Policy Analysis

Some Points on Choice in Education Author(s): James S. Coleman Source: Sociology of Education, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 260-262 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2112769 Accessed: 18-03-2018 02:26 UTC

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260 EXCHANGE

Alexander W. Astin, Ph.D., is Profes- sor and Director, Higher Education Re- search Institute, University of California at Los Angeles. His main fields of interest are higher education policy, values in higher education, and the impact of the college environment on students' development. He is currently conducting a study on strategies for reforming American higher education.

Some Points on Choice in Education JAMES S. COLEMAN University of Chicago

The movement toward choice is the first step in a movement toward getting the incentives right in education- incentives for both the suppliers of educational services, that is, schools and their teachers, and for the consumers of education, that is, parents and children. The incentives for schools that a voucher system would introduce would include an interest in attracting and keeping the best students they could. The incentives for parents and students would include the ability to get into schools they find attractive and to remain in those schools. These incentives already exist, of course, but in the absence of choice by parents and schools, they can be implemented only by moving. That is, parents can implement their interests by moving to a school district or attendance zone within their financial reach that they find most attractive. Principals and teachers can implement their interests only by trying to get transferred to a school with a student body that is more to their liking. The results are unfortunate in several respects. For both the schools and the parents and child, an important incen- tive to improve is missing: The school cannot attract students by improving itself and cannot dismiss students who do not live up to its standards, and the

student and parents have no incentive to perform and behave well for the student to be in the school they aspire to. This absence of appropriate incentives on both sides of the educational process means that an important source of edu- cational improvement is missing.

A second consequence of the absence of choice in education is that there is extensive stratification of schools, but unlike the comparison used by Astin of Caltech and low-status colleges, this stratification is based entirely on income and race. For example, the incomes of parents of children at New Trier High School in a wealthy Chicago suburb differ far more from those at Chicago's inner-city Dunbar High School than do those at the most selective colleges from those at the least selective. The result of choice in elementary and secondary education, whether confined to the pub- lic sector or including the private sector through vouchers, would not be to increase stratification; it would be to replace the current stratification by in- come and race by a stratification based on students' performance and behavior. To be sure, students' performance and behavior are correlated with income and race, but they are a different basis for stratification that both changes the grounds on which the competition for schools and students takes place and reduces the stratification by income and race. To use an example introduced by Astin, the top students at the selective Bronx High School of Science in New York City (as well as the student body as a whole) are far more diverse in income and race than are the top students (or all students) at New Trier High School or any other suburban school in North Shore Chicago. (I use Chicago-area schools as an example because I am familiar with them, but nearly compara- ble stratification can be found in almost any large metropolitan area in the United States.)

It is perhaps time to be straightforward about stratification among schools more generally. Numerous scholars inveigh against choice on grounds of "inequal- ity" or "stratification," as does Astin.

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E X C H A N G E 261

But the absence of choice does not eliminate stratification. Families use whatever resources they can to get a good education for their children. If they cannot use the performance and behav- ior of their children to do so, they use money or racial exclusion. Stratification among the elementary and high schools is not absent, just because "choice" is not allowed; it is present in the extreme, and it is present in a form that deprives it of the incentives that stratification systems at their best bring about.

Astin appears to believe not only that there will be less stratification among schools under a system of assigning students to schools by their place of residence than under a system of choice, but that stratification is necessarily bad. Quite the contrary is true, as long as the stratification has the right basis. Stratifi- cation based on merit, as is partly the case for the selection of students by American colleges and universities (and was much more the case during the period of the G.I. bill, which was an extraordinarily successful postsecond- ary educational voucher) leads all to be motivated to do the best they can. It is not a bad thing, but a good thing, for the system of higher education in the United States that admission to colleges and graduate schools is selective. I can hardly believe that Astin would argue that undergraduate and graduate education in the United States would be improved if institutions at these levels of educa- tion had fixed attendance zones, as is traditional for elementary and secondary schools. Yet this is the policy he favors for lower levels of education.

It is not a bad thing, but a good thing, for most countries other than the United States, that their secondary school sys- tems are selective on the basis of merit. This form of selectivity produces not more stratified systems than that of the United States, but systems that are stratified on grounds that induce high achievement and good behavior, not on grounds that induce residential homoge-

neity and exclusivity.' These are sys- tems in which the variation in achieve- ment is not greater than that in the United States, but the average achieve- ment is greater. It may not be accidental that the United States, which has the most rigid system of assigning students to schools of all the developed countries (nearly all of which provide financial support for non-state-run schools), has the lowest levels of achievement among developed countries, as measured by standardized tests.

One may, in fact, conjecture that it is a misplaced emphasis on equality in edu- cation that is responsible for policies in American education that have led to students' poor performance. The empha- sis on equality means that the focus in education is on the bottom of the perfor- mance distribution. My general conjec- ture is this: Policies that focus on high levels of achievement and rewards for high levels reverberate downward through the system, providing an incen- tive for students at lower levels to improve. Policies that focus on the lowest levels of achievement imply that incentives for improvement among those at the lowest levels cannot arise endoge- nously from within the system, but must be introduced from the outside. Mean- while, those at higher levels of achieve- ment dangle in the wind, without being seriously challenged to improve their performance. This failure to use the natural incentives for status within a social system can result in lower achieve- ment among higher-achieving students

1 See James S. Coleman "International Comparisons of Cognitive Achievement," Phi Delta Kappan, 66 (1985), pp. 403-406, which compares variations in achievement in science in different countries. The data, taken from the first IEA study (conducted in 1970-71), show that in science, high achieve- ment growth between ages 10 and 14 is associated with high variation among stu- dents in science achievement. The presump- tion is that the same policies that produce high variation in achievement (presumably selection on merit) also produce higher mean achