.2 19.0 8.4 0.0 10.4

Middle Schools
Glenfield (6-8) 51.0 40.2 4.7 0.2 3.9
Mt. Hebron (6-8) 42.0 45.2 8.7 0.0 4.1
Renaissance (6-8) 60.3 25.7 7.4 0.0 6.6

High School
Montclair High School 47.8 42.3 5.7 0.3 3.9

Total 50.0 37.2 7.0 0.2 5.6
52
Source: New Jersey Department of Education (http://education.state.nj.us/rc/rc06
103
Exhibit #4: Timeline of events in the establishment of magnet schools in

Montclair
1960 The federal census finds Montclair’s population to be 24% African American.
1969 Monclair is placed under court order to desegregate its schools.
Early The district adopts a series of seven desegregation plans, including forced
1970’s busing, to address the court order. “White flight”—the “exit option”—is the
result.
1976 Montclair proposes and the state approves one of the nation’s first “choice”
plans aimed at voluntary desegregation of its schools.
1980 The federal census finds Montclair’s population to be 29% African American.
The student population in Montclair schools is 45% African American.
1984 The district adopts a comprehensive plan involving all elementary schools and
middle schools, which become theme-based magnet schools. All parents are
required to choose what school their children will attend.
1988 The student population in Montclair schools is 49% African American.
1993 The Montclair High School English department “de-tracks” its courses,
opening them to enrollment by any student. Parents of both African
American and white children respond with “bright flight”—the “exit” of
high performing students to private or parochial schools or to schools in other
districts.
1997 Responding to “bright flight,” the district opens Renaissance Middle School
as a magnet offering small class sizes and “educational innovations normally
identified with private schools.” “Bright flight” is successfully curbed.
2000 The federal census finds Montclair’s population to be 32.1% African

American. The student population in Montclair schools is 34.7% African
American.
2002 New Jersey Transit opens Midtown Direct-Montclair train service providing
direct trains from Montclair to midtown Manhattan. This results in an
increase in property values and, in turn, an in-migration of white
professionals.
2006 The federal census finds Montclair’s population to be 28.4% African

American. The student population in Montclair schools is 37.7% African
American.
104
2008 The U.S. Supreme Court issues its decision in the case of Parents Involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. While the decision generally
prohibits the use of race as the sole factor in determining student placement in
schools, Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a concurring opinion, suggests that there
may be circumstances in which race can be taken into account.
2008 Taking advantage of Kennedy’s opinion, the Montclair district decides not to
modify its selection process for magnet schools, arguing that race is only one
among several factors taken into account in that process.
In school year 1999-2000 Bernadette Anand, principal of Montclair’s Renaissance Middle School,
and Michele Fine, a parent volunteer, organized an oral history project for grade 9 students at the
school. The project set out to reconstruct a history of school desegregation in Montclair through
newspaper accounts, public documents, and extensive interviews with those who had lived through the
process as students, teachers and administrators. Following is the product of their endeavors:
Document #6: Bernadette Anand, Michelle Fine, Tiffany Perkins, Davis S. Surrey and the
Renaissance School Class of 2000, Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in our
Town, (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002) pp. 17-56.
A Brief History of Segregation in Montclair
Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous luxury. They seem to feel that

because they fought on the right side during the Civil War, and won, they have
earned the right merely to deplore what is going on in the South, without taking
any responsibility for it; and that they can ignore what is happening in Northern
cities because what is happening in Little Rock or Birmingham is "worse." Well
in the first place, it is not possible for anyone who has not endured both to know
which is "worse."
James Baldwin, "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem"
Blacks began living in Montclair in significant numbers in the middle of the nineteenth
century, primarily as household servants but also as artisans. While some Blacks lived in
wealthy households, or at least in the servant quarters where they worked, an African
American community, separate and certainly not equal, began to emerge around the time
of the Civil War. Then, as is still the case today, Blacks lived primarily in the southeastern
part of the town. In the nineteenth century there was a clear pattern of not selling or
renting to Blacks outside of the southern part of town. Like Blacks in nearby Newark,
Blacks in Montclair at the turn of the twentieth century competed with Italians for
inexpensive housing. Eventually the majority of Italians dispersed throughout the town of
Montclair. As we will see, 100 years later, during the height of the local desegregation
struggle, little had changed with respect to Black residential patterns.
105
The segregated and less-than-equal status of Montclair's Blacks permeated policies of

housing, education, and worship, ironically even in the Immaculate Conception
Church—whose building is where the Renaissance School is currently housed. Seton Hall
Professor Elizabeth Milliken, in her pamphlet on the history of the racially mixed Catholic
Saint Peter Claver Church in Montclair, reveals the mostly forgotten story of how the
Black Catholics who worshiped at Immaculate Conception were excluded from the main
space of worship. Milliken (n.d.) quotes Saint Peter Claver parishioner William Cannaday
describing why his family left Immaculate Conception in the 1930s:
We couldn't sit upstairs. We sat downstairs and they had some sort of speaker
system so that we could hear mass. We went there for about two months. Finally
someone mentioned to my mother "Don't you know that there is a Black Church
on Elmwood Avenue?" and took her to where it was! And we started going there,
(n.p.)
Segregation in Montclair was not restricted to religion and neighborhood. The Montclair
Times reported a talk by civil rights activist Dr. D. C. Rice, pastor-emeritus of Union
Baptist Church. Dr. Rice, who came to Montclair in 1929 as a youngster, described a
community with segregated hospitals, housing, and theaters, and a segregated school
system with all-White teachers. This progressive northern community had a "colored
YMCA," built under the guidance of Charles Bullock in 1926 and now called the
Washington Street YMCA; colored churches; a colored dance hall; and colored
barbershops. At the end of his 1983 talk, Dr. Rice sadly noted the lack of progress when
he described the 19 employees of the Township Department of Revenue and Finance,
noting "not a Black face is to be seen anywhere."
In our interviews, we heard often and painfully these stories of community and
neighborhood segregation. Lydia Davis Barrett, high school student during the early 1960s
and later director of the Urban League of Essex County, described Montclair in the 1950s:
When we were in elementary school, there were Italians and Blacks in our
neighborhood—we were in a poor to working-class neighborhood here, the
fourth ward. There were also a couple of Jewish kids.
As she grew, however, "difference" became a problem:
I remember one incident in second or third grade. There were these two girls
who I realized, years later, were Jewish, but I didn't know at the time. They
invited me to play with them, at their house. And I remember when I went, one
of them came out looking a little strange. She looked awkward. And she said,
"Oh, I think we need to play outside." I thought I heard her mother's voice.
Davis Barrett vividly provided images of interpersonal but also institutional exclusion
throughout town:
Colored kids went to the colored Y. White kids went to the [Park Street] Y...
that was the way we lived. We didn't particularly question it. But my friend, that
year, for reasons I'll never know. said to me, "We should go to the Park Street
Y..." and we went home and told our parents ...but they let us go up there. And I
106
remember going up there and looking up at this man in the registration window
and saying, "May I please have the registration form?" and I remember this man
saying to me, "You sure you're in the right place?" And I said, "Yes." And he
gave it to me. We signed up and went to the Park Street Y. I realized ...one of
the profound consequences of racism ...I remember being amazed because in the
Park Street Y I didn't have to step in a bucket of disinfectant, but we always did at
the colored Y. Of course I ended up with a fungus, I believe from the locker
room.
Nan Winkler, a White activist and parent in town, also remembers these same divisions.
Geographically, [Montclair] was very segregated with the exception of some very
small areas of town... .There were a lot of progressive people here who were
eager to see the system integrated and to see life in a different way but there were
also a lot of people who were very racist in their attitudes toward life generally
and toward the school system in particular.
Race and class intersected in Montclair, as in every other community in the nation, with
complex consequences. Particularly because Montclair had a growing Black middle class,
"fitting in" was sometimes a problem, as we hear from Dr. Renee Baskerville.
My life before integration was as part of a family that was considered a middle-
class family, so that we enjoyed many of the opportunities that everyone enjoyed
in the community of Montclair. I had a membership at the library, the art
museum, the YWCA. I worked on the Board of the Recreation Department and
served on committees of the United Way. The problem was that we [Black
people] had been educated, we had been to college, and we realized that
education made us seem like outsiders to other Blacks and to Whites.
The Struggle to Integrate Montclair
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, if one were to hear the phrase, Civil Rights
Movement, the immediate thought would be of the South. After all, this is where the
court battles were fought, where the federal troops were sent, and where the freedom
riders rode. And, if one were to believe the media, the South was where all the sit-ins,
boycotts, and violence were taking place. But if one thought that, one would be mistaken.
Civil rights protests in the North were very real, although far less publicized then or
known today. Montclair was no exception. Increasingly vocal in the 1950s and 1960s,
most Northern civil rights activities focused on the tightly woven issues of housing and
education.53 In 1965, the Montclair Fair Housing Committee called 22 homeowners who
had put their houses up for sale. Of these owners, only four said they would sell to an
African American family. The Fair Housing Committee also interviewed African
American buyers. Among these families, it was found that Blacks were told houses in
White neighborhoods were off the market when they were not; were not shown houses
in White areas by realtors; were told that the owners would not sell to them; and, finally,
were told that mortgages would not be given to them for homes in White areas.
53
The following information was obtained largely from back issues of the Montclair Times and the 1964
Community Audit.
107
Nan Winkler revealed:
When we looked for a house here, if we asked a realtor a question about an

integrated area or an area where African Americans lived, they assured us that
there were no African Americans living in that area, which, of course, is exactly
what we wanted to know. But we had hoped for a different kind of answer.
Marlene Anderson, an African American woman who was a high-level administrator in

the school district, working for the Superintendent, at the same time as she was advisor to
the Black Student Union, remembers growing up in Montclair.
I'm 50 years old, and at 50, I'm still fascinated by seeing so many interracial
children and interracial people. When I grew up in Montclair, it was Black or
White. There were no Puerto Ricans... there were no Hispanics of any type.
There was a Chinese laundry. And a Chinese family. That was it. And if you were
anything other than that, you didn't say.... Talking about interracial couples, I
came from New York with my husband simply because Montclair was that kind
of town. We wanted to live here because we felt that this was a place where we
would be able to be happy and raise children.
Educator Bernadette Anand tells a similar story of coming to Montclair.
I was living on the Upper East Side. Then we moved to Montclair because I got
married and we wanted our children, who were going to be biracial [Indian and
White] to grow up in a town that we felt was an integrated town.
Mary Lee Fitzgerald, educator, Superintendent of Schools in Montclair, and

Commissioner of Education for the state of New Jersey, remembers her days of moving
in.
One of the things I did, because I am White, I bought a house in an all-Black

neighborhood, because I...can't talk about integration as well if I'm going to live
in a White neighborhood. So I wanted to personally try to integrate a
neighborhood. And I learned a lot from my neighbors. I was the only White
person in about six blocks. And there were old timers who had been in Montclair
for a couple of generations. And they were very open to me, which I appreciated.
I often thought if this had been reversed, if it was an all-White neighborhood and
one Black moved in, I don't know if the neighbors would have been as
welcoming as my neighbors were there.
Joe Fortunato, activist lawyer who grew up in Upper Montclair, recounts:
I remember the first time I ever saw a Black youth in Upper Montclair…Maybe
he was 6 years old and I was very curious because I had never seen a person like
this in Upper Montclair. I began to follow him—the boy—down the street and
then began talking to him. And soon a truck came by and…an Italian American
man who apparently was caring for the boy…the boy may have wandered off,
and I remember the man scolding him for running off…perhaps he was thinking
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that it was something scary for him to be walking the streets of Upper Montclair
at that point.
Judy Miller, professor emeritus of Black studies at Seton Hall University, narrates the tense
and intimate relation between housing and school segregation.
Kids [would] go to neighborhood schools and the neighborhoods were all-Black

so they [would] go to all-Black schools... so, part of the issue that we all got
involved in was [the Fair Housing Act] to find a house that you wanted. So that
became part of the breakdown of segregation. There were practically no Black
people who lived in Upper Montclair. That was our Mason-Dixon line and you
didn't cross over that.
By 1968, the Fair Housing Committee revealed that little progress toward integration had
been made. Using Black and White testers to find available housing, the Committee
established that in areas outside of the southeastern section of Montclair, Blacks were still
told there was a waiting list or simply that no housing was available. Whites were shown
housing in these areas immediately. Realtors were doing their job in keeping the African
American community in the southeastern part of town.
Among the leaders of Montclair's Civil Rights Movement was Charles Baskerville, whose
daughter Dr. Renee Baskerville was interviewed by the Renaissance students as a former
student who had survived the desegregation struggle to become a pediatrician, and whose
grandson, Alt, was one of the Renaissance School students involved in this study. In
November 1965 Charles Baskerville, who among other roles served as Chairman of the
Montclair Civil Rights Commission, summed up Montclair: "White racial discrimination
and Negro racial magnetism have combined to produce the great ghetto we have today."
Later that year, Baskerville, in discussing housing discrimination in Montclair, noted that
Montclair had a housing segregation index of 80.3, even higher than Newark's 71.6. The
residential patterns provided the justification for a de facto segregated school system,
rationalized in the language of "neighborhood schools."
Tensions with the lack of progress toward integration rose throughout the nation and,
perhaps not surprisingly, throughout the North in the 1960s; frustration at times erupted
into open confrontations, sometimes violence. After a series of what were called
disturbances by the Montclair Times, George Rice, president of the Montclair NAACP,
stated:
Recent demonstrations are the results of an internal combustion. They are caused
by utter frustration. After years of countless humiliations, it is not at all surprising
that they occur. (Montclair Times, July 27, 1967)
Organizations such as the NAACP, the Fair Housing Committee, the local Civil Rights
Commission, and church-led protests pressured the formal and informal institutions of the
community to admit that Montclair, not just those distant localities in the South, needed
to change morally and structurally. Increasingly, youth in Montclair, as was the case
elsewhere throughout the North, were losing their patience with both the White
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establishment and the traditional Black leadership. At the forum with Mr. Rice, Vincent
A. Gill, of the Montclair Civil Rights Commission, noted:
This near riot in Montclair is local evidence that our town suffers from the same
ills that have beset Newark, Nyack, Birmingham and Detroit.... Old leaders have
been rejected and new leaders have been chosen from their [young people] ranks.
Current events reflect their extreme frustration and a growing determination to
pay the ultimate price to motivate change. This was the mood as I sensed it while
"holed up" with a group of angry young Negroes on that tense Sunday night, July
16. (Montclair Times, July 27, 1967)
This anger rose to the surface in 1968. In July, a few young Blacks broke windows in the
southeastern business district of Montclair. While extremely small in scale, this action had
a traumatic effect on both the Black and White communities. More significant, that Fall
there was a demonstration at the high school. The Black Student Union held a half-day
sit-in the cafeteria, with reports of some vandalism and rumors of unprovoked attacks on
White students.
The men and women whom we interviewed remembered the power and passion of the
demonstration. Renee Baskerville was a student at the time.
The sit-in that I remember was about a guidance counselor in the high school,
Mr. Lee. I remember there was some controversy about his job situation.. .he was
Black and his contract had not been renewed. There were questions from the
parents in the community [about what had happened]. We all sat in the cafeteria
and took over, and it was... [designed] to try to keep Mr. Lee on and trying to get
the Board of Education to recognize him and not hold him back because he was
Black. There were some tables turned over. The police came in. There was some
unrest, but I don't remember any bloodshed…
I can remember it being a warm feeling for me because we [took over the
cafeteria], Martin Luther King was a great influence in those times. And I
remember feeling very special and warm inside to be a part of this, which I felt
was a peaceful demonstration. I remember sitting there and we were rocking back
and forth, singing, "We Shall Not Be Moved." I don't remember it being
depressing. I don't remember being frightened by the tables that were overturned.
I just remember feeling very important because I knew I was part of something
that was hopefully going to bring about positive change and it was a wonderful
feeling to be apart of history.
Nan Winkler also remembers this period in history vividly.
The controversy regarding Mr. Lee was as intense as any I remember. It was
prolonged and involved numerous community meetings. We lost. His contract
was not renewed. He was in touch with the issues and willing to discuss them
with his students. No wonder his contract was not renewed.
An equally spirited, although very different, account is narrated by Marlene Anderson,

who was working for the Board of Education at that time and was advisor to the students.
110
It was scary to work for the Board of Education during the protests. You had
your moments when you didn't know whether or not, if you made any flares or
you were contrary to what the Board felt,.. .you were going to lose your contract
or you may not have your job, or.. .you had to go elsewhere to work. At that
time, the Board of Education was not as liberal as it is now. We did not have as
many Blacks in the administration level. So therefore, we had to bite our
tongues a little bit as to what our feelings were about the segregation problem that
they felt was in town. You didn't know whose toes you were going to step on.
You didn't know how many people who had been smiling at you all along were
really racially involved.... There weren't that many [Blacks] who stood up for
themselves at that time because of the fact that... we didn't have enough Blacks in
authority... so if we were going to do something, we were on our own. The
demonstrations were more prominent in the high school... they started with food
fights, in the cafeterias, because although we had racial discrimination here, our
kids weren't violent—neither the Blacks nor the Whites.... They were just striving
to get the attention of the adults. They were striving to get the attention of the
Board of Education. They just wanted them to listen...and they weren't so much
fighting for integration in Montclair, they were fighting for equal education. They
were protesting for equality.
To paraphrase the 1968 Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders, by the end of the
1960s Montclair was recognized as divided into two societies, separate and unequal.
Segregation in the Schools in Montclair
Prior to Brown v. Board of Education, segregation in the South was explicit and legal. This
de jure segregation separated children into "White schools" and "colored schools." Not so
in the North. Prior to, and for a long time after, Brown v. Board of Education, de facto
segregation existed under the guise of local schools. When necessary, creative
gerrymandering—the drawing of neighborhood borders to isolate or protect privileged
groups—ensured a segregated school system. Jane Manners in her analysis "Repackaging
Segregation: History of the Magnet School System in Montclair, NJ" articulates how a
series of "gerrymandered student attendance zones ... intentionally separated black and
white neighborhoods…" (1998, p. 56). Soon, a pattern in Montclair existed prior to and,
more significantly, after the Brown v. Board of Education decisions.
That de facto segregation was the rule in Montclair, as demonstrated in Table 1, made it
no worse than other northern towns; however, Montclair certainly could not justify
claims of moral superiority to the segregated South. In fact, the schools in the southern
part of Montclair, Glenfield, Nishuane, and Rand, became more—net less—segregated in
the decade after Brown v. Board of Education.
Table 1: Percentage of Minority Students in Montclair Public Schools
School 1947-48 1964-65

Bradford 0.0 0.0
Edgemont 0.0 3.0
Glenfield 85.4 97.0
Grove Street 37.4 32.0
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Nishuane 51.2 75.0

Northeast 0.0 0.0
Rand 76.4 84.0
Southwest n/a 3.0
Watchung 1.7 6.0
Hillside 11.3 36.0
34.0 (grades 7-8)
Mt Hebron 0 0.0
33.0 (grades 7-8)
Montclair High School 25.0 30.0
Nan Winkler reiterates the problem.
We had moved to Montclair in the hopes that there would be a better scene as far
as integration was concerned. So it was disturbing that my children were not
getting the maximum benefit of an integrated school system…Yet my children
did not experience the worst of segregation. Partly because they, in elementary
school, were in a school that had at least some African American population, but
also because in our personal life, they were part of our group of friends who were
quite diverse. So that they were never in a situation which was totally cut off, as
White kids…But one of the things that disturbed me was when [my children]
heard bad comments—and I can recall a particular incident where my son came
home from fooling around in the playground after school, there had been some
racist comments and he didn't—he was very young-know how to react. It was the
beginning of my thinking about the fact that the classroom really needed to deal
with issues, so that the children…learned how to talk about it with one another.
Lydia Davis Barrett details the problem and the resistance.
About integration? Well I guess you could say that during elementary through
junior high school, the situation was that nobody felt there was a situation... there
was only one Black teacher and she happened to be an outstanding teacher. I was
fortunate enough to have her, Mabel Hudson, when I was in fourth through sixth
grade. By the time I got to junior high school at Glenfield, there was a second
Black teacher—Daisy Douglas—I was one of her worst students…but she was
gracious enough not to acknowledge that. There was no mandate to have
curriculum that integrated the African American experience... but there was a
mandate to study the Native American experience. And I remember wondering
why Mabel Hudson went into such depth and detail. She somehow, I guess, felt
that she could teach us [the histories of] people of color even though she wasn't
really free to teach us African American history.
In a parallel voice, Renee Baskerville explains:
I grew up in the south end of Montclair and I remember then that the schools
were very segregated. And all the kids in my class were Negroes ...I am trying to
keep with the language of time... [but] I remember having mostly White teachers.
In contrast, Joe Fortunato remembers:
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Starting kindergarten in Mt. Hebron and then junior high... my kindergarten class
was entirely White and it remained that way through the sixth grade for me...
there was one Jewish student, and he was a very distinct minority. He was looked
at as being different because he had a different religion, perhaps he didn't celebrate
Christmas. But the concept of going to school with Black students just didn't
occur to us. This wasn't part of our reality.
Montclair's history is a familiar, if unspoken, one. It is a history of segregation of schools,

housing, and worship—a segregation that this community, and the northeast, are still
coming to grips with. At the end of the twentieth century the lack of progress toward
residential integration remained pronounced in the most densely populated northeastern
states. Montclair is no exception. It is still predominantly Black in the southeastern part of
town and still predominantly White in the northern area known as Upper Montclair.
As Table 2 illustrates, New Jersey, and neighboring New York and Pennsylvania are
among the most segregated states. In a 1999 national study conducted by Gary Orfield and
John T. Yun, and updated in 2001, New Jersey and New York consistently rank among
the top ten most segregated school systems. Orfield and Yun conclude that
Large and increasing numbers of African-American and Latino students are

enrolled in suburban schools, but serious segregation [characterizes] these
communities.. .[and] all racial groups except whites experience considerable
diversity in their schools but whites are remaining in overwhelmingly white
schools even in regions with very large non-white enrollments. (1999, p. 1-2)
Table 2: Percentage of Black and Latino Students Attending Schools Where at

Least 90% of the Students are Minorities
Black Students Latino Students
Rank State Percent Rank State Percent
1 Michigan 64.0 1 New York 58.8

2 Illinois 60.3 2 Texas 45.7
3 New York 60.3 3 California 42.2
4 New Jersey 51.3 4 New Jersey 40.7
5 Maryland 49.7 5 Illinois 37.8
6 Pennsylvania 46.7 6 Connecticut 31.3
7 Alabama 43.1 7 Florida 29.2
8 Mississippi 41.2 8 Pennsylvania 26.5
9 Tennessee 40.8 9 Arizona 22.7
10 Louisiana 40.3 10 New Mexico 22.1
Source: The Star Ledger, July 18, 2001
In 2001, Orfield is cited in the Star Ledger.
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New Jersey is like much of the Northeast, where the pattern of segregation is high
and getting slightly worse,... Actually, it has been so segregated in these states that
it is hard for them to get much worse. (Mooney, 2001)
Civil rights and educational activist Walter Lack recounts his days on the Civil Rights
Commission, confronting issues of race and class discrimination in schools and in housing.
My sense is that a large part of the problem is also related to class. I think that
people aren't paying enough attention to the economic class aspect of this.... But
in some instances, we adults tend to put [racism] on you [students]. So I don't
think it's real shocking that there's racial segregation even today. New Jersey is
[after all] the second and fourth most racially segregated—by schools and
housing—according to the 1990s census. So if the cafeteria is segregated, that's a
reflection of what's going on in our state, And that's promulgated by adults.
As Jane Manners details, in the late nineteenth century, before immigrant Italians were
accepted by the rest of the White community, both Black and Italian children who
attended public schools were assigned to the Cedar Street School (later renamed
Nishuane) in the southern part of town. Erected in 1887, this school was designed by the
Board of Education to ensure that these two groups would not attend school with
"White" students. In 1896 the Maple Street School (now called Glenfield) was erected in
the southeastern part of town to further ensure that Black and Italian children would
remain in their neighborhood. Both schools were K-9. Once Italians began moving out of
the southern part of town, Nishuane and Glenfield became increasingly "colored" schools.
After ninth grade, these students would join the rest of the town in a single high school.
However, by the time they arrived at the high school, the inferior quality of their feeder
schools made tracking by race easily justifiable. And tracking, in small northern
municipalities such as Montclair that had only one high school, became another means of
de facto segregation within a building.
Things could have been complicated for Montclair since there was a small, but wealthy,
White community in the southwestern part of town. By the late 1940s, the Board was
faced with the possibility of sending White students from the southwestern part of town to
the predominantly Black Nishuane and Glenfield schools. The Board came up with
another idea-create another neighborhood school. In 1949 the Board converted a former
mansion in the southwestern part of town into the Southwest School. Table 1… illustrates
just how effective this policy of de facto versus de jure segregation remained into the
1960s, with Southwest 97% White and Glenfield 97% Black. In large part, the creation of
Southwest School, in combination with the exodus of White families, explains the
increase in segregation between the late 1940s and mid-1960s.
The Fight for Desegregation in the Schools54
54
This section is derived primarily from information from the commissioner of Education's decisions, court
records, the Montclair Times, various Board of Education documents, and Jane Manners's article in Race
Traitor, 1998, Volume 8.
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...The [State] Commissioner [of Education] directs the Montclair Board of

Education to formulate a plan which will effectively achieve the goal of racial
dispersal enunciated by the Courts as the law of New Jersey.
Commissioner of Education, November 8,1967
In Montclair it was a long, uphill climb from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to the
final implementation of a desegregation plan in the late 1970s—longer than the
desegregation struggles in Little Rock, Birmingham, and throughout the South.
The secret, as the 1960s began, was not that Montclair had segregated schools. That was
explicit and rationalized by neighborhood boundaries. The secret, although hindsight does
not allow it to be a surprise, was that the separate schools were not equal. As many of the
interviewees told the Renaissance students, the predominantly Black schools were not
fully educating their students, did not have the same resources or curricula as the White
schools, and, most significant, were not educating toward high expectations for their
students.
Public protests over school segregation in Montclair began in 1961. Parents at Glenfield
Junior High School, with the local NAACP, challenged then Superintendent Clarence
Hinchey and the Board of Education over "unequal and inferior" educational
opportunities. The June 29, 1961 Montclair Times reported a heated 5-hour meeting with
the Board of Education at which parents demanded establishment of a citizen's advisory
committee to study elementary and junior high schools across Montclair. The parents also
demanded an immediate redistricting of school boundaries.
One of the leaders of the parents was Glenfield PTA President Harris Davis. Davis's
daughter-Lydia Davis Barrett, who as an adult was director of the Urban League of Essex
Countywent from straight As at Glenfield to Ds at the high school.
Here I was, this great big honor student from Glenfield—which was mostly
Black—and I failed the first essay in Montclair High. I was getting similar
mediocre grades in algebra. (Mays, 1998, p. 52)
Davis, after concluding that these poor grades were the result of his daughter's inadequate
preparation rather than failure to adjust to high school, organized other parents into a
Parents' Emergency Committee. Lydia Davis Barrett remembers:
What my father discovered is that we weren't getting the same content as kids in
the White schools... we were getting old, outdated textbooks from White schools.
There were low expectations. (Mays, 1988, p. 52)
Working with the NAACP, the Emergency Committee found
disparities similar to those found in "separate but equal" systems in the South. The
schools in Montclair's white neighborhoods had newer supplies, more rigorous
curricula, better facilities and more experienced teachers…The predominantly
white schools received new textbooks and furniture on a regular basis, while
Glenfield had to be content with hand-me-downs…White schools had new
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science laboratories, extensive library, and fully-equipped gymnasiums and

cafeterias…Finally Glenfield's teaching staff did not have the same credentials as
those in other schools. (Manners, 1998, pp. 59-60)
Lydia Davis Barrett tells this story:
When I went to Glenfield, I won a lot of awards for academics…My parents were
both college graduates so you had to sign up for whatever kind of program you
wanted at the high school. And I signed up for the college prep program. When I
went to pick up my schedule, I had cooking as a major and sewing as a minor...
but I had signed up for college prep which meant I needed 5 days of language,
math, and English.... My father had to leave his job for a day. In those days fathers
didn't leave their jobs for a day to go to school. But he had to leave his job and go
up to that high school in order to make them give me back the college prep
program. [When I started getting low grades at the high school], my father made a
fuss. ..only to learn that although I graduated top of my class at Glenfield, I had
been receiving the curriculum for students who were [classified as] Negro.
In this struggle, the Davis family—and the Black community—learned that students were
receiving very different curricula, supplies, and facilities based simply on race.
Following a brief community boycott of Glenfield, at the beginning of the 1961-62 school
year, Superintendent Hinchey and the Board made vague promises to study the situation,
as well as half-hearted, ineffective gestures toward creating desegregation plans. However,
every attempt to ease the segregation situation was met with opposition from White
parents who formed organizations such as the Committee for Neighborhood Schools.
These parents, defending the "neighborhood school" concept, explained that it would be
inappropriate to bus children beyond their neighborhoods. They argued that busing
would tire their children out and thus would be educationally unfounded, ignoring the
fact that neighborhood segregation and creative gerrymandering had created the White
and Black neighborhoods in the first place.
As we learned from Nan Winkler, there was another historical force—one easily
overlooked in history.
There was a group of African American parents (and supporters) in Montclair, as

throughout the country, who [also] believed that integration was not the solution
to inequities in education. Some believed that as long as White people were in
control, making all of the decisions, the interests of Black children would not be
served. They questioned the sensitivity of White people to the culture and history
of the Black community. They understood that the expectations for their children
would remain low. These parents supported the concept of "community control,"
wherein the community would have the power to make decisions regarding the
education of their children. Many of their fears have been borne out. We
continue to struggle with these issues.
In 1962 the Committee for Neighborhood Schools went to court, claiming that a Board
of Education plan to create limited integration at Mt. Hebron denied their own White
children equal protection of rights guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. In May
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1964, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against the Committee for Neighborhood
Schools, stating that the Board could indeed use race as a factor in school assignments. The
Court also declared that the Fourteenth Amendment rights of the Mt. Hebron students
were not violated.
Later in 1964 Superintendent Hinchey left the district and was replaced by Robert
Blanchard. Blanchard and the Board of Education failed to take advantage of the New
Jersey Supreme Court ruling beyond annually offering half-hearted plans for
desegregation. These plans were unacceptable to the pro-integration forces, for not going
far enough, and equally unacceptable to the anti-busing constituency, which continued to
rationalize segregation using the concept of neighborhood schools.
Meanwhile, within the schools, Marlene Anderson tells us:
At the time I went to Montclair High School, in the early 1960s, I had never
heard of a Black college. I was never even called into the guidance office to be
evaluated to go to college. I wasn't geared toward that direction. We didn't have
any Black guidance counselors…Some classes had all Black students. We actually
had classes that were segregated…The Black Student Union, eventually, was
formed to fight for the rights of all the students in Montclair. They were trying to
make it better for all the kids.
Frustrated by the lack of progress, in 1966 Black parents petitioned the New Jersey
Commissioner of Education. These parents accused the Montclair Board of Education of
failing to seriously and adequately desegregate Montclair schools. The suit claimed that the
Board's inaction led to a
denial of their right to equal educational opportunity and they asked that the
Board of Education be directed to take positive steps, and to employ fair and
impartial standards, to eliminate all aspects of racial segregation and discrimination
under its jurisdiction.
On November 8, 1967, the Commissioner recognized in his ruling that the Board had
made some plans to desegregate, particularly by considering (1) pairing schools at opposite
ends of the town and cross-busing, or (2) closing two schools at the southern sector of the
town. The latter plan would recreate the space thus abandoned by construction of new
schools or additions to existing schools in the northern sector, and transport the pupils
displaced to the new facilities. However, the Commissioner noted that the Board itself had
rejected these plans as unworkable. While rejecting the Black parents' contention that the
Board failed to recognize the effects of discrimination, the Commissioner directed the
Board to implement a complete correction of racial imbalance in its school system.
Renee Baskerville, whose parents were pioneers in the litigation, remembers with great
pride this moment in her childhood.
I don't remember the particulars of what was said or anything like that. But it was
a very special time for me, because I was watching my parents fight for something
and was watching them be dedicated. I was so proud of my parents.
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Parallel to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1967 ruling by the Commissioner led to neither
immediate nor full implementation. It certainly was a legal victory; however, it would
take a long time to reach fruition. While there was much resistance, there was also much
organizing by parents—mostly Black, but some multiracial coalitions also began to
emerge. Judy Miller recalls:
We had meetings trying to find out what it was we should do…we weren't always
in agreement. But we would come to a consensus after a great deal of talking and
examining what might be best. It wasn't just all Black people. We had a number
of White people who worked with us, and who were courageous in what they
were doing. Sometimes they received much more overt criticism…I remember
on the picket lines, men would drive up in a car and they would yell at us and the
children. But a lot of the abuse was focused on some of the White women doing
marches and it was constant. But it was exhilarating because we were fighting for
integration, which was much more than just putting Black kids with White kids.
The White kids also received better education, more supplies, a more rigorous
curriculum, more qualified teachers. We were thrilled with the possibilities.
Joan Smith, a White parent who was involved in the early struggles for integration, also
remembers the power of the meetings and the strength of parents coming together across
race lines to fight for social justice.
I think that there was what they called de facto segregation, which means that in
fact they separated some neighborhoods where it was more highly one race or
another, and had them go to those schools.... [Nevertheless] I have to tell you,
there were a lot of wonderful friendships forged between the races in those years.
Between African Americans and Caucasian people in the community. There were
some wonderful side benefits of working for this integration plan... realizing that
some of these other parents were poets, writers... getting to know them as
individuals, not just over the PTA table.
The Board of Education responded with a so-called 5-3-4 Plan, which involved moving
Black students in grades 1-4 from Rand School in the south to Watchung and Edgemont
Schools in the north; moving White students in the fifth and sixth grades from Watchung
and Edgemont to Rand; and placing White fifthand sixth-grade students from Southwest
School in programs in Nishuane School. While this plan did lead to more racial balance, it
failed to satisfy the criteria established by the Montclair NAACP and the State
Commissioner of Education. The latter ruled on August 19, 1968, that the 5-3-4 Plan
proposed by the Board of Education was insufficient and therefore unacceptable. The
Commissioner again did not provide either an acceptable remedy or an acceptable time
for the Board to act.
One outcome of the 5-3-4 Plan was the establishment of what would become the
foundation for Montclair magnet schools. To make Nishuane and Rand more acceptable
to White parents, the Board added exciting educational programs. While the
Commissioner's ruling negated the 5-3-4 Plan, the notion of the attractive themes for each
school would become the foundation for the system that eventually was accepted.
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After the Commissioner's rejection of the 5-3-4 Plan, pro-integration forces pushed the
Board for a more meaningful desegregation plan. The Committee for Neighborhood
Schools, and its successors, resisted all such moves. As Nan Winkler remarked:
People were not saying what they really believed. I mean, nobody said, "We're
against integration." They said things like, "We're against this change because
children have to go further away from their homes." Or "This is complicated." Or
"There are too many changes." But people did not admit to being against
integration.
It was in September 1968 that a student protest was ignited at the high school. The
Montclair Times of October 3, 1968, describes
[an] intolerable situation at Montclair High School [in which] the Black Student
Union, some 500 strong, decided on a sit-down demonstration.... The high
school has been plagued with demonstrations, physical attacks by Negro students
upon White students and conditions in the high school not conducive to the
democratic process.... Everyone in the community, Negroes and Whites, have
much at stake in this critical situation and already many White families, fearful of
attacks upon their children, are considering withdrawing them from the high
school and moving or sending them to private schools. Montclair can ill afford
such a movement, for it wouldn’t take long for our schools to become
predominantly Negro and the community a ghost town.
The Board as a whole, like the newspaper, often reflected the sentiments of the more elite
and White segments of town. The Board, as a body, was not in favor of moving with any
deliberate speed. Judy Miller remembers:
I was the first African American president of the PTA council that brought
together all the PTAs in town. On the day of the meeting, I got a call that there
was trouble in town... one of the first fights in the school and the parents were
incensed and they demanded some meetings. The only meeting that was
happening in education at that point was our [integrated] parent/teacher council
meetings. So we met in the Superintendent’s office because we were going to
have to go to Hillside to meet 700 parents who were irate about what was
happening between Black and White kids…they were furious. It was a meeting
that I’ll never for get…parents were yelling…by the time we got near the end of
it, people were calmer.
It was at that meeting, as reported in the Montclair Times, that Irving Winkler saw “the real
problem…as naked, unabashed White racism.” [Following are Winkler’s comments at the
meeting]:
I have three children in our school system and I attended the Town Commission
meeting at this school last week which dealt with the current situation in our
High School.
It is high time now that someone stood up and told it as it is, characterizing the
real problem by its right name—i.e. pure, simple, naked, unabashed white
racism—some of it subtle, most about as subtle as the main address at a George
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Wallace rally. I am both appalled and sick to my stomach at the expression and
display of bigotry which pervaded that meeting.
What has our fair town in such an uproar? Several hundred black students join
together to develop an organizational form which they apparently felt was
necessary to express their particular problems and needs; special problems which
result from a very special oppression—a systematic, all encompassing, humiliating
oppression which all black people, and particularly black youth, have been
subjected to for over two hundred years. We are incensed that they no longer
eagerly reach out to grab at some noble white hand, which time and time again
has clenched into a steel fist—only to beat them into the ground in a thousand
insidious ways. We are outraged with righteous indignation that black youth in
our community have come to the conclusion that they must now find their own
way, develop their own organizational forms under their own leadership if there is
to be any meaningful progress or change.
To those who suddenly lament this polarization of the black community, but who
have nothing to say about the lily white polarization that has for decades
dominated every aspect of life in this town, not withstanding its racial tokenism;
to those who are looking under beds for “outside” black agitators, I for one say
thank God these kids have the courage, wisdom and guts to stand up and be
counted, to say “What was once good enough, is good enough no longer!” To
those who say, “It was never like this when I went to Montclair High where
some of my best friends were Negroes,” I say we are way behind the times in
Montclair. Even the smart bigots quit playing that jazz years ago.
I bring news for my white brothers. The fact is the day is long, long gone, like it
or not, when white people could determine who the black leadership should be,
or what “Black organizational forms” should be, or what black values should be,
or what black demands and aspirations should be—and most particularly, what
black tactics in the quest for full freedom now should be. Neither are black people
going to be divided or diverted and led down harmless paths by false friends; or
intimidated by expulsions, threats, or billy clubs, here in Montclair or anywhere
else. The record should be abundantly clear on that score by now!
As a white man I am not here to defend black youth, who need no defense from
me. I am here, however, to defend the interests of my own children who attend
Montclair schools. I submit that it is no accident that, by and large, the same
forces who are now calling for the heads of the school administration, who are
spreading the racist rumors, who seek to make political capital from this situation
and wreck the preferred plan, who are pushing the law and order bit—are the
very same forces who attack every school budget, who organize the “NO” votes
in every referendum that determines the quality of our schools and the education
which our children shall receive.
These remarks, however, should by no means be taken as approval of the Board

or of the latest actions of Drs. Blanchard and Fish. Some of their recent decisions
show questionable sensitivity indeed to the special needs of black youth, whose
right to organization and recognition are essential to the very life of the
democratic process in our school system.
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First rate, quality education is as indivisible as freedom itself; just as the targets of
bigotry and discrimination are never limited to one racial, religious or national
group.
I have every confidence that all of our children, black and white, can resolve this
question as they will resolve many of the decisive questions of our time which our
own generation has bungled. It is some of the parents and certainly the bigoted
troublemakers who constitute the real problem.
And so the Board worked out several more plans. In 1970, one such plan, which involved
turning Mt. Hebron and Hillside into integrated middle schools, was rejected by the
voters. The following September an interim plan was put into place. This plan left the
segregated elementary schools in place and created three middle schools with some
integration. Black students would be sent to White schools, but not the reverse. Needless
to say, this interim plan was rejected by the State Commissioner of Education.
Michael Johnson, who was leader of the Black Student Union, remembers these early days
of one-way desegregation.
The first stage of desegregation came when Glenfield was closed and each of the
Glenfield students was bused to one of the other junior high schools. Thus
segregation remained in the K to sixth-grade schools. This plan continued for a
few years when they... made Montclair High School a 9-12 program. Now there
were only two junior high schools and the entire system was desegregated—hut
not integrated—7-12. So desegregation was gradual…It should be kept in mind
that desegregation and integration were not necessarily the same thing. As a child,
when I lived in the Glenfield area it was a somewhat contained Black community
which I imagine continues to a certain degree. The school desegregation
movement swept across the country during this period and as a youngster I
recognized it as a positive change, though I questioned, along with others, the
validity of the assumption that there could not be “excellent” all-Black schools.
Thus I had this ambivalence about the School Board’s decision which was
aggravated by the fact that the burden of the early busing fell on the Black
students.
Parent Helen Newhouse remembers the plans and the associated rumors.
When integration first happened, they struggled for many years to find the right
way to do it…What I particularly remember was they transferred a White fifth
grade from Bradford to Glenfield and vice versa…Black children were being
brought to Mt. Hebron and White children were brought, I think, to Hillside…I
remember hearing one rumor that was going around among the children, “Do
you know they found a girl’s skeleton in Mt. Hebron? You know, DEAD
BODIES!”
Educator Frank Rennie discussed some of the political maneuvering of the times.
I don’t want to blame the conflict on the Board of Education, because the town
clearly was not wild about going into any kind of integration program. It seemed
to me they were just not ready to say, “We’re going to bus students around.
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We’re going to change this.” The south end of town was predominantly Black.
Other parts were predominantly White. So they tried this. It lasted for 2 years
until everyone saw the folly [of moving just a few students]. It was artificial…it
wasn’t real because integration didn’t start in the first grade or kindergarten where
it should. It was flaunting…the law said you had to integrate the school, not each
grade. Integration wasn’t a choice on the part of the parents. It was something the
Board of Education could do. It upset a lot of people in town…There were what
we call contentious meetings because people—and I say it was primarily Whites—
did not want to give up their right to send their kid to a neighborhood school.
That was their pitch. You lived, you bought a home in one part of town. The
more expensive homes were in the upper part of town. So you bought a home
two blocks away and it was practical, “Oh, my kids are going to walk to school.”
And then somebody tells you, “You can’t send your kids to this school. We’re
going to bus you to the other end of town.”
Joan Smith, a White parent involved in the PTA and now a disability rights activist,
remembers that she, and a group of other PTA mothers, were very concerned.
There were people in Montclair who really fought hard for what they believed
was the right thing to do for kids. I happen to be one of that group of PTA
women. The issue was busing versus neighborhood schools. The Board of Ed
tried to convince people that busing was the way to go…it didn’t matter what
happened on the other end of the bus line, as long as your education was exciting.
And a lot of people believed that was true. They believed that all kids in this town
were going to get a more equal educational experience, and a better social
experience... and a more diverse community. We got tired of listening to all the
arguments that went back and forth. We said, “You know what? Let’s make an
appointment with the Commissioner of Education.”
We were a group of PTA parents...we made an appointment with the

Commissioner of Education and we went to Trenton. We realized that Montclair
was really in noncompliance with the law, that we had been given an order to
desegregate our schools and we were tossing the ball all around town. And so we
came back and I remember the Montclair Times had a big spread on the front
about PTA PARENTS GO TO TRENTON. We felt that [the lawsuit] was just
one more step to having the Board of Education recognize the need for a [system
of] education that would be open to all children…But I can remember very
heated arguments at PTA sessions and town sessions. Very heated arguments. And
sides were taken and racial slurs were made. There were some very unkind
remarks. It was a very, very hot issue.
Montclair High School and Harvard University graduate, Jane Manners describes this
historic period as follows:
There had been attempts to desegregate the schools for 5 years... and nothing had
really happened. They started busing the Glenfield students who were mostly
Black to the White middle school, so there was some integration, but it certainly
wasn’t wholesale. So the Black parents said, “You haven’t integrated our schools.
The Black students are still getting inferior educations. They are getting the worst
supplies ...we want integration; we want equal opportunity for student
education.”... But a lot of the White parents didn’t want to send their children on
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a bus. It’s very interesting the words these White parents used to fight these
busing proposals. They said they didn’t want to send their kids on a bus across
town... when they had a perfectly good school 5 minutes away, could roll out of
the bed in the morning and walk to school.... And that was... the reason they said
that they were all opposed to this busing measure—and they called it forced
busing.... [But] there was an interesting law that passed at this time called the Fair
Busing Act...which meant that anyone in town should have the same opportunity
to take a bus to school if they wanted to...most of the kids who took these buses
under the Fair Busing Act were White kids going to private schools.
In February 1972 the Board of Education approved what became known as the “Plan of
Action” involving two-way busing. Pushed by new Superintendent of Schools James
Adams, this comprehensive plan covered elementary as well as middle school children.
Anti-integration forces, who had tolerated, barely, the busing of Black middle school
children to White schools, now organized under the banner of a group called Better
Education for All Montclair (BEAM). As with its predecessor, the Commit tee for
Neighborhood Schools, BEAM argued that busing was educationally unsound and would
lead to a decline in educational quality.
BEAM and other opponents successfully supported anti-busing candidates for the Town
Commission in the May 1972 elections. As a result, the Commission increased the
number who served on the Board of Education from five to seven and reduced their
length of service from 5 to 3 years. In his September 1972 A Plan of Action,
Superintendent James Adams proposed that “each youngster will attend his neighborhood
school for four years... for example, Nishuane’s second graders will be assigned to
Edgemont and Bradford, while Hillside and Grove second graders will be assigned to
Northeast and Glenfield. This assignment of second graders will bring about racial balance
at that level.”
In shared spirit with then-student Michael Johnson, educator Frank Rennie reflects on this
period of history:
By the time ‘72 came around, it was clear that the Board of Education was not
moving very swiftly to integrate the schools. It was clear nothing was going to
happen unless somebody made it happen. So the Superintendent decided to
devise a plan where they would gently go into integration of the schools by taking
one class, just one grade, out of the Black school and moving those students into
an all-White school, to Northeast, for example. And move the kids from
Northeast someplace else to integrate that school.... We had large meetings at
Hillside. That auditorium was filled because they had to come up with another
and a better plan. There was no other way except to bus kids.... People weren’t
going to move from one section of town to another.
Bernadette Anand recalls overhearing a conversation about this time in a neighborhood

coffee shop.
My husband and I sat down for breakfast one morning. There were all White
people sitting at the counter. I remember that there was this one woman really
upset about the integration plan. They were saying, “What do they want to do
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here?” “They want to ruin our town and they want to shove kids in.” “I’ll be
damned ...if my daughter is going to go to that school over there and I am going
to put her on a bus.” “Why can’t I have a neighborhood school?” My husband
and I looked down at the end of the counter... and they sort of stopped.
Marlene Anderson comments on the same period.
I worked at the school system for the Board of Education ...it was strange to see a
town like Montclair actually involved in racial discrimination because, when I was
coming up in this town, it did not exist in the open ...it was probably there, but it
was not presented to us and it was not exploited.
By 1974 anti-busing forces had full control of the Board. At the end of 1974 Adams left
and was replaced by Walter Marks as Superintendent of Schools.
In September 1975, this anti-busing Board replaced the Plan of Action with a “Freedom of
Choice” policy. Parents now could avoid having their children bused to the school
selected by the Board if their choices did not lead to racial imbalance. Frank Rennie
explained:
A group of predominantly White parents got together and they said, “If we’re
going to have to send our kids to another school because they have to be
integrated, we want to choose the school that these children go to.” It was called
“freedom of choice.” And that word has remained today. ...It saved the
community because they hammered out agreements to make particular schools a
freedom of choice in the magnet approach... meaning that particular schools
would be made attractive to parents.
This Board approved all requests for choice even though some, indeed, created further
imbalance. Rennie continued, “But at the time, the policy was implemented in ways that
undermined integration.”
In July 1975, the State Commissioner rejected Freedom of Choice alone as an acceptable
plan for desegregation. Freedom without balance was not a solution to racial segregation.
Now the Commissioner was much more direct with the Board. He ordered the Board to
create a plan in which every school in the district would reflect the 60 White/40 Black
ratio of the district.
In February 1976, Superintendent Marks was caught between the State Commissioner and
conflicting constituencies who were passionately for, or against, busing to create
integration. In April, the Superintendent presented five alternate plans to the Board of
Education. The plans ranged from the “blue” plan, which called for the closing of five
elementary schools and increased busing, to two “red” plans, which called for the
cessation of all busing for integration. There were also a “gold” and a “green” plan. These
plans would mandate limited busing; however, both emphasized the magnet school
alternative. In theory, each school under the “gold” and “green” plans would be so
attractive based on its specific theme that for most parents, that is, White parents, busing
would be not only digestible but desirable.
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In April 1976, the Board shocked Superintendent Marks and voted 4-3 for a modified
“red” plan, even though this plan clearly would not be acceptable to the State
Commissioner and possibly would cost Montclair substantial federal and state aid. Under
this plan, all elementary schools would remain open and all mandatory busing for
integration would end. The only policy that the district would offer for integration would
be magnet schools based on the foundation of attractive themes.
Within a month, Black parents staged a sit-in at the Board, protesting the adoption of this
new “red” plan. Superintendent Marks was supportive of the demonstrators, refusing to
have them removed. The Board, recognizing the impending loss of more than $2,000,000
in aid and the strength of the State Commissioner’s order, conceded and voted to restore
the Plan of Action for the 1976-77 year. Finally in June 1976, the Board voted 6-1 for a
new “green” plan for implementation in the 1977-78 school year for the schools. This
plan called for incorporation of magnet schools and, like the “red” plan, did not directly
call for mandatory busing for racial balance. However, distancing itself from the “red”
plans, the new “green” plan required at least 25 “minority students” in each of the K-9
schools.
The 1976-77 school year was spent selling the magnet plan to the community, which
meant largely the White community. Attractive themes for two magnet schools, at
Nishuane and Hillside, were developed. These schools, which had been predominantly
African American, became magnets for “gifted and talented” children. What White parent
would deny a child this option?
Many resources were added in order to encourage White parents to send their children
“south.” Indeed, a number of astute seventh-grade interviewers asked: “Why did they
have to bribe White parents to send their kids to our schools—but not bribe Black parents
to go to a White neighborhood?” Frank Rennie answered:
The district started to think about theme schools. This town tends to be seen as an
artsy town. We have a lot of artists in it, and we have a lot of well-educated
people. Black and White. We have people in the media, in the arts, actors,
writers. So they decided to make Hillside School an attraction by putting an arts
magnet there. And what does Hillside School have that the other schools don’t
have? Dance, art, music teachers, youth drum corps. They wanted to attract
White parents badly. And White parents were attracted to something like that.
Conversely, Bradford, a traditionally White elementary school in the northern part of

town, was to become a magnet for the “basics,” aimed at appealing to Black parents who
had expressed a desire for their children to concentrate on fundamental skills.
Federal funding was received to aid the development of the magnet schools. The physical
structures of elementary schools Nishuane and Bradford were finally improved to the
levels of the schools in the northern part of town. The magnet school plan worked to the
point where 2,500 students were voluntarily bused— more than had been bused under
the Plan of Action. Racial balance exceeded the 25% figure in all schools, with 28% being
the lowest and 54% the highest “minority” presence.
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For the 1978-79 school year, the “green” plan was extended to the two middle schools.
Glenfield, in the southern part of town, also became a “gifted and talented” magnet
school. Mt. Hebron, in the northern part of town, was designated a “fundamental”
magnet. Glenfield also received renovations similar to those at Nishuane and Hillside the
previous year. To further sweeten the pot for White parents, the creative arts program was
moved from Mt. Hebron to Glenfield. Once again it worked and Montclair emerged as a
model magnet school system.
The process of creating a system of magnet schools was completed under Superintendent
Mary Lee Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, who replaced Marks in 1981, magnetized all schools, with
Edgemont, in 1987, becoming a Montessori School. Fitzgerald remembers her days as
Superintendent vividly.
When I first came, a lot of people didn’t want to go to these schools in Montclair.
They were worried about integration. Unless you wanted to [go to] Nishuane,
which was gifted and talented, a lot of people in town just didn’t think it was a
good idea. I really do believe after 10 years of working at this, people came to see
that you could create real high-quality schools in a town like Montclair. And
guess what? They were integrated. People were not moving here in spite of
integration. They were not moving out because of integration. They were
moving here because of it. That’s how we were marketing ourselves.
In 1989, the Educational Testing Service lauded Montclair’s magnet school choice
program for its success, as determined by “test scores, enrollments and census figures and
qualitative data.” The researchers concluded:
Montclair’s schools achieved a better racial balance with the magnet plan. In the
1988-89 school year, 48% of the elementary school students were minorities. The
range of each school’s minority enrollment for the year was between 26% and
52%. In the previous 10 years, the rate of minority enrollment in different
elementary schools ranged between 12% and 74%. The minority representation in
individual classrooms was consistent—with one exception. Minority students
were underrepresented in advanced classes, especially at the high school and
middle school levels. (Educational Testing Service, 1989, p. 1).
A few years later, the Office of Civil Rights of the United States Department of Education
voiced similar concerns, particularly with respect to the differential placement of students
in rigorous courses and in special education classes by race and gender (Fields, 1996).
Tracking or ability groupings, like special education placements, are deeply connected to
race and class. And these politics are often part and parcel of integration plans, in
anticipation of “White flight.” When combined with differential expectations of students
by race and ethnicity, on the part of faculty, these two persistent features of educational
inequity have, according to many national scholars and many of our interviewees, worked
to maintain racial and class segregation and achievement gaps within presumably
desegregated buildings.
Jane Manners told the students in her interview:
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Tracking is when you separate students by [what are thought to be] ability levels
and you say, “Well, these kids are really, really smart and we’re going to put them
in this class. And these kids aren’t so smart, so we’re going to put them in this
class.” But sometimes a kid who is really smart but maybe he doesn’t talk so
much, gets put in a [less smart] class; there are not really good measures of how
smart that student is and what happens is a lot of times each track tends to break
down along racial lines, so I think that there is a lot of racial segregation according
to classroom level now.
Renee Baskerville provided a student perspective on the question of tracking.
Oftentimes, either because of poor preparation up until that point or whatever the
reasons were, I found that the [upper level/predominantly White] classrooms
were “working” on a higher level, were not always as integrated as some of the
other classrooms. So they were working toward trying to find a good solution for
a problem that existed for many years. But I [sometimes] had a problem because
other Black families—Negro families just to keep the language correct—at the
time often ridiculed me and actually made me feel bad for being a bright student
and being a good athlete. And even other Negro students who were my
classmates, they made fun of me; because they would say things like, “Oh, she
thinks she’s White” or “She thinks she’s better than other people.” There were
many things that were tried and later became mistakes. As parents began to
question, why is it that in your top classes you have one or two Negro students
and however many White students? Answers. People were trying to find answers.
Frank Rennie remarks on differential teacher expectations that accompanied and

undermined integration.
As principal I might find a teacher—a White teacher—who was mistreating Black

kids and you find out, then you deal with the teacher. You would also find Black
teachers who dealt very harshly with Black kids. ...On the part of [all of these]
teachers, I would say because many of them had stereotypic views in their head.
...We fired people, some resigned. You can’t ignore the fact that some teachers
would give Black kids poor grades for “discipline.”
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, now a nationally recognized psychiatrist who grew up in

segregated elementary schools, not in Montclair but in Orange, New Jersey, was one of
the first African American children to integrate Hayward School. In her interview,
Fullilove reminded students of the typically unacknowledged pain and loss associated with
integration, especially for African American children:
My father was a union organizer for many years. In the 1950s, there was a senator
named Joseph McCarthy who started a series of Congressional investigations
searching for Communists, and many organizations like unions and civil rights
organizations were destroyed in the process.... My dad’s union fell apart and he
lost his job. The FBI would come and say, “That guy’s a troublemaker, don’t hire
him.” He was depressed because he was unemployed and inactive. Tb get him
going again, my mom said, “Do you know the schools in our town are
segregated?” My father said, “Well, we have to fight and get rid of these
neighborhood racial lines.” So he was the organizer for the school fight in our
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town. He got the neighbors organized and told this story to the papers and led the
struggle to get the schools desegregated.
[At my all-Black school], it was said that the school had bad textbooks and pages
torn. But I had really wonderful teachers. I was at the top of my class. I really felt
part of the group. All the teachers made it clear they loved us. [Then I was
transferred to Hayward for desegregation.] Some of my White teachers [at
Hayward] made it clear that they didn’t love us... and when you’re a little kid in
third or fourth grade, you want your teachers to love you.... I just felt all by
myself. And I think I didn’t know how to fit in. So I was really miserable... and it
took me a long time to get over that feeling.
Bernadette Anand, long known and recognized for her brilliant work on educational
excellence and equity, in particular her struggle to detrack the English curriculum at the
high school, explains the continual struggle against tracking that persists throughout
integrated districts nationally.
When I started teaching at the high school, I found a [rigid] tracking system...
when I walked into English 9-1A (the highest honors ninth-grade course), which
was supposed to be the top-level course, there were only two Black students out
of 33 students. When I had to observe in the 10-2 classes and in the bottom-track
class, I found all African American students with the exception of maybe two
White students. So I said, “We don’t leave our prejudices at the school-house
door. We walk in with them and we’ve got to do something about them.” But
every time we educators would meet and try to change these [tracking
procedures], the administration would say, “There will be White flight from the
school.”
When we finally detracked ninth-grade English at the high school, people would
come to the meetings and shout and scream at me...run Camcorders and play the
Camcorders at the meetings…they would write letters about me and the course. I
was fine when I would teach their upper-track students, but then later I became
the worst possible educator who couldn’t possibly teach to a class of all different
kinds of kids. So they thought I would dumb-down the curriculum. They were
very upset because we believed in a multicultural curriculum [see Fields, 1996;
Fine, Anand, Jordan, & Sherman, 2000; Karp, 1993; for a history, see Off Track
video, Fine, Anand, Hancock, Jordan, & Sherman, 1998].
The struggles to authentically integrate schools, classrooms, and curricula—not merely

desegregate, as Michael Johnson has noted, and Mindy Fullilove, Bernadette Anand, Frank
Rennie, Judy Miller, and so many others have testified—are ongoing. And today districts
like Montclair confront budget cuts from the federal and state governments, which
drastically undermine efforts for quality education and desegregation. The most recent cuts
in aid to Montclair remind us of the words of activist Walter Lack.
To the extent that we succeed in educating our children, we provide the life
blood for our country’s future. To the extent we fail, we create a burden in the
form of people unable to provide for themselves.... Benjamin Franklin once said,
“The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.” (Montclair Times,
May 17, 1984)
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It was a long and mostly forgotten struggle for desegregation that was fought in Montclair.
It is a struggle that most of us would not know about had it not been for the Renaissance
students. But 24 years after Brown v. Board of Education and 21 years after federal troops
forced the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas, schools, Montclair also integrated its
school buildings. Renaissance students during the 1998-99 school year interviewed the
real heroes of this story, documenting the struggles, lessons, and victories. Among the
words, wisdom, contradictions, and legacies of ambivalence they collected the following:
School desegregation had a very positive effect on this town. No one can ignore it
anymore, sweep it under the rug, kind of go along living their very segregated
existence, not thinking about the other race. It forced the town to be Black and
White, like much more equal opportunity than before. (Mary Lee Fitzgerald)
It couldn’t have been easy for kids that age to hear the things I was saying about
their twon, which is always being described as the greatest place where everyone
mixes and mingles (Lydia Davis Barrett, after her interview with the seventh
graders, in May 1998)
It should be kept in mind that desegregation and integration are not the same
thing. (Michael Johnson)
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In 1999 Lise Funderburg learned of Anand’s and Fine’s oral history project at the Rennaissance
School. She used the project as the lede in an article she wrote about Montclair for the New York
Times Magazine. In her article, she called into question aspects of the image of the “perfectly
integrated community” that Montclair cherished. She pointed out that the community was on the
verge of reaching a tipping point, at which, as a result of white flight, Montclair would become a
minority majority community. As noted in the introduction to the case, the city did not reach that
tipping point. Instead, a new commuter railway connection to Manhattan brought a new, white,
upwardly-mobile set to Montclair, raising the price of homes in the community and thereby pricing
African Americans out of the market. Today the community risks becoming yet another largely white
suburb of New York City.
Document #7: Lise Funderburg, “Integration Anxiety,” New York Times Magazine,
November 7, 1999.
“How many of you who are white think about being white all the time?” asks Michelle
Fine, speaking to a racially integrated class of seventh graders last spring at Renaissance
Middle School in Montclair, N.J. Fine, a white woman and Montclair resident, is a
nationally regarded social psychologist who specializes in education issues. Today she’s
wrapping up an oral history course she has volunteered to teach along with the school’s
principal, Bernadette Anand.
For nine weeks, these students have considered nothing less than the meaning of race in
Montclair as they have documented the town’s 40-year history of school desegregation.
They have interviewed residents, reviewed court cases, read mountains of newspaper
clippings and watched segments of the civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize.” Yet
none of these students connect to feeling white, and Fine’s question is met with silence.
She tries a different tack.
“White kids, when you go into a store, do you feel like you are white?”
Dust particles drift into the rays of light spilling through the classroom’s tall, arched
windows. Students look down at their desks and stare into space. Finally, Kendra Urdang,
a white girl with a South African mother and a Canadian father, answers yes, sometimes,
when she’s in a store filled with black people. No one else speaks. Fine tries again.
“Kids who are African-American,” she says, “when you go into a store, are you reminded
about being black?”
Suddenly, several students leap from their chairs, clamoring to give examples of local stores
where they have been followed, searched, accused of stealing, asked to leave. Daryl
Shelton, a serious-faced 12-year-old, names a toy shop in town, and three other black
students nod their heads vigorously, “mm-hmming” in recognition.
“I was with him, right?” Daryl begins, pointing to his best friend in school, a tall white
boy named Kyle O’Donnell. Kyle’s mother was giving Daryl a ride home when she
stopped for an errand. All the kids piled out of the car. “His younger sister went into this
store,” Daryl says. “Then when I try to go in, I can’t. They always bring up, ‘You have to
be 18 or older.’”
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In most cities and towns across the country, Daryl’s tale of being singled out because he’s
black would be regarded as sad but not surprising. But this is Montclair, a suburban
enclave 12 miles west of New York City that is renowned for being racially and
socioeconomically integrated, for welcoming everyone who is willing to mow their lawns
and pay their taxes. That reputation has attracted blacks and whites—including the
presidential hopeful Bill Bradley—who have chosen not to default into more common
patterns of racial segregation. In most of the country’s metropolitan areas, 79 percent of
whites and 33 percent of blacks live exclusively among members of their own racial
groups: they borrow sugar from people who would check the same box on a census form
or file in the same tax bracket.
All Americans are going to have to face integration sooner or later, whether they want to
or not. Although in the 1990 United States census, whites made up 84 percent of the
population, some demographers now project that this figure will drop to 50 percent in the
next half-century. People can retreat to only so many gated communities, themed dorms
and homogenous executive lounges.
For more than a century, Montclair residents have struggled to live the integrated life.
When newcomers buy houses, they often assume that they have put a down payment on
diversity. Yet once you get past the Kumbaya hype, self-congratulatory civic boosterism
and media accolades, stories like Daryl’s appear with disturbing frequency. Montclair’s
experience, then, holds lessons for the rest of the nation. Diversity is still a concept very
much under construction here.
No one has defined what constitutes a truly integrated community. But Montclair (pop.
36,313) is a serious contender. In a landmark study published last year, researchers for the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) identified some of the
characteristics that undergird a “successful, stable, racially and ethnically diverse”
neighborhood. Montclair fits HUD’s criteria; it has, among other things, a mixed racial
balance since at least 1980 and the willingness of residents to identify their community as
diverse.
During the last 30 years, while other communities became all black or all white as
industrial decline, white flight and gentrification took their toll, Montclair has remained
roughly 30 percent black and 65 percent white. A varied housing stock has helped
preserve its socioeconomic mix. Home prices may average $334,000, but rambling
Victorians with sprawling lawns often stand a stone’s throw from apartment buildings and
tiny clapboard homes where more than 2,200 people live below the poverty line. And
while most of the town’s poor are black, many of its middle- and upper-class residents are
black as well.
Like many of the towns and neighborhoods in the HUD study, Montclair is older and
physically attractive and has more than its share of amenities. It has a nationally recognized
art museum, four movie houses, six theaters, four bookstores, 48 religious congregations,
154 acres of parkland, Montclair State University and a heavenly fried porgy sandwich
made to order at the Fin and Feather. And while it’s a point of civic pride—and of tax-
revenue woe—that Montclair has no mall, it does have five shopping districts, a Gap and
two Starbucks.
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Culture, food and lattes may boost the community’s appeal, particularly to integration-
tolerant ex-urbanites (and a stunning number of celebrities, from the tap dancer Savion
Glover to the makeup mogul Bobbi Brown, as well as Bill Bradley). But it’s the enduring
mix of race and class that sets Montclair apart from prototypical suburbia. “Racial and
economic exclusion continue to be hallmarks of suburbanization,” writes W. Dennis
Keating in “The Suburban Racial Dilemma.” Although most residents will argue that the
town has yet to achieve the physical, social and spiritual integration Martin Luther King Jr.
once described as “the beloved community,” hardly any of its streets are totally racially
isolated.
The HUD study also notes that in diverse communities, schools typically offer a rallying
point for people to come together —the place where “social seams” are stitched together.
And indeed, Montclair’s 11 public schools are perhaps the town’s most integrated
institutions. Thanks to zealous compliance with a 1976 state-levied desegregation order,
the district’s 5,930 students all have significant exposure to kids of different races and
classes. Montclair operates a “controlled choice” program that relies on magnet schools, a
lottery and town-subsidized busing. And unlike a similar, recently abandoned program in
Boston, it has largely gone undisputed over the years. But the schools are also where the
pressures on racial harmony are the greatest, threatening to fray those seams beyond repair.
“I need seats in the middle,” Michelle Fine calls out, trying to make room for Marvyn
Rice, today’s guest and one of 25 black parents who successfully brought suit against the
school district in the mid-1960’s. Rice is among a parade of subjects, most of them still
Montclair residents, whom Fine and Bernadette Anand have invited to the school and
whose stories have helped personalize the abstractions of the town’s history for students.
Volunteers bring chairs into the center of the room with an eagerness that probably won’t
last into high school. Rice responds generously to students’ questions, carefully unfolding
rich anecdotes. Between inquirers, she sits primly, hands folded in her lap. “I just want to
mention that Mrs. Rice is a real, live hero,” Fine says, when the students have exhausted
the list of scripted questions. “So take the moment!”
Those involved in the early days of school desegregation in Montclair still shudder at the
battles fought. “Those were Armageddon arguments,” Montclair’s mayor, William Farlie,
remembers. But in those days, the principle at stake -- that barriers to equal education
should be removed -- bore a noble, if naïve, simplicity. Nowadays things are messier.
Fully sharing power and resources across race and class lines -- often called relational
diversity -- is something no one has done before. The skirmishes over educational access
that fill P.T.A. meetings and op-eds in The Montclair Times are inevitably complex: Is a
budget cutback racist, for example, if it affects more blacks than whites? More whites than
blacks? Should district resources be dedicated to keeping the school population ‘‘stable,”
which is often code for ‘‘middle class’’ and ‘‘not too black?”
Nationwide, Fine says, perceptions of an institution’s worth shift depending on whether
whites or blacks are in the majority. Consequently, the slight black majority (53 percent)
at Montclair High sometimes sets off alarms for real estate agents who show prospective
buyers around town and for some white and black parents deciding where to send their
children. ‘‘There are a lot of whispers about tipping,” Fine says, referring to concern over
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maintaining current racial percentages. ‘‘I get calls from friends who say, ‘My kid’s class is
imbalanced.’ I know right away that means there are too many black people in the room.”
In 1993, for instance, some parents became panicked when Bernadette Anand, then the
head of the Montclair High School English department, along with some of her
colleagues, devised a world literature class that was open to everyone. By jettisoning
prerequisites, world lit renounced the ability-based groupings that in Montclair and across
the country too often default into racial equations—advanced placement equals white;
remedial equals black, especially black and male. The town is striving to close the
achievement gap between black and white students (which also exists nationally).
To that end, Anand had declared war on ‘‘tracked classes,” but in so doing, assaulted the
protected inner sanctum that allows middle- and upper-middle-class parents to
comfortably keep their children in the public schools. After acrimonious debate, the
school board voted to go forward with the class, but a swell of parents—mostly but not all
white—plucked their children from advanced-placement classes and out of the system
altogether.
Many liberals in town characterize those who left the system as cloaking their racism in a
pro-meritocracy argument. But Brenda Farrow White, an African-American woman
whose husband, Herman, was the school board president for two years, and whose
children attend Montclair schools, is more generous toward parents who put their own
needs in front of larger social justice issues. ‘‘Parents are, by nature, not objective when it
comes to matters regarding their children,” she says. ‘‘All that matters to them is what is
good for Johnny or Susie. Or Laquesha or Tanesha.”
The board of ed also noticed that an increasing number of students—again, mostly but not
exclusively white—were leaving the district, particularly at the middle-school level. Many
transcript requests indicated parochial- or private-school destinations. The white kids were
clearly middle and upper middle class. (Montclair’s white working-class stronghold
virtually disappeared during the 60’s and 70’s.) But black kids also departed, and
administrators surmised that they, too, were from well-heeled families. People in town
have come to call this exodus ‘‘bright flight,” unwittingly equating economic standing and
intelligence.
With the explicit goal of ‘‘stabilizing” the district, the superintendent and school board
opened a third middle school in 1997, which became Renaissance. This one would be
smaller than the others—75 children per grade versus 200—and would offer educational
innovations normally identified with private schools. The hope, says Michael Osnato, the
superintendent, was that these components would ‘‘retain and return” the education-savvy
middle class. The school was designed, in other words, by the district to stanch bright
flight, but this goal created new tensions.
Anand, for one, was interested in creating a learning environment that valued
achievement and equal access for all students. She remembers how white attrition
dominated school board discussions. ‘‘That’s what they cared about,” she says. ‘‘They felt
that if the whites left, the whole town would go down. Then we’d have a whole bunch of
blacks here, and I’d be perfectly happy to teach them.” Anand’s first planning meeting was
with Fine, whose older son is now a Renaissance seventh grader. The two women quickly
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became allies, promoting their vision of the school. ‘‘We’re people you don’t invite to
parties,” Anand jokes, referring to their fierce commitment to social justice.
Fine says that together they decided that the school would only succeed if its curriculum
tapped the talents of every child—a familiar tenet of progressive education. The tendency
to value certain kids over others is so endemic to school systems, Fine insists, ‘‘it’s in the
air-conditioning.” Disproportionately, she explains, ‘‘kids who have had the cultural
capital and the social reinforcements for getting it right tend to be elite kids, and in this
town, that means white—or some middle-class black—kids. And then kids who learn that
they don’t quite get it right, who would be more hesitant in the class, who wouldn’t feel
as entitled to speak their minds, tend to be working-class African-American kids.’’
In its third year, Renaissance offers rigorous instruction, longer school days, innovative
field trips and an extensive community-service program. This is an increasingly
complicated endeavor in the jumbled classrooms of Montclair, as a new wave of poorer
blacks move into town, and children who can’t afford class outings sit next to the children
of millionaires. Anand’s strategy has proven popular, but at a potentially disturbing price.
As of last year, Renaissance was the only middle school in the district with a majority of
whites. If the school continues to attract whites disproportionately, Osnato’s aim to
‘‘recapture the market share” may be met, but Fine counters that the school will have
failed in a different way. ‘‘What does that say about poor and working-class kids?” she
asks. ‘‘Are those kids not valued as much?”
Others voice different concerns. One white parent, who describes herself as ‘‘an old
leftie,” complains that Renaissance’s good intentions have gone too far. She says her child
has ‘‘gotten lost” despite Renaissance’s small classes and links this neglect to race. ‘‘I’m
happy that race is an issue in a positive sense, as a topic of discussion,” says the woman,
who asked not to be identified for the sake of her children. ‘‘But there does seem to be a
feeling that if your child is white, he or she doesn’t need any extra help. Now, it’s a
correct assumption that if you’re white, you’re likely to be privileged; but it’s also assumed
that you don’t need any support in learning.”
And middle-class whites aren’t the only ones who are worried about their kids getting
lost. Debra Jennings, 41, says that the African-American parents she knows have different
reasons than whites for pulling out of the public schools. ‘‘I would say only one out of 10
feel like their super-gifted child is not going to be sufficiently challenged,” she estimates.
‘‘The other nine are worried about teachers’ low expectations, particularly if the child is a
boy. Those parents will tell you that their child was being painted with a certain brush,
and they did not want that to happen.”
Jennings has sat on the school board, run for mayor and co-founded a watchdog group
called Concerned African American Parents (CAP). She’s currently the associate executive
director of an education support group, the State wide Parent Advocacy Network. In
Montclair, many blacks are reluctant to discuss the tensions of intraracial class divisions,
and Jennings is known for specifically representing the town’s working-class and poor
blacks. ‘‘There’s no such thing as ‘bright flight,’” she says with a scowl. ‘‘It’s ‘I-can-afford-
it flight.’”
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On the theory that power lies in the hands of the informed, CAP focuses on information
dissemination -- mostly through a quarterly newsletter and a biennial Parents’ Expo.
Jennings says even white parents rely on CAP’s school-budget analyses to understand how
money is being spent in the district. Yet communication gaps between the races persist.
Despite Renaissance’s explicit mission to raise the bar for everyone, CAP had serious
reservations about the district’s starting a new middle school. ‘‘We had two questions,’’
Jennings recalls. The first was about how, in a year of draconian budget cuts, the district
could afford a new program. The second, she says, was why Renaissance didn’t do a better
job of including poor black parents when planning the school. ‘‘There were attempts
made to reach out to African-American parents,’’ she concedes, ‘‘but most of the parents
they reached out to were middle to upper middle class. There was really no outreach to
African-American parents who were more typical—more working and middle class.’’
Socioeconomic status matters, Jennings says, because wealthier families often have the
luxuries of time and resources to lobby on behalf of their children’s needs. ‘‘When I look
at the parents who are at Renaissance,” Jennings explains, ‘‘I don’t criticize them, but
almost all have been heavily involved in their children’s education. I felt like that kind of
energy should have gone into some of the other schools—because we need more African-
American parents in the other schools. We don’t need a concentration in one school.’’
Elliott Lee is part of that concentration. An Ivy League graduate and a senior program
officer of a locally based foundation, he has a daughter, Andrea, who is an eighth grader at
Renaissance, and has been an involved parent, joining Anand’s curriculum development
committee and participating in a loosely organized lobby against budget cuts. He has even
considered seeking a seat on the school board.
Thirteen years ago, when Lee and his family moved onto a predominantly black street in
Montclair, he wasn’t prepared for the chilly reception from his new black neighbors. ‘‘I
thought because we were black and they were black, they would welcome us,” he says.
‘‘But we weren’t just black people, we were the outsiders driving up property values and
forcing the old folks out.”
Class-consciousness is creeping into all of Montclair, he contends, and no one wants to
admit it. ‘‘Most people are willing to talk about the folks with resources coming in and
supplanting those who’ve been here a long time,” Lee says. ‘‘What isn’t talked about are
the new black folks coming in who aren’t well off, trying to get their kids into better
schools. That would send the wrong message about Montclair. A lot of people—white
and black, but maybe more white folks—want Montclair to be less diverse than it is. They
want it to be middle class. It’s one thing to have poor people who’ve been here for years,
but it’s another thing to be known as a place that attracts them.’’
A teacher’s aide walks through the Renaissance hallway last spring, ringing a hand bell to
signal the period’s end. It’s lunchtime, and students in the oral history class lunge for the
door. Kids fill their plates—it’s pizza day—and then make a beeline for their seats in the
basement cafeteria. Day after day, the long tables fill up according to a carefully worked-
out calculus of race and class.
‘‘I sit at the semipopular/unpopular white girls’ table,” explains Susana Polo cheerfully.
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‘‘I think it has to do with the music people listen to,” says Trevor Sage-El, the student
council president at the time and a biracial boy who sits at the popular black boys’ table.
‘‘My friends are 75 percent black and 25 percent white,” says Ashley Carter-Robinson,
who is black and chooses to sit at a table that’s all black and all girl, except when Daryl
Shelton’s friend Kyle O’Donnell invites himself over, seemingly oblivious to whether he’s
welcome.
‘‘Four of my black friends sit with us,” says Kendra Urdang, ‘‘and the rest of us are white
at my table. I have mixed friends, but honestly, my best friends, more of them are white
because in this school it is a bit more separated. When there’s a clique of only black
people, one time I went over to that crowd and they just ignored me.”
In these social striations, the children are not much different than the adults. Despite all
that Montclair has going for it, despite the widely expressed desire for relational
integration, if you ask residents, black or white, whether people cross the color line
socially, most will say no, not really, or not very often. Maybe at Watchung Booksellers or
Sharron Miller’s dance studio or the Luna Stage theater—but they’re exceptions. Even
supermarkets have the reputation of being patronized along racial lines. (King’s is white,
Pathmark is black, Fresh Fields is for anyone with a full wallet.)
Not even the HUD researchers could calculate whether living together leads to social
integration. But as community life atrophies everywhere, true relational integration seems
ever more difficult to imagine.
‘‘There’s an impoverishment in relatedness in America,” says Mindy Thompson Fullilove,
a public health research psychiatrist at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Where we
once raised barns to build commonality, we now pay property taxes. Normal patterns of
socializing have eroded because people no longer live, work and socialize in the same
place. Overlay race, and the challenge of integration is heightened.
‘‘I find communities like Montclair hopeful,” says the sociologist Douglas Massey. ‘‘But
the sorts of forces that produce segregation in American society don’t happen at the
community level. Basically, places like Montclair are forced to adapt to a racially
segregated world and undertake heroic efforts, often, to keep themselves these islands of
integration in the broader sea of segregation.”
Renaissance’s principal, Anand, says, ‘‘School is the one place where you can really break
down the patterns of sameness that exist within our communities.” But perhaps because it
is one of the town’s few arenas for change, progress continues to come slowly.
‘‘It’s not our fault if we don’t like people,” says Susana Polo, who is half Irish and half
Puerto Rican. ‘‘We want to sit with our friends. I’m not saying this racistly, but black
people are brought up different, because of persecutions and slavery and stuff—they’re
brought up to feel different things than white kids, which makes their personalities
different. I don’t get along with the black kids in my school. I get along with my friends,
who are mostly white, and Michelle, who’s black. And it’s just like that.”
A seating chart Anand implemented to break up the cafeteria’s race- and class-based
groupings stood little chance against the undertow of elaborate and steadfast allegiances—
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kids who live in Upper Montclair as opposed to those who live in Frog Hollow, who
listen to rap as opposed to Hanson, who come home at night to play basketball as opposed
to Battle Squad. After less than a month, Kendra Urdang observes, ‘‘everyone was just
sitting back where they wanted to.”
Still, Montclair offers reason for optimism. One of Daryl Shelton’s classmates, a white boy
named Ian Bandes, tells me the most important thing he learned in Fine and Anand’s oral
history class was about the relationship between time and social progress. ‘‘I learned that
very recently, maybe 20 years ago, the town was very racist. And it’s kind of scary, but it
also taught us that we’ve come so far in that short time.”
Renaissance, one suspects, deserves only partial credit for Ian’s enlightened attitude. After
all, many schools, even in the most segregated neighborhoods, teach racial tolerance. If
Montclair’s white students are more open to racial diversity than other kids, it’s probably
because their families are, too; that’s why they chose this town in the first place.
Absolute integration may still be unrealized in Montclair, says Joan Pransky, the white
mother of a 12th grader at the high school, but that’s no reason to despair. ‘‘I don’t think
it happens in your lifetime,” she says. ‘‘The long and short of it is the contribution you
make along the way and the fervor you bring to it. The fact that a lot of things around
here are wrong doesn’t mean for a minute you change doing your best to do right.”
The town is still very much a work in progress. True integration, Mayor Farlie observes,
demands an acceptance that no town will ever be perfect and that people will always
disagree. ‘‘One of the challenges of suburban and urban life these days in America,” he
says, ‘‘is you either believe in diversity and are prepared to sometimes be disappointed and
other times be elated, or you move to suburban Connecticut.”
A week after Daryl tells his story in class, I ask him to talk about the episode at the toy
store. ‘‘I was distressed that they were singling me out because of my race,” he says as we
sit on the stairwell outside the cafeteria. ‘‘It’s never happened before. I thought Montclair
was perfect.” Now, partly because of the class project, he says: ‘‘I’m starting to notice that
other people are looking at me more often. I don’t think it’s very fair.”
On his own, Daryl has come up with a plan for returning to the store, a combined appeal
to human decency and market forces. ‘‘I was thinking I should just go over there and talk
to them about it and tell them how it makes people feel,” he explains. ‘‘And tell them
how many kids actually don’t want to come to their store.” He is thinking about the
profits, he says, because the store should want to attract as many customers as possible.
His resolve fulfills Fine’s goals for the class. ‘‘Young people need to know that they can
produce history,” she says, ‘‘and hopefully, that’s the legacy of this town. It’s not just
about raising kids to be good citizens or good boys and girls, it’s actually a town
committed to raising young people who know how to live in a multiracial, multiethnic
community.”
Daryl’s tale of hometown discrimination makes a case for Montclair’s failure—that even in
such small moments of interaction, the community can’t break free of segregationist,
prejudiced patterns. But a stronger case can be made that, here, the stage for real progress
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is continually being set. With Daryl’s plan, the town takes one more small but meaningful
step toward the beloved community.
In 1992, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching carried out a study of school
choice in its various forms. The study compared statewide and districtwide choice programs.
Montclair, New Jersey, was one of three districtwide choice systems they investigated.
Document #8: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, School Choice.
(Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1992. Excerpts.
Chapter 3--Districtwide Choice: Montclair, Cambridge, East Harlem
East Harlem in New York City, along with Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Montclair,
New Jersey, are the nation’s “stars of choice.” These districts are routinely cited as
evidence that school choice can indeed deliver excellence to all, including children in the
most challenging environments. Even education leaders who generally are skeptical of
choice’s potential have hailed these places for their efforts.
East Harlem’s Community School District 4 serves one of New York City’s poorest
neighborhoods. In 1973, when the process leading to choice began, it ranked near the
bottom in the city on virtually every educational measure. Cambridge is a district that
enrolls the offspring of Harvard and M.I.T. professors, struggling black and Hispanic
families, and immigrants speaking Portuguese and more than forty other languages.
Cambridge became a pioneer in 1981 when it adopted choice as a strategy to achieve
racial integration. Montclair, New Jersey, a sophisticated, racially and economically diverse
suburb near New York City, introduced choice in the mid-1970s as “white flight”
threatened. Today, the district’s extensive system of choice has students from million-
dollar homes attending classes side-by-side with children poor enough to qualify for free
lunches.
Even in these districts, choice has its limits. In all three, parents and students are asked to
list several school preferences within their district, but nowhere is their first request
guaranteed. In Montclair and Cambridge, choice is restricted by available space and the
requirement for racial balance. In East Harlem, the schools have greater freedom to select
their students, but the local board also plays referee to assure that 29 no program grows
too “elitist” by skimming off the most gifted, most motivated, best-behaved students.
Hundreds of districts around the country operate “choice” programs of one sort or
another, with magnet schools or various specialty programs for selected students. Some of
these programs existed long before the debate over school choice began. But several
important conditions set Montclair, Cambridge, and especially East Harlem apart.
First, all three have virtually done away with neighborhood-school zoning at particular
grade levels—in effect, requiring parents of students at particular grade levels to become
active school choosers. Second, each has moved beyond the goal of desegregation and
designed a “choice” system to promote cooperation and school betterment throughout
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the entire district. Third, choice in all three districts was born from a long, painstaking,
grassroots process. We visited each of these places to understand better both the strengths
and limitations of school choice at the district level.
MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY
Edgemont Montessori School. Bradford Academy. Mt. Hebron School. They sound like
posh private schools. In fact, they are among the eight elementary magnet schools, two
middle schools, and one high school that comprise Montclair’s much-heralded “choice”
program.
Montclair’s plan was designed to meet three goals: to voluntarily integrate schools,
diversify programs, and raise student achievement. To a considerable degree, this 5,400-
pupil suburban district has succeeded in achieving these objectives. The racial balance in
all “choice’’ schools is close to fifty-fifty.55 Districtwide student performance is
encouraging, and the programs are unusually diverse. They include a science and
technology magnet school, a Montessori school, a school that emphasizes communication
skills, an international program based on foreign-language study, two “gifted and talented”
schools, and a new “family magnet” for pre-kindergarten through second grade which
focuses on family involvement in early education.
The differences among schools go beyond subject themes to learning and teaching styles.
Parents who choose Bradford Academy, for example, find an intimate, traditionally
structured environment for preschoolers through fifth-graders. But Hillside Elementary
offers third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders more than 250 electives from which to choose.
Montclair superintendent Dr. Mary Lee Fitzgerald says, “Hillside asks seven-, eight-, and
nine-year-olds to schedule themselves like college students. Some kids would be lost in
that situation. So we work a great deal with parents to help them understand the learning
style of their kids, and try to find the right match in the school. We also ask, what does
your family value? If you value a lot of homework, textbooks, tests, go with it.” Fitzgerald
adds: “We have schools that are geared toward the style of the learners.”
School choice did not come to Montclair because its schools were failing. This has always
been a high achieving district with highly motivated parents. Rather, the events leading
56
up to choice date to the late 1960s, when Montclair was ordered to desegregate.
According to long-time residents, tensions ran high. Crosses were burned. Real estate
values fell. Racial unrest in neighboring Newark and East Orange intensified fears that
many residents would abandon the public schools. Even the most open-minded citizens
insisted that they would not sacrifice their children to strife-torn schools.
A forced-busing plan in the early 1970s led to significant “white flight” and even more
racial imbalance. Then, in 1976, Montclair proposed, and the state approved, one of the
nation’s earliest “choice” plans aimed at achieving voluntary desegregation. The district
55
Beatriz C. Clewell and Myra F. Joy, Choice in Montclair, New Jersey (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing
Service, 1990), p. 9.
56
Barbara Strobert, “Factors Influencing Parental Choice in Selecting Magnet Schools in the Montclair,
New Jersey, Public Schools,” dissertation for Teachers College, Columbia University, 1990, pp. 46f.
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opened a gifted program in a minority neighborhood, hoping it would attract whites. A

“traditional” program stressing basics was established in a predominantly white
neighborhood, in hopes of attracting blacks.57 The district provided transportation for all
students beyond walking distance.58 Still, declines in the white student population
continued, and in 1984 the district’s delicate racial balance was, once again, threatened.
Montclair then moved to its present comprehensive plan, doing away with all school
boundaries and transforming all elementary schools into magnet programs with distinctive
curricular themes. The plan’s underlying philosophy is that no school is right for every
child, or for that matter every teacher. The belief is that if choice is to lead to true
diversity and excellence, then schools must be willing to tell parents or even teachers that
a particular school just might not be the best place for them.
Watchung School, for example, a science and technology magnet school, lacks lavishly
appointed labs. The school demands from its teachers, however, that they develop a high
level of technical and scientific knowledge. As part of Watchung’s transition from
neighborhood school to science magnet, teachers were paid to participate in a two-week
summer training program at Bank Street College of Education, and Bank Street experts
came every other week during the school year to work with teachers. Principal Barbara
Strobert says she loses about two teachers a year because they can’t, or won’t, adjust to
that kind of demand. “People who come into this building have to understand this,” said
fifth-grade teacher Edward O’Connor.
Under the current Montclair plan, all parents are required to list two choices from among
the district’s eight elementary schools. More than 90 percent get one of their preferences,
again dictated mainly by available space and the imperative of racial balance. No “choice”
school in Montclair, not even those for the gifted and talented, has academic admissions
criteria.
At Hillside Elementary, one such magnet, teachers are trained in the belief that all children
have a gift; it’s up to the school to discover and nurture it. Seventy-six of the 640
students, in fact, have disabilities that qualify them for special education. One student who
has a significant neurological impairment illustrates Hillside’s approach. The boy’s father
told principal Michael J. Chiles that his son seemed to “come alive” at football games
when the crowd cheered and applauded. “We wondered if he would respond positively to
drama. Sure enough, he gets on stage, and he’s transformed. He played Martin Luther
King in our school play this year, and he had to memorize three of his speeches. His talent
might never have been picked up otherwise,” said Chiles.
While many parents are pleased that they have the right to choose their children’s schools,
some told us that it’s difficult, almost unreasonably so, to decide for their young ones,
whose abilities and learning styles are still evolving. To help parents select the right schools
for their children, the district must give parents information about their options, and
informing parents is, indeed, one of Montclair’s greatest strengths. All elementary schools
in the district offer parents tours during February and March. Roughly three-quarters of
57
Ibid., p. 49.
58
Ibid., p. 47f.
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the parents participate, and some parents actually show up with minicams.59 Brochures
describing each program are distributed, and many schools issue weekly bulletins. Parents,
of course, also depend on each other for information. One survey found that for as many
as 89 percent, the most prevalent way of gathering information was “talking to others.”60
As a result of these efforts, most parents we interviewed seemed to be educated
“consumers.”
What can we learn from Montclair? Importantly, while the initial moves were spurred by
desegregation mandates, choice in that district did evolve gradually out of discussions
among parents, teachers, and administrators. The resulting system of magnet schools offers
almost uniformly desirable options. Principals and teachers say competition among
programs “keeps them on their toes,” and it is clear that the program encourages a strong
entrepreneurial spirit among educators. We were told by school principals, however, that
this doesn’t always promote cooperation. “Good educational ideas,” said one, “are
guarded as jealously as industrial secrets.” Another principal said, ‘ ‘We don’t do a lot of
sharing, principal to principal. If I’m doing something great, the success story is sent
around the district. But we don’t tell each other in advance. Principals bum out quick
here,” he added.
Further, Montclair illustrates that choice is not cost-free. The district has a firm
commitment to provide the resources needed to shore up weak programs and maintain
strong ones—and that takes money. And although Montclair’s compact size helps keep
down some extra costs, such as for transportation and parent information, the need for
substantial additional money cannot be avoided. For example, the district buses about half
its children daily because of choice—far more than the 10 to 15 percent typical in the
state—and therefore, choice adds about $1.5 million each year to Montclair’s
transportation costs, according to district officials.
The district has enjoyed a solid funding base—$7,478 per student—but that has been
somewhat eroded. In addition, Montclair has, until very recently, received from $1.5 to
$2.5 million annually in state and federal desegregation funds, making possible the special
equipment and teacher training needed for distinctive magnet programs. But the 33
district lost its desegregation funding this year, which forced it to reduce summer
programs and encourage early teacher retirements.
Bringing excellence to all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or economic

circumstance, has been Montclair’s toughest challenge. Overall, students in grades two
through eight averaged in the 84th to 95th percentile in reading and math on the Iowa
Test of Basic Skills in the spring of 1991. But the test scores of minority students still lag.
In 1988, the district established an Office of Minority Achievement to confront this
problem and raise consciousness in every school. One encouraging signal: twelve out of
seventy of the district’s National Honor Society award recipients last year were minority
students, up from just one three years earlier, says Chandler Dennis, head of the office.
The percentage of Montclair’s nonwhites accepted at four-year colleges is also up, from 50
59
Ibid., p. 77, table 5.
60
Ibid., p. 79.
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percent before 1988 to 59 percent in June 1991—but well below the 82 percent of white
students accepted.
Dennis believes, however, that strong leadership from the top, not choice, has been the
key in the gains by minority students: “I don’t see a direct correlation between choice and
increased achievement.” Indeed, Montclair’s other administrators stress that success has
stemmed from many factors, not just choice.
School choice, then, has not solved all of Montclair’s problems. Still, from what we’ve
observed, it has helped promote racial integration and brought a sense of energy to the
district. At the same time, the town’s compact geography; highly educated, relatively
affluent, and open-minded parents; committed school leaders and teachers; and not least,
bountiful state and federal funding have all been crucial to success. As one longtime
resident put it: “Montclair is a very unusual town. Whatever happens here, it’s hard to
compare it. You have to look at the kinds of people who choose to be here. You have an
incredibly urbane, educated population which demands excellent schools but isn’t afraid to
integrate.”
Chapter 2—Possibilities and Problems
After examining school choice programs all across the country, we were struck by the
scarcity of information about just how effective they have been. In states and districts
where choice has been adopted, little effort has been made to record the process carefully
or to document results. Anecdotes have been used to justify new initiatives. Sweeping
legislation has been passed with little planning, and we were left with the clear impression
that critical policy decisions are being made based more on faith than on fact.
Still, by looking at a large number of examples and reviewing data from a variety of
sources, we were able to fit important pieces of evidence together. On the basis of this
examination, we reached several key conclusions regarding the problems and possibilities
of school choice. These nine findings are summarized below.
First, Americans in general feel positive about the idea of school choice. The vast majority of
parents, though, appear quite satisfied with their current public school arrangements, and very
few have elected to participate in statewide choice programs now in place…
Second, many parents who do decide to send their children to another school appear to do so
for nonacademic reasons.
Third, not all families have multiple school options available to them, and even when options
are available the choice process tends to work much better for those who are most advantages
economically and educationally…
The economic status of families…seems to be an important variable in determining how

well-informed parents become about their options. In the affluent suburb of Montclair,
New Jersey, where all parents of elementary students must participate in choice, we found
that families with lower incomes (under $50,000) tended to use fewer sources of
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information to make their decisions than did higher income residents. For example, only
about half of lower income families actually visited schools before making a decision. By
contrast, 84 percent of the highest income families made such visits. Also, slightly more
than one-third of lower income parents used written information about the schools; for
the wealthiest families, it was 76 percent (table 6)…
Table 6
Sources of Information Used by Montclair Parents
In Making School Choice Decisions
(By Income Level, 1989-90)
Percentage of Parents
Source <$50,000 $50-99,999 •$100,000
Lower Middle Upper
Talking to others 90 90 90
Visits to schools 53 81 84
Board of education materials 57 72 84
Parent evening program 45 67 74
Written information from schools 35 65 76
Principals 31 65 58
Newspapers 35 50 53
Nursery school staff 43 38 35
Central office staff 20 21 19
Parent coordinator 8 9 8
Source: Barbara Strobert, “Factors Influencing Parental Choice in Selecting Magnet Schools in the
Montclair, New Jersey, Public Schools.” Dissertation for Teachers College, Columbia University,
1990, p. 79
Fourth, evidence about the effectiveness of private-school choice, limited as it is, suggests that
such a policy does not improve student achievement or stimulate school renewal…
Fifth, parents and students who do participate in school choice in both the public and private
sectors tend to feel good about their decisions and like the programs in which their children are
enrolled…
Sixth, the educational impact of school choice is ambiguous at best. In some districtwide
programs, a correlation may exist between choice and the improvement of students’ academic
performance. In statewide programs, no such connection could be found…
Results are more encouraging in selected districtwide programs [than they are in statewide
choice programs]. Even here, though, the academic impact of school choice is unclear.
Students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Montclair, New Jersey, for exmple, perform
quite well on standardized tests in the basics and have made gains in recent years. It is
possible, we believe, to attribute these achievements at least in part to the revitalizing
influence of school choice and to active parent participation. However, these districts
have, through the years, been relatively well-funded. It is therefore difficult to determine
to what extent choice, in and of itself, is responsible for such improvement. Further, in
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both districts, minority and poor students still trail their white counterparts on every
measure. Still, the overall achievement of these “choice” districts is impressive…
Seventh, school choice, to be successful, requires significant administrative and financial

support. It is not a cheap path to educational reform…
Montclair, which has [a] successful program, is also a well-funded district—spending

$7,478 per student in 1992. It also has, through the years, received millions of dollars in
state and federal desegregation funds to create distinctive magnet schools and train
teachers…In Montclair, transportation expenditures have increased by approximately $1.5
million annually as a result of the “choice” program…
Eighth, statewide “choice” programs tend to widen the gap between rich and poor districts…
Ninth, school choice works best when it is arrived at gradually, locally, and voluntarily—not
by top-down mandates…
[T]he best “choice” programs we observed were in single districts, like Cambridge, East
Harlem, and Montclair, where the plans evolved gradually. No districtwide referendum
was involved. Still, parents were engaged at every stage, through living-room discussions
and public meetings that brought the community together. Parents in these districts were
given many options from which to choose, transportation was available to students, and
the funding level from school to school was more equitable than in statewide programs.
Further, in all of these districts, active parent participation was ongoing—and this, we
believe, is one of the greatest benefits of school choice…
In 2000, Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, and Melissa Marschall conducted a study of school choice
in two New York City districts and two New Jersey districts, of which Montclair was one. Their
book is Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools.
Following are excerpts from the book that treat the Montclair case.
Document #9: Mark Schneider, Paul Teske and Melissa Marschall, Choosing Schools:
Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2000) Excerpts.
Montclair, New Jersey is located less than fifteen miles from New York City. Despite
its close proximity to the nation’s largest city, and the fact that many residents commute
to New York, Montclair’s population of 38,000 gives it a “small town” feeling. The
town has become increasingly affluent in recent years. In 1990, Montclair’s median
housing value was $267,000 and its median household income was over $52,000.
Montclair’s residents are well educated—about 47 percent hold college degrees.
In addition to being affluent, Montclair is also an example of a racially mixed suburb.

The black population increased from 24 percent in 1960 to 29 percent in 1980 to 36
percent in 1990. As we discuss below, race relations have not always been smooth in
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Montclair. However, today, despite the increasing proportion of minorities in the

community, residents have not abandoned the public schools. In fact, the private school
enrollment in Montclair (18 percent) is significantly lower than the county average (21
percent).
In contrast to District 4 [in New York City], choice was not implemented in Montclair
because its schools were failing. Indeed, as the Carnegie Foundation Report (1992, 31)
notes, Montclair has always been a high-performing district with an involved parent
population. Instead, Montclair adopted school choice in 1976 as a means to voluntarily
accomplish desegregation. As African Americans began moving into the community in
larger numbers throughout the 1960s, housing patterns became increasingly segregated.
This led to a racial imbalance in school enrollments, since school boundaries were drawn
according to neighborhoods. Racial unrest in Montclair and neighboring towns
intensified during the late 1960s. According to long-time residents, tensions among
African Americans and whites ran high, and cross burnings were not unheard of
(Carnegie Foundation 1992).
During this period many white parents in Montclair took their children out of the
public schools. This “white flight” intensified with the implementation of a forced
busing plan in the early 1970s. Rather than improving the racial balance of the public
schools, the busing plan actually had the reverse effect.
Under the threat of losing state funding, Montclair developed magnet schools in 1976 to
desegregate (Carnegie Foundation 1992, 31; Clewell and Joy 1990 5). Under this initial
plan, Montclair developed a “talented and gifted program and opened it in an African
American neighborhood. At the same time, in a predominately white neighborhood,
Montclair began a program that stressed traditional approaches to learning, emphasizing
“the basics” (Carnegie Foundation 1992, 31). In addition to creating these magnets,
district boundaries were also redrawn (Clewell and Joy 1992, 5).
While this initial plan partly succeeded, some parents perceived inequalities between the
magnet and traditional schools. Thus, in 1985 Montclair eliminated the concept of the
neighborhood school and moved to a magnet school program. Each school had its own
distinctive curricular theme and/or pedagogical approach…Though some of the themes
have changed over time, the basic plan has remained intact since 1985…
The various forms of choice
Choice is not a single reform, but rather a class of reforms with different rules and
institutional arrangements…These include the rules that determine who can choose,
how many alternatives they have, how school or district selection criteria or objectives
limit or enhance the ability of parents and students to match their preferences, and what
resources are available to assist parents with choice.
We identify five institutional arrangements in our four districts [listed here] along a
continuum from most to least restrictive. [They are neighborhood schools, controlled
choice, option-demand choice, universal choice, and private schools.]…
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Controlled choice
Controlled choice, which describes the full site magnet program in Montclair, generally
refers to choice programs with mandates for racial balancing. These programs are often
characterized by a “universal” design whereby all schools in a district become schools of
choice from which all parents must choose. However, the choice mechanism differs in
important ways across controlled and universal choice programs. Under controlled
choice, district officials regulate parents’ choices to ensure that all district schools are
similar with respect to racial and/or other demographic characteristics of students.
As Rossell (1995, 43) explains, controlled choice is one of the most recent innovations
in the four-decade evolution of school desegregation policy. While this innovation
relies on the voluntary actions of a school district’s parents and students to accomplish
desegregation, it also includes a mandatory back-up plan to ensure that desegregation is
actually accomplished. It is a compromise between parents’ desires for greater choice and
school administrators’ desires (or mandates) to desegregate by controlling assignments.
The hope is that magnet schools with different themes will attract students with similar
interests, but who are diverse in racial background and/or socio-economic status.
…Montclair’s controlled choice program includes two junior high magnet schools
(gifted/talented and science/technology) and seven elementary magnet schools. At the
elementary level, the themes are reflected by gifted and talented programs at two
schools, a Montessori school, a science and technology school, an international studies
school, a family and environment school, and an information technology school.
The district office in Montclair disseminates a considerable amount of information about

the schools and the process of choice. The fifty-page Parent to Parent handbook explains
the magnet system, outlines the curriculums offered, and lists all important events,
services, resources, and opportunities for parent involvement. A second booklet,
Montclair’s Magnets, provides parents with additional information about each school,
including registration procedures and requirements. Montclair also publishes a
newsletter, various “fact sheets,” and fliers for all school and district sponsored events.
In selecting schools, parents indicate their top two choices to the district office, which
assigns students to schools. In addition to the parental preferences, several factors are
taken into account: placement of siblings, gender and racial balance of schools, and
available space. Parents who move into the district midway through the school year are
assigned to schools based on available space (Clewell and Joy 1990, 7). Since the schools
are nearly uniformly good, about 95 percent of parents receive their first choice
(Strobert 1991, 56-57). Because the district provides transportation for all students,
61
distance does not limit parental choice. Between 60 and 80 percent of students take
buses to their schools.
61
In their survey of parents, Clewell and Joy (1990, 7) found that many parents select the school that is
closest to them. This is particularly true for the K-2 years, as parents may want to keep their children closer
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Option-Demand Choice
The second type of choice…, option-demand, refers to explicit programs adopted by

local school districts to expand the range of educational alternatives available to parents
and students. Unlike controlled and universal choice, under the option-demand system
these choice alternatives exist alongside neighborhood schools. Option-demand thus
does not eliminate the traditional schooling arrangements but instead implements change
by offering a limited set of alternatives to a smaller group of parents and students.
The majority of choice programs currently in place across the United States are option-
demand. [The New Haven Public Schools’ magnet school program is an option-demand
program.] While they vary somewhat, the characteristic feature of option-demand
choice is a two-stage selection process. The first stage involves the decision to opt out of
the zoned neighborhood school. At the second stage, parents/students select their
preferred school from the set of possible alternatives.
The distinction between these two levels of choice is critical in studying equity issues
that frequently emerge in school choice debates. Option-demand choice essentially
creates a separate sector of public schools, and since parents self-select under option-
demand choice, for several reasons these programs may be vulnerable to adverse
outcomes such as stratification. First, option-demand choice places more responsibility
on the individual parents and students, which may result in biases in who exercises
choice, as some parents have access to more and better information (Bridge and
Blackman 1978; Henig 1994; Wells 1993b; Mumane 1986). In addition, some parents
are more capable of making informed choice as a result of greater involvement and
participation in their children’s education (Wells 1993b; Witte 1993; Coleman and
Hotter 1987).
A second reason option-demand systems are associated with stratification relates to

institutional aspects of school choice. In particular, the nature of the alternative schools
established, and the process schools use to admit students, may lead to systematic biases.
Alternative schools may be disproportionately targeted at particular “types” of students
(for example, bilingual schools are often designed to attract a certain type of student—in
New York districts, Hispanics).
As option-demand choice places greater responsibility on individual parents and students

in making schooling decisions, it also increases the importance of institutional and
contextual features that can either reinforce or diminish existing biases in who
participates in choice. Specifically, the number and type of alternative schools
established, the existence of public transportation, the presence of information, and rules
specifying how students are accepted into schools all play important roles…
Universal Choice
to home while at the same time figuring out which programs might be most appropriate. Quite a bit of
“shopping around” takes place at the third grade level.
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Although we noted previously that controlled choice programs are often characterized
by a “universal” design, they differ in important ways from universal choice programs.
Most importantly, controlled choice programs are associated with voluntary
desegregation schemes and mandatory requirements to achieve racial balancing.
Universal choice programs, on the other hand, do not share the explicit goal of
desegregation and are generally much less regulated than controlled choice programs…
Do Institutional Arrangements Matter?
Theoretically, the search for information [about schools in a choice system] is driven by
both the personal characteristics of individuals and the environment in which individuals
operate. According to its proponents, school choice increases the incentives of
individuals to search for information. While we address later the quality of the
information parents in different school districts possess, here we focus on the pathways
to information: do parents in choice districts find different sources of information useful.
[The mean number of sources for Montclair parents is just under five, of which one is a
“formal” source, 1.75 are “friends/parents” and 2.25 are “school based.”]
…Considering the pattern in parents’ evaluations of the usefulness of school based

sources, here the data show a clear effect of choice—parents in both choice districts are
more likely to find school-based sources of information useful than are parents in the
“matched” district. This may indicate that choice has succeeded in making parents feel
more like “owners” of their schools, reducing the distance and barriers between parents
and schools…
Simple bivariate comparisons show that Montclair parents are significantly more likely
than their counterparts in [the “matched” non-choice New Jersey district of]
Morristown to report having enough information (by 0.7 points on the 5 point scale.
While there are no significant differences in the ability to correctly name principals,
Montclair parents are significantly more accurate than those in Morristown on two of
the four measures: reading scores and the percentage of Hispanic students. There is no
significant difference across these New Jersey parents in knowledge of the percentage of
black children in the schools. In the case of average class size, Morristown parents are
actually more accurate than Montclair parents. Thus, the bivcariate evidence is mixed,
but suggests somewhat more accurate information among choice…
REFERENCES
Bridge, Gary R., and Julie Blackman. 1978. A Study of Alternatives in American Education, Vol. 4 of Family
Choice in Schooling. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 1992. School Choice: A Special Report. Princeton,
NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Clewell, Beatriz C., and Myra F. Joy. 1990. Choice in Montclair, New Jersey: A Policy Information Paper.
Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.
Coleman, James, and Tomas Hoffer. 1987. Public and Private High Schools Compared. New York: Basic
Books
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Henig, Jeffrey R. 1994. Rethinkking School Choice: Limits of the Market Metaphor. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Murnane, Richard J. 1986. “Comparisons of Private and Public Schools: The Critical Role of
Regulations. In Private Education: Studies in Choice and Public Policy, ed. Daniel C. Levy. New York:
Oxford University Press
Rossell, Christine H. 1995. “Controlled-Choice Desegregation Plans: Not Enough Choice, Too Much
Control?” Urban Affairs Review 31 (September): 43-76
Strobert, Barbara. 1991. “Factors Influencing Parental Choice in Selection of a Magnet School in the
Montclair, New Jersey Public Schools.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College.
Wells, Amy Stuart. 1993b. “The Sociology of School Choice: Why Some Win and Others Lose in the
Educational Marketplace.” In School Choice: Examining the Evidence, ed. Edith Rassell and Richard
Rothstein. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
Witte, John F. 1993. “The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.” In School Choice: Examining the
Evidence, ed. Edith Rassell and Richard Rothstein. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute
Following is information from the Montclair Public Schools Web site describing their magnet school
program. Every elementary and middle school is a magnet. Thus every parent needs to make a
choice when enrolling their Kindergartner and their fifth grade child. The district Web site contains
26-page application packets explaining the options available and eliciting information from parents.
Assignment to schools is based on a lottery system. “Choice is embedded in Montclair,” says Frank
Alvarez, the district superintendent. Included in Document #9 are the descriptions the programs of
two magnet schools. Descriptions of the programs of the remaining eight elementary and middle
schools in the district are available on the district Web site.
Document #10: Montclair Public Schools, Information on the Montclair magnet schools
from the district Web site, http://www.montclair.k12.nj.us/WebPage.aspx?Id=21
Overview
There are eleven schools in the Montclair Public School System; seven elementary
schools, three middle schools and one comprehensive high school.
In Montclair, children do not necessarily attend the school closest to their homes. The
Board of Education has developed specialized programs in each of the schools and believes
children are best served by a program that most closely supports their individual learning
styles.
It is important to understand that learning styles are not related to intelligence. Many able
learners work most productively within a well-ordered schedule. Others do well with
greater direction from the teachers. Educational research suggests children learn best when
they have a peaked interest in their learning. A different specialized program has been
established at each school. All schools follow the same basic curriculum, but each offers a
difference structure or special activities related to its own special theme.
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All of our schools are outstanding. There is no one school, no one organization that is best
for all children. Rather, it is a matter of what program is best for the child. The decision is
made by the parents with the assistance of the Board of Education staff.
As a public school, we are required to incorporate the New Jersey Core Curriculum
Content Standards established by the State Department of Education. Every school
includes classes in language arts, math, science, social studies, physical education, art,
music, world language and character education as part of its core curriculum. Students
have access to computer technology at all eleven schools. At the middle and high school
levels, students have the option of enrolling in a variety of elective courses in addition to
those indicated above.
In addition to classroom teachers, each school has the services of a reading teacher(s), math
coach(s), technology teacher(s), a student assistance counselor(s), teacher assistants, and a
school nurse(s). Child Study Team services are available in all schools for students with
special education needs. The Project STARS program provides academic support to
students in Language Arts and/or Math in grades 1-12 in all schools. This program has an
after school tutorial and summer component which is provided for elementary students at
no cost to parents.
Although the basic curriculum is the same, each school offers special programs consistent
with its own magnet theme.
A Historical Perspective of Montclair’s Magnet School System
“Dedicated to becoming the national role model for public integrated education”
The choice system in the Montclair Public Schools was implemented originally as a
voluntary desegregation plan in 1977. Beginning with only two magnet programs, the
plan has grown continually and now includes all seven elementary schools and three
middle schools. The term “neighborhood school” no longer exists in Montclair; the entire
township is the neighborhood for every school.
Implementing the magnet program was no easy task. Following the approval of the
magnet schools concept by the Board of Education and State Commissioner of Education,
a year was spent in developing, designing, marketing and selling the plan.
A call went out for volunteers to serve on a citizens’ advisory task force established to
make recommendations about the future magnet programs. More than 100 people
responded. Magnet schools in other districts were researched and visited by administrators,
teachers and community members. Meetings to describe the magnets were held with
organizations such as the PTA, Board of Realtors, local agencies and church groups. Input
from parents was sought on desired courses, course content, program and structure.
In September of 1977, the district’s first magnet schools opened: a gifted and talented
program to draw white students to a school with a predominance of students of color. A
fundamental “back to basics” program also opened to draw minority youngsters to a
predominately white school.
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Montclair’s system of choice has come a long way in the past 25 years. What started as a
desegregation plan has turned into a true system of choice. When parents register their
children for elementary school at the district’s central office, they must list their first
through sixth choice of school. The magnet schools have created a good learning
environment in which students of diverse backgrounds feel comfortable and are able to
learn. Teachers, students and parents are generally happy with the curriculum and
instruction.
The magnet plan has had a positive impact on the community by creating alternatives
within the public school system and adding excitement to the schools. Parents like the
idea of choosing a school for their child. It provides them with the opportunity to become
more involved in their child’s learning. For example, each year an evening orientation is
scheduled; principals and parents from each building are on hand to make presentations
and answer questions. An open house week gives parents a firsthand look at each school’s
daily operation. During registration week, central office administrators are available to
guide parents who are still unsure of their choice. Involvement in the school continues
after enrollment. Parents are more aware of what their child is doing in school and
whether or not the program is meeting expectations and their child’s needs.
No one school is better than another; they are all equal but different. Each school
implements the same district curriculum which is aligned to the New Jersey Core
Curriculum Content Standards as required by state law. The overlap of the magnet
program and the organizational structure of the school makes each school unique.
The magnet schools bring people from diverse backgrounds together to work
collaboratively toward the common goal of high expectations and academic excellence in
an integrated environment. In Montclair, children are our future, diversity is our strength.
The Schools:
Bradford School (K-5) Theme: The University Magnet “Everyone Teaches, Everyone
Learns”
With the completion of our sunny, state-of-the-art addition, Bradford School has
launched the University Magnet, reflecting our new partnership with Montclair State
University, our walking-distance neighbor. In this dynamic collaboration, the university
serves as a wide-ranging resource for Bradford’s students and faculty. Our children and
their teachers take classes with university professors from the College of Education and
Human Services. Bradford students participate in age-appropriate projects designed by the
university professors, and have access to such university facilities as the art gallery, music
rooms, skating rink, photo lab, theater, Yogi Berra Museum, and video-conferencing lab.
Bradford’s experienced teachers, in turn, supervise some of the university’s teachers-in
training in Bradford classrooms. Thanks to these student teachers, classes at Bradford will
have a smaller student-teacher ratio, with greater opportunities for small group learning.
Bradford’s Mission
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Our mission is straightforward: Bradford students understand that learning is life-long. It

begins in kindergarten and continues into adulthood, as the children at Bradford see even
their own teachers revitalized by graduate-level seminars at the university.
The association with the university enhances an elementary school that already offers
topnotch technology and many other first-rate programs. Bradford students use cutting-
edge learning tools like a new technology lab and a modern broadcast studio. Technology
has been integrated into the curriculum for Bradford’s kindergarten through grade five
students. Core courses are linked through broad thematic units. The related arts are also
celebrated at Bradford, which has a new art room, music room, library, and its own
kitchen.
To responsibly educate and nurture the whole child, Bradford also emphasizes community
and citizenship. Community service projects are encouraged, and students will plant and
garden in the new courtyard, which will be used to expand their knowledge of the natural
world. In conjunction with the Montclair Counseling Center, Bradford also offers unique
programs in character development and respectful social interaction. Parent and caregiver
involvement in the classrooms is welcomed. The extended Bradford community gathers
for many academic and social occasions throughout the year.
The Basic Program
Math, science, social studies, and language arts make up the basic curriculum. Students
also receive instruction in music, art, physical education, technology, and library at least
once a week, and Spanish, twice a week. Special education students learn in inclusion
classrooms, self-contained classrooms, or mainstream classes, accompanied by trained
professionals.
The Bradford-Montclair State University (MSU) Collaboration
• Montclair State University professors support and enhance Bradford’s math,

science, and technology programs. A Montclair State professor is available to
work with Bradford’s teachers at the school one day every week.
• Every Bradford student will participate in at least one university-designed

teaching experience for each of the three marking periods each year. These
could include a science workshop led by Montclair State professionals, a
program participation in Philosophy for children, or math enrichment in small
groups, or participation in a School of the Arts collaborative project.
• Bradford faculty attend professional development seminars at the university,

with exposure to progressive, creative approaches to education. Bradford
teachers were recently trained in Problem Based Learning.
• Student teachers, known as junior faculty, from the university apprentice in

Bradford classrooms, thereby reducing the student-teacher ratio and increasing
opportunities for small-group learning.
152
• Bradford students have access to Montclair States facilities, including the art
galleries, Panzer gym for grade level activities.
• Bradford is available for MSU professors to teach seminars classes.
• For more information on Partnership activities, go to

http://www.msubradfordpartnership.org
Special Features at Bradford
• A new addition, including sun-drenched, colorful classrooms for younger students,

a library with skylights, a new technology lab, a new art room, a playground with
new equipment, and a designated music room. Bradford also has a new kitchen,
making it easier to offer healthy lunch menus, as well as cooking and nutrition
classes.
• Newly landscaped courtyard with gardening shed, to provide students with

opportunities for outdoor and environmental learning projects
• Broadcast TV studio, used by staff and students daily
• Writer’s Room instruction
• K-5 Junior Great Books program
• Compass Learning, which allows students to fine-tune their math and reading
abilities with differentiated computer-assisted instruction
• Affiliation with the Montclair Counseling Center, which provides first-graders an

age-appropriate social skills course and fourth and fifth graders with anger
management discussion groups.
• After-school enrichment courses sponsored by Bradford’s PTA, including classes in

yoga, music, cooking, tae kwon do, chess, drama and science.
• Integration of dance and stringed instruments into arts and social studies courses
• A parent-faculty generated health and wellness program, emphasizing nutrition and

exercise.
The Greater Bradford Community
Family participation is vital and essential at Bradford. Teachers welcome classroom
volunteers. Parents and caregivers have ample opportunity to help shape the planning of
activities at the school. Supported by an active and enthusiastic PTA, the many gatherings
of Bradford families throughout the year include: a picnic and breakfast at the start of
school in the fall; a Global Adventures festival celebrating each class’s study of a country’s
art, music, history, culture and food; music concerts; book fair; science fair; a community
153
service night in December; a Valentine’s Day food drive; bake sales; Bingo night; a
bowling night; and a spring picnic at the end of the year…
Renaissance Middle School (Grades 6-8) Theme: “Where Learning is a Constant and
Standards are Exceeded”
The Renaissance curriculum is based on historic rebirth of arts and sciences. The school’s
mission is to mold individuals who think critically and responsibly. Students investigate
ideas through an interdisciplinary, thematic curriculum.
Its mission, “equity and excellence,” occurs in a small school environment. Studies
document that in small schools students learn more, behave, and display more social
concern. Parents are actively engaged in the school community.
When you visit Renaissance School, you will see:
• A culture where students work harder and smarter to do quality intellectual work.
• Students who are engaged, persistent, confident, and proud of their work.
• Teachers who connect learning to student lives.
• Tasks that challenge students to exceed both district and state standards.
• A variety of learning contexts/groups/settings.
• Learning guided by salient themes; problems, issues or questions.

Distinguishing Aspects
Our Renaissance community is composed of a rich diversity of family backgrounds,
geographic origins, achievement histories, talents known, needs and strengths. At the heart
of Renaissance School are students and faculty who investigate ideas through an
interdisciplinary thematic curriculum. The thematic approach centers on essential
questions that provide the discipline to exceed state and school district standards.
The teachers of the Renaissance School have crafted an interdisciplinary curriculum that
has at its foundation state standards and tasks that evaluate achievement. Student work is
assessed through portfolios that indicate growth over time. Structure is based on
commitment to maximum use of instructional time. The school implements an extended
day schedule. Staff are involved in on-going collaborative seminars with cross-disciplined
reading and planning for student work.
For the efficient allocation of resources during its growth stages, the Renaissance School
relies on adjunct instructors and community resources. These resources include physical
education at the Montclair YMCA, Ashley Hammond Soccer Domain, and Sharron
Miller Academy for Performing Arts, a collaboration with the Montclair Art Museum and
Montclair Public Library. Part-time instructors for specific skill sets come from other
schools in the district. In keeping with the philosophy of the classroom with Afew walls@,
154
the thematic units include field study and investigation. These sites vary from museum
visits to outdoor ecological and historical sites. Desktop/Laptop computers and a local area
network are also part of the school.
Organization
Students are part of a grade level team. The teams provide an optimal student-teacher ratio
so that both group and individual pedagogical techniques can be used. The school operates
on an extended day four times a week which provides 196 additional hours of
instructional time during the school year.
The schedule is unique. Block scheduling encourages students to spend extended periods
of time concentrating and working on specific activities. Specifically, students work in the
four subject areas for 75 minutes twice a week. Mathematics problem solving and writing
are further bolstered with two additional sixty-minute periods of instruction two days a
week. Regular advisories and Community Service complement the extended day
schedule.
Community Service
• Social Action Class initiated for all grades; projects included Animal Rights (7th
Grade), and Human Rights (8th Grade).
• Community Service Learning Classes for 6th graders working closely with PAWS,
Pre-K, Library and more.
• Community Service Learning class for 7th and 8th grade, with student placements
at the Montclair Community Pre-K, Park Street Academy, Nishuane School,
Rand School, Over the Rainbow Pre-K, Edgemont School, Neighborhood
Childcare Pre-School, Charles Bierman Home, Hillside, Watchung, and Montclair
Co-Op.
• Student Government sponsored toy drive, bake sale, pep rally, and Valentine’s Day
dance.
Awards/Recognition
• New Jersey Service Learning leader School Award
• Four students published in the 2000 Student Poetry Anthology
• Science Olympiad
• Mid-Model United Nations Conference
• Essex County Teacher Recognition participation
• Developmental Disabilities Council Fellowship for Inclusive Education
155
• 7th Grade student and Renaissance recognized for Inclusive Education as

Governor proclaims December 2-6, 2002 Inclusive Education Week
• 1st Place Academically Speaking
• 1st Place State of New Jersey Brown vs. Board of Education Essay Contest
Special Events
• Initiation of the Global Learning Peer Mediation Program
• Pilot site of Middle School Family Math Nights
• Iris Gardens/ROGATE program
• Greek Olympics, India Day
• Renaissance Performance Ensembles; Band, Chorus
• Partnership with Montclair Art Museum, Art Shows, Student Museums.
• Spring Fair, Science Fair, Sixth Grade Expo
• Students select a language and performance art (music or band) as activities that
result in performance assessments.
Through the opening of school year 2007-08 race and ethnicity were used as factors in the student
placement system in Montclair. As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the cases of
Parents Involved in Community Schools (PICS) v. Seattle School District and Meredith v.
Jefferson County Board of Education, race can no longer figure in the placement process. The
decisions are discussed in the following document:
62
Document #11: Sonya D. Jones and Erin N. Ramsey , “Rejoinder—Parents Involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1: Racial Imbalance Is Not Segregation,”
Journal of Educational Controversy 2:1 (2007)
“Because racial imbalance is not inevitably linked to unconstitutional segregation, it is not
unconstitutional in and of itself.”
Introduction
On June 28, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a crucial case involving race-based,
63
public school assignment plans in compulsory education. The quote above from Justice
62
Sonya D. Jones is an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation in Bellevue, Washington. PLF filed as amicus
in support of Petitioners in both cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Erin N. Ramsey is a law student at
Seattle University School of Law.
156
Thomas’s concurrence captures the spirit of the Court’s decision in Parents Involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, striking down public school assignment
policies based on racial classifications.64 Quite simply, the Court determined that the
policies used in both the Seattle and Louisville school districts violated the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.65 Fifty years
after Brown v. Board of Education, it baffled the Court that race could still be used as a
determinative factor in participation in a compulsory school system: “The way to stop
66
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The
Seattle School District operates an open choice policy for incoming ninth graders to high
school, meaning that students may choose which of the ten high schools they would
prefer to attend.67 Once a high school has been oversubscribed, a set of tiebreakers is
triggered to determine who will be admitted to that high school.68 The first tiebreaker
selects students for admission if they already have a sibling attending that school.69 The
second tiebreaker selects students who will not disrupt the racial balance of the school, in
relation to the racial balance of the district overall, by more than ten percent.70
Jefferson County Schools were once subject to a court ordered decree to desegregate due
to past segregation policies.71 In 2000, a court dissolved that decree, finding that Jefferson
County Schools “had achieved unitary status by eliminating ‘[t]o the greatest extent
72
practicable,’ the vestiges of its prior policy of segregation.” After the decree was
dissolved, Jefferson County adopted a “voluntary” student assignment plan in order to
encourage racial balancing in public schools in that county.73 Parents of kindergartners,
first graders, and students transferring into the district may submit an application indicating
their first two choices of schools within a specified geographic range of their residence.74
63
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS), 551 U.S. ___, 127 S.Ct. 2738,
2746 (2007). This opinion also represents the opinion in Meredith v. Jefferson County Bd. of Educ., a similar
case involving race-based school admissions policies. For background information on these two cases, see
Sonya D. Jones and Erin N. Ramsey, DISCRIMINATION VEILED AS DIVERSITY: THE USE OF SOCIAL
SCIENCE TO UNDERMINE THE LAW, available at
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/eJournal/v002n001/a003.shtml (last visited July 24, 2007).
64
See PICS at 2769 (J. Thomas, concurring). Even more egregious in this case was that Seattle considered
two categories in trying to achieve racial balance: white and non-white. Louisville considered two, as well:
black and other. Id. at 2746. Neither system of classification distinguishes students of other ethnic
backgrounds, such as Hispanic, Asian, or Native American, and woefully discounts the diversity provided by
those students.
65
See id. (“No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
U.S. CONST. amend. XIV, ‘ 2).
66
Id. at 2768; see also, id. at 2743 (“[I]t is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in
life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to
provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Id. at 493); Brown v. Board of
Educ.(Brown II), 349 U.S. 294, 300-01 (1955) (school districts must not base admissions to public schools on
race).
67
See PICS, 127 S.Ct. at 2746-47.
68
See id. at 2747.
69
Id.
70
Id. The overall distribution in Seattle Public Schools is 41% white, and 59% non-white. Id.
71
Id. at 2749. Jefferson County Schools operate the public schools in Louisville, Kentucky. Id.
72
Id. (internal citations omitted).
73
Id.
74
Id.
157
Decisions to assign those students within the designated geographic ranges are based on
available space and racial guidelines promulgated by the district.75 If a school is too close
to the “extremes of the racial guidelines,” a student whose race would disrupt the racial
balance is denied admission.76 As for middle and high school students, there are no
considerations based on location; they are merely denied admissions if the applicant would
disrupt the racial balance objectives set out by the district.77
The Majority And Concurring Opinions

Any government action that “distributes burdens or benefits on the basis of individual
racial classifications” is subject to strict scrutiny.78 Strict scrutiny requires that the action be
narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest.79 At issue here was
whether the two school assignment plans were narrowly tailored and whether those plans
were in pursuit of satisfying a compelling government interest. Chief Justice Roberts,
along with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito, formed the majority, holding that
the subject school plans were not narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental
interest.80
Compelling Government Interest
According to the Court, the only permitted uses of race in public school assignments are
(1) to remedy past, intentional segregation, or (2) in the interest of creating educational
diversity in higher education.81 The Court found that the Seattle Plan did not fall into the
first category of permissible interests because there was no previous forced segregation in
the Seattle School District.82 Further, the Court found that Jefferson County had no
current interest in remedying past segregation due to the dissolution of the decree to
desegregate.83 As for the second category of permissible government interests, the Court
highlighted the difference between the compelling interest of creating a diversified
educational experience in higher education contrasted to that in primary and secondary
education.84 In Grutter, the Michigan Law School used criteria for admission that included
race among many other factors, in identifying students who would contribute to a more
85
diversified learning experience deemed beneficial in law schools. The Grutter Court
found there was a compelling interest in considering multiple factors that create a diverse
75
Id.
76
Id. at 2749-50.
77
Id. at 2750, n.7.
78
Id. at 2751-52 (internal citations omitted).
79
Id. at 2752 (internal citations omitted).
80
Id.
81
Id. at 2752-53.
82
Id.
83
Id.
84
Id. at 2753.
85
Grutter v. Bollinger (Grutter) 539 U.S. 306, 331 (2003). “[The law school’s] policy makes clear there are
many possible bases for diversity admissions, and provides examples of admittees who have lived or traveled
widely abroad, are fluent in several languages, have overcome personal adversity and family hardship, have
exceptional records of extensive community service, and have had successful careers in other fields.” Id. at
338.
158
86
learning environment, not just race. The Court distinguished Grutter because the student
applicants were considered as individuals, and not simply as members of a racial or ethnic
group, and that was permissible in the context of law school admissions.87
Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, formed a plurality
holding that racial diversity in all primary and secondary education is not a compelling
88
interest that could justify race-based admissions. The plurality opinion rejected the
school district’s argument that its plan served a compelling interest because of its efforts to
undo damage done by de facto segregation caused by Seattle’s housing pattern.89 Further,
they argued that because a racially diverse learning environment is superior, and the best
means to achieve that is to base admissions on race, then the plans at issue do not fall
under the Grutter analysis.90 The Court rejected those contentions stating “[t]he plans are
tied to each district’s specific racial demographics, rather than to any pedagogic concept of
the level of diversity needed to obtain the asserted educational benefits.”91
Because the school districts failed to articulate a constitutionally acceptable purpose for
their racially selective schemes, the plurality agreed that there was no compelling interest
at all for racial balancing. The subject plans sought only to manipulate the schools’
enrollments, based on race alone, in order to more accurately reflect the racial makeup of
the districts, constituting racial balancing which is unconstitutional. At the very heart of
the Fourteenth Amendment is the noble idea that “Government must treat its citizens as
individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual, or national class.”92
Even though the districts’ attempts to classify their goals as promoting racial diversity,
there is no distinction.93
In Brown v. Board of Education (Brown), the Court declared that school districts must
“achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a non-racial basis.”94
In Brown, both the plaintiffs’ amici asserted that differential treatment of school children on
the basis of race alone was detrimental to the educational experience and unconstitutional
under the Fourteenth Amendment.95 That position ultimately prevailed in Brown and in
PICS.
Narrowly Tailored
86
See PICS, 137 S.Ct. at 2753; Grutter, 539 U.S. at 331.
87
PICS, 127 S.Ct. at 2753; see also, Grutter, 539 U.S. at 337.
88
See PICS, 127 S.Ct. at 2755. A plurality occurs when a majority of Justices agree in the judgment, but do
so for different reasons. Usually, the narrowest test asserted by any of the opinions supporting the majority
judgment will be the test used in future cases. Here, that opinion arguably belongs to Justice Kennedy,
giving his asserted possibility of a compelling interest future play in the courts.
89
Id.
90
Id.
91
Id. Further, the school districts offered “no evidence that the level of racial diversity necessary to achieve
the asserted educational benefits happens to coincide with the racial demographics of the respective school
districts . . . .” Id. at 2756.
92
Id. at 2757 (quoting Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 911 (1995)).
93
Id.
94
Brown II, 349 U.S. at 300-01.
95
See PICS, 127 S.Ct. at 2767-68.
159
A majority, including Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and
Alito, agreed that the subject plans were not narrowly tailored.96 The districts “failed to
show that they considered methods other than explicit racial classifications to achieve their
stated goals.”97 In order to satisfy the “narrowly tailored” prong of strict scrutiny, it was
imperative that the school districts employ “serious, good faith consideration of race-
neutral alternatives.”98 Again, the school districts failed to satisfy this requirement.99
More importantly, unlike in Grutter where race was only one factor considered in the
100
admissions process, in the Seattle Plan, “it was the factor.” The Seattle Plan “speaks of
the ‘inherent educational value’ in ‘providing students the opportunity to attend schools
with diverse student enrollment.’”101 Because the Seattle Plan allows for only white and
non-white racial classifications, potentially providing absurd results, the Court rejected the
plan as not being narrowly tailored to achieve the stated purpose of the plan.102
In his concurrence, Justice Kennedy suggested that achieving diversity may be a
103
compelling interest that school districts may pursue. Justice Kennedy opined that
[i]f school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools
interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their
students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a
general way and without treating each student in a different fashion solely on the basis of a
systematic, individual typing by race.104
To that end, Justice Kennedy suggested several race-neutral alternatives that would pass
constitutional muster, such as “strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance
zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; [and,] allocating
resources for special programs . . . .”105 Any of the methods for achieving diversity
mentioned by Justice Kennedy would be race-conscious without being racially
discriminating, thereby passing strict scrutiny and achieving the same stated goals as in
these subject plans.
Response To Dissents
The plurality attacked Justice Breyer’s dissent by highlighting the faulty reliance on
distinguishable cases that were all decided prior to the implementation of strict scrutiny as
106
the test for all government-sanctioned classifications based on race. As discussed below,
Justice Breyer incorrectly assumes that the plans in these cases were remedial in nature as a
96
See id. at 2760.
97
Id.
98
Id.
99
See id.
100
Id. at 2753 (emphasis in original).
101
Id. at 2754 (internal citations omitted).
102
Id.
103
See id. at 2788-89 (J. Kennedy, concurring).
104
Id. at 2792.
105
Id.
106
Id. at 2761-62; id. at 2762 n.16.
160
result of past segregation of some variety, but that was not the case.107 The Seattle School
District was never segregated by law and the Jefferson County School District had satisfied
a stringent court order to desegregate.108 As the plurality stated, “[s]imply because the
school districts may seek a worthy goal does not mean they are free to discriminate on the
basis of race to achieve it, or that their racial classifications should be subject” to anything
less than strict scrutiny.109
“[T]he Constitution emphatically does not forbid the use of race-conscious measures by
[school] districts... that voluntarily desegregate their schools.”110 Throughout his dissent,
Breyer makes no distinction between voluntary desegregation and voluntary integration.
The former is a remedial measure taken to correct a previous injustice. The latter is a
proactive attempt to meet a racial proportion which is more aesthetically pleasing to the
local school district. This case is not about voluntary desegregation, but rather voluntary
integration programs, which arbitrarily use race as the definitive factor for which school a
child attends.
Unlike the present case, the legal precedents upon which Breyer relies are desegregation
cases challenging the state proscription against assignments made on basis of race for the
111
purpose of creating racial balance to disestablish dual systems of education. In contrast,
the Seattle Plan challenges a voluntary integration program adopted by the school district
to better blend the races in Seattle’s public schools. As stated above, there is a distinction
between desegregation and integration programs. The Seattle case was not about de facto
segregation, but rather a case about de jure discrimination for the purpose of effectuating a
race-based integration program. Justice Breyer’s reliance on desegregation cases as legal
authority to his analysis is inappropriate and unpersuasive.
In his concurrence, Justice Thomas criticized Justice Breyer’s dissent as sounding
alarmingly familiar: “Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, [Justice
Breyer’s] dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of
race “an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in [Brown].”112
Justice Thomas noted that Justice Breyer mischaracterized the nature of the subject plans
as being implemented to remedy segregation or prevent resegregation even though neither
district was currently being compelled to remedy segregation nor threatened with
resegregation.113 Justice Thomas stressed that “racial imbalance is not segregation,” and
114
racial imbalance is not itself unconstitutional. “The Constitution abhors classifications
based on race, not only because those classifications can harm favored races or are based on
illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial
registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us
107
Id. at 2762.
108
Id.
109
Id. at 2765.
110
Id. at 2811(J. Breyer, dissenting).
111
Id. at 2811-12 (citing Swann, 402 U.S. at 15-16; Northern Carolina School Bd. of Ed. v. Swann, 402 U.S. 43
(1971); Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Bd. of Ed., 439 U.S. 1380(1978)).
112
See id. at 2768 (J. Thomas, concurring).
113
See id. at 2768-69; see also, id. at 2788 (J. Kennedy, concurring) (“Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion . . .
rests on what in my respectful submission is a misuse and mistaken interpretation of our precedents.” Id.).
114
Id. at 2769.
161
all.”115 Such strong sentiments from Justice Thomas illuminate the fatally flawed thinking
in the dissent that race should matter.
Conclusion
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment secures to “a race recently
116
emancipated... all the civil rights that the superior race enjoy.” The purpose of the
Fourteenth Amendment is to prevent and remedy segregation. Moreover, it seeks to
eliminate the inequitable separation of races. It seeks to give equal opportunity for every
individual regardless of race and eliminate the exclusion of an individual from access to an
opportunity because of race. That “balance of individual and collective interests” cannot
in itself offend our Constitution by means amounting to retaliatory discrimination
resulting in a benefit to those previously disadvantaged to the exclusion of the previous
benefactors’ fundamental right to equality.
This decision itself sets up an interesting scenario by virtue of the fractured opinion—
namely that similar plans will have to be viewed individually in the context of their overall
purpose and race-conscious means to achieve that purpose. However, one thing is
perfectly clear: the two subject plans in these cases were unconstitutional, surely bringing
to light hundreds of others across the country that will now have to be re-evaluated in
order to pass constitutional muster. If the ultimate goal is a better education, then schools
must stop teaching racial discrimination by using racial discrimination in their admittance
policies.
Document #12: “Montclair Public Schools React to Supreme Court Ruling,” (Available
at http://www.montclair.k12.nj.us/Article.aspx?Id=187)
On June 28, [2007] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 to limit the use of race in
assigning students to schools under voluntary public school district desegregation plans.
The desegregation plans examined in the case (which concerned the Seattle and
Louisville districts) were deemed unconstitutional, but a majority of the Court
concluded that school districts do have a compelling interest in eliminating racial
isolation and supporting diversity. That majority made clear that a variety of race-
conscious measures may be used to support these goals, including the use of magnet
schools like those used in Montclair. It is still unclear what the specific impact the
Supreme Court decision will have in Montclair, which operates under a state-ordered
plan. While we await further clarification of the decision's impact, we do not expect
any changes in the near future to the district's current student enrollment system. We
do, however, believe that this decision provides an important opportunity to discuss
Montclair’s magnet school system.
115
Id. at 2770 (quoting Grutter, 539 U.S. at 353 (J. Thomas, dissenting)).
116
Id. at 2815 (J. Breyer, dissenting) (citing Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 306 (1879)).
162
Segregation and Desegregation in Montclair
Every year, families move to Montclair with the expressed purpose of enrolling their
children in the district’s well-regarded magnet school system. For many, the schools’
racial and economic diversity is a deciding factor; for others, factors like parental choice
and strong test scores weigh more heavily. But as popular as the magnet system has
proven to be to generations of families, many are not aware today that the original
purpose in creating a magnet school district in Montclair was to remedy the effects of a
segregated school system.
Segregated enrollment patterns were the norm for decades in Montclair. In 1965, for
example, the enrollment of three schools — Bradford, Northeast, and Mt. Hebron —
was entirely white. By contrast, the student population at Glenfield, Rand and
Nishuane was predominantly African-American with enrollments of 97%, 84% and
75%, respectively.
In 1966 a group of Montclair residents filed suit against the Montclair Board of
Education, charging that the district was in violation of Brown v. Board of Education
by providing unequal access to educational resources for students based on race.The
suit led to an order from the NJ State Department of Education mandating that
Montclair adopt a plan for integrating its elementary and middle schools. After many
false starts over the next decade, Montclair eventually moved away from the
neighborhood school concept that reflected the town’s segregated housing patterns.
The Magnet System
The district opted to create a magnet school system. Under this system, parents select
an elementary school for their children based on its magnet theme (educational focus),
rather than its proximity to the student’s home. Some of the current magnet themes in
the Montclair schools include the environmental studies, global studies, science and
technology, university studies, and visual and performing arts. Each elementary school
feeds into one of two middle schools, with a third and smaller middle school available
to families who choose it. All three middle schools feed into a single high school.
When determining school placements for incoming kindergartners, registration officials

take a variety of factors into consideration. These include sibling preference (children
who have an older sibling at a certain school are assured admittance to that school);
available facilities and resources for children with special needs; and available
instructional programs for English Language Learners.
Once sibling preference and special program enrollment decisions have been made,
parents participate in the school choice system by ranking their elementary school
choices from 1 to 6. A random lottery is then held to assign as many students as
possible to their first- and second-choice schools. This drawing is done by computer
without regard to students’ names or other information. In most cases (about 90% of
the time), first- or second-choices are honored. There is also a freedom of choice process
for parents to request school transfers at the end of each school year; the transfer
request rate is very low.
163
In addition, Montclair is required under the state order to ensure that each school’s
enrollment by race is broadly reflective of the overall racial enrollment in the district.
Therefore, once the computerized lottery assignments have been made, district officials
review each school’s enrollment to ensure that it is broadly consistent with overall
district enrollment by race. For the past several years, the lottery has in fact resulted in
schools that are racially integrated consistent with state requirements. In other words,
in recent years the district has not had to change the results of the lottery assignments
based on any student’s race. In this respect, as in others, the magnet system has been a
success. It is worth noting that transportation expenses related to Montclair’s magnet
system represent less than 1% of the school district’s annual budget.
In 2004, the Montclair Public School district was named one of the top 6 Magnet
Districts in the nation by the U.S. Department of Education. In recent years, the
district has also been the recipient of numerous other awards, including a silver rating
by Quality New Jersey (New Jersey Governor’s Award) in 2005 and a bronze rating in
both 2001 and 2002. Montclair schools were also among the first in the nation to
receive Blue Ribbon School designation by the U.S. Department of Education in the
early 1990’s. Post-high school outcomes are excellent with over 90% of the district’s
high school graduatesgoing on to college and a significant number matriculating at Ivy
League and other highly selective schools.
The school district’s educational outcomes and many national and statewide awards pay
tribute to its educational efficacy. Many Montclair educators believe that the district’s
commitment to equal access to educational resources and to racial and economic
diversity is an integral part of its overall success.
Moving Forward
The Superintendent of Schools, Board of Education and legal counsel for the district
will be working actively with the New Jersey State Department of Education to
determine how the Supreme Court decision affects our community. We will do
everything we can to maintain a racially and economically diverse school system that is
of excellent educational quality — goals we believe to be complementary.
164
Suggested study group questions
1. After reading the introductory documents on school choice, what is your view on the
importance of parents’ having a choice of schools to which to send their children?
2. Several studies in the casebook suggest that parents may not make their choice of
school based on objective information about its “quality”—i.e., its comparative position
relative to other schools based on student performance results—but rather on other more
subjective bases. Is this a problem that should be addressed in a system of school choice?
3. In the past, Montclair regularly took students’ race and ethnicity into account as they
placed them in magnet schools. In 2007 the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Parents
Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board
of Education that school districts could not take students’ race and ethnicity into account in
their attempt to achieve racial balance in their schools. However, “Justice Kennedy
suggested several race-neutral alternatives that would pass constitutional muster, such as
‘strategic site selection of new schools; drawing attendance zones with general recognition
of the demographics of neighborhoods; [and,] allocating resources for special programs...’
Any of the methods for achieving diversity mentioned by Justice Kennedy would be race-
conscious without being racially discriminating, thereby passing strict scrutiny and
achieving the same stated goals as in these subject plans.” (Document #..., p… above)
As Montclair’s superintendent, how would you go about modifying the student placement
system in order to bring it into accord with the Supreme Court ruling while, at the same
time, attempting to achieve some degree of racial balancing in Montclair’s schools?
Last year’s clarifying questions

1. How much deliberate racial balancing is done currently in Montclair? Although the
casebook states that 95% of the time the parents get their first choice, how often does race
come into play? Is Montclair currently aggressive in marketing different schools to
different neighborhoods to maintain a desired balance? (3) Race was a tie-breaker in placement
decisions in Montclair up through the current school year. The degree to which it came into play
depended on parent choices, which varied from year to year. The district resists using neighborhoods in
school admission decisions, presumably because their use would move back in the direction of
neighborhood schools. They are considering using wards or zones based on racial, ethnic and
socioeconomic residence patterns. They are not, at this point, considering aggressive marketing of
specific schools which strikes me as undermining the idea of parent choice.
2. Do you have any information as to how Watchung and Renaissance became
disproportionately white compared to the other schools listed? Have there been efforts to
achieve a better racial balance in the school? (3) Frank Alvarez, the Montclair superintendent,
says that it could be because of the themes of the two schools and parent choices around those themes.
Watchung is a science and technology magnet elementary school. Renaissance Middle School features
“rigorous instruction, longer school days, innovative field trips and an extensive community-service
program” and has billed itself as comparable to an independent school in its approach to teaching and
165
learning. He added that they find that often parent choice is more closely linked to school location,
opening time and bus schedules than it is to magnet themes.
3. What is the DLC (Exhibit 3)? The rest of the casebook seems to talk about 7
elementary schools, but there are 8 listed in that table. (4) “The Developmental Learning
117
Center (DLC) is a group of special education classes for children ages three to five.” As you will
recall, every district is required to provide these services under IDEA.
4. We had trouble answering the writing prompt without more data about the
socioeconomic status of Montclair’s residents. The casebook provides a map
showing the distribution of household incomes, but more measures than income
factor into SES, such as level of parents’ education, single-parent household,
language spoken at home among others. (2) Much of that information is mapped at the U.S.
Census Bureau site where I found the map of income distribution in Montclair.
(http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_event=ChangeGeoContext&geo_id=06000US3
401347500&_geoContext=&_street=&_county=montclair&_cityTown=montclair&_state=0400
0US34&_zip=&_lang=en&_sse=on&ActiveGeoDiv=&_useEV=&pctxt=fph&pgsl=010&_sub
menuId=factsheet_1&ds_name=DEC_2000_SAFF&_ci_nbr=null&qr_name=null&reg=null%3
Anull&_keyword=&_industry=). More to the point, if you are interested in using SES as a means
of selecting students for admission to magnet school, are the questions you would include on a parent
application form that would provide you the information you need.
5. What level of racial integration was required in New Jersey schools prior to the
supreme court ruling? (1) Unlike Connecticut, New Jersey has had no racial balancing regulations
on the books.
6. Has anything been done since the supreme-court ruling? (1) My note on p. 144 of the
casebook gives a pretty complete answer to that question: “Through the opening of school year 2007-
08 race and ethnicity were used as factors in the student placement system in Montclair. As a result
of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the cases of Parents Involved in Community Schools
(PICS) v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education,
race can no longer figure in the placement process. The district plans to continue to place siblings
together in schools, to place English-language learners in settings where programs are available to meet
their needs and will use some surrogate for race. Among the surrogates under consideration are socio-
economic status, the four “wards” into which the town is divided, or the creation of new school
enrollment “zones.”
7. What percentages of students attend private schools in Montclair and the surrounding
communities? (4) The statewide figure is 13.7%. Frank Alvarez estimates that Montclair is very
close to that figure. Nationwide the figure is 11.6%.
8. Why was the postscript included? Will Montclair benefit from changes in funding? (4)
Montclair will benefit slightly from the change in the state funding system. Total state aid will
increase by a half-billion dollars and every district is guaranteed at least a 2% increase in state aid for
the next three years. In Montclair, this will amount to an increase in state aid of $187,991 for
school year 2008-09. Details of the new funding system (probably more details than you really
117
http://www.montclair.k12.nj.us/schools/dlc/index.cfm
166
want) are available at http://www.nj.gov/education/sff/reports/AllChildrenAllCommunities.pdf (I

also included the article because we looked at the “Abbott district” funding system last semester in the
Newark case study and I thought an update was in order.)
9. Is there a transitional system in place to ease the burden on property-tax payers in local
communities? (4) New Jersey ranks first in the nation in median property tax and first in the
nation in property tax as a percent of annual income.118 The state has put in place property tax relief
provisions, but they apply only to seniors and for those with low incomes.119
10. In Rossell’s article (page 68 of the casebook) he suggests using the race of
administrators and teachers strategically to attract parents to a school. Is this process of
using racial hiring legal? (3) Rossell is talking about placement, not hiring. Nevertheless, I would
suspect that a teacher or principal denied a placement because of race could at the least grieve the
placement through the teacher’s union or, perhaps, litigate on the basis of racial discrimination.
11. We (the royal we) vaguely remember learning about Caroline Hoxby’s “gold
standard” last semester. Teske and Schneider invoke it quite a bit but never
explain exactly what it is. What is it? Does it have any relation to the Golden
Rule program Teske and Schneider reference in the same document in the casebook? (2)
Teske and Schneider describe Hoxby’s “gold standard” as applied to research on school choice as
involving “a randomly drawn control group, detailed baseline data on not just demographic
characteristics, but on the behaviors of parents and students before receiving the opportunity to choose,
longitudinal assessment, and data on attrition.” Her 2000 paper is actually a commentary on papers
delivered at a conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School on charters, vouchers and school choice. I am
unable to determine whether it is included in the published version of the proceedings of the
120
conference. The Golden Rule program referred to by Teske and Schneider is a private voucher
program in Indianapolis. One could, presumably, apply Hoxby’s “gold standard” in evaluating
Indianapolis’ Golden Rule voucher plan.
12. Can you please give us some sense of the political leanings of the researchers whose
studies we read (and whose studies were cited in the studies we read) in the casebook? We
don’t expect you to Google all 436 of them [Thanks a lot!], but it would help to have
some context in understanding whether researchers tend to produce studies that simply
confirm their worldviews and preconceived opinions on various aspects of school choice.
(2) Of course I can’t provide you with information on the “political leanings” of the researchers in
the casebook. One can (imperfectly) infer political leanings from organizational affiliations. They are
as follows for the authors in this casebook:
Rolf Blank Director of Education Indicators, Council of Chief State School Officers
Bruce Fuller Professor of Education and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley
118
Connecticut ranks third and fourth respectively. Louisiana ranks 50th in both categories. Information
available at
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/PropertyTaxesWhereDoesYourStateRank.aspx
119
Details of the tax relief programs are available at
http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/index.html?lpt/localtax.htm~mainFrame
120
Paul E. Peterson and David E. Campbell, Charters, Vouchers and Public Education (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution, 2001)
167
Richard Elmore Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
Roger E. Levine Senior Researcher, American Institutes for Research121
Gary Orfield Professor of Education, Law, Political Science And Urban Planning at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and head of the Civil Rights Project,
formerly based at Harvard.
Christine Rossell Professor of Political Science, Boston University. She served as Co-Chair of
“English for the Children,” (Question 2) Campaign, Massachusetts
Mark Schneider Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at SUNY Stony
Brook. He is currently on leave, serving as Commissioner of the National
Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education
Laurie Steel Principal Research Scientist, American Institutes for Research (see note 5
above)
Paul Teske Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Management at SUNY-
Stony Brook.
13 Do other countries have magnet schools, if so, how do they work? (1) Wikipedia says
that “[t]he term magnet school is mostly associated with the United States, although other countries
have similar types of schools (such as specialist schools in the United Kingdom).” There is an article
on the UK specialist schools on Wikipedia.
121
Which describes itself on its Web site as follows: “We conduct our work within a culture and philosophy
of strict independence, objectivity, and non-partisanship, as we tackle society’s most important issues.”
(http://www.air.org/overview/default.aspx)
168

Yale - 2009 Fall - Readings - Public Schools Policy - Case I Montclair

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Case I: School choice: Magnet schools in Montclair, New

John Bryan Starr

Document #1: Albert O. Hirschmann, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses 7

Document #2: Bruce Fuller, Richard F. Elmore, and Gary Orfield, 27

Document #4: Christine H. Rossell, “What is attractive about magnet 67

Background information on Montclair and its public schools 95

Map #1: Distribution of African American residents in Montclair 96

Map #2: Distribution of income in Montclair 97

Exhibit #1: School system statistics 100

Exhibit #2: Montclair School Governance 101

Map #3: Location of Montclair public schools 102

Exhibit #3: 2006 Racial distribution by School in Montclair 102

Exhibit #4: Timeline of events in the establishment of magnet 103

Document #8: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 138

Document #10: Montclair Public Schools, Information on the Montclair 149

Document #11: Sonya D. Jones and Erin N. Ramsey, “Rejoinder— 156

Document #12: “Montclair Public Schools React to Supreme Court 162

Suggested Study Group Questions 165

Last year’s clarifying questions 165

Because my experience with public policy is primarily in the arena of policy-making

(1) What, specifically, is the problem with which we intend to deal?

(2) What are the alternative solutions to the problem?

(5) What are the trade-offs involved in our alternative solutions?

Introduction: Enter “Exit” and “Voice”

How the Exit Option Works

Competition as Collusive Behavior

Voice as a Residual of Exit

We return to the simple relationship between deterioration of a product and declining

Similarly, voice is in a much more commanding position in less developed countries

Voice as an Alternative to Exit

The Activation of Voice as a Function of Loyalty

When is loyalty functional?

The loyalist’s threat of exit

The Broad Appeal Of School Choice

An overwhelming majority of Americans support the idea of school choice, according to

Why Has School Choice Moved To The Center Of Policy Debates?

The Civil Rights Movement

pursuing the public interest in desegregation while maximizing responsiveness to parents’

The Fading American Dream

The Impact of Cultural Pluralism

Mobilizing Political Will

Community action strategies—building public remedies from the ethnic neighborhood’s

Contemporary family-choice remedies have undoubtedly succeeded in mobilizing wider

Claims of School Choice Proponents

Emerging Evidence: A Story of Cultural and Political Logics

The Cultural Logic of Families.

Thus we cannot see inner-city or middle-class family cultures as uniform or unchanging.

The Political Rationality of School Institutions.

The Limits Of Empirical Evidence

Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Katz, M. (1989). The undeserving poor. New York: Basic Books.

These forms of choice vary on important characteristics.34 Magnet schools,

types of choice—such as magnet schools, interdistrict choice, charter schools, and

CHOICE AND THE PARENTAL DECISIONMAKING MODEL

Choice and Parental Preferences

As noted above, one common form of choice is option-demand, in which alternative

program closer to parental educational philosophy, greater opportunity for

In the Cleveland voucher program, which is limited to low-income parents, Greene,

Nevertheless, in terms of behavior, higher-SES parents and white parents appear

choice systems therefore could exacerbate stratification or segregation because

Do Parents Gather Accurate and Useful Information?

Some evidence indicates that incentives provided by school choice affect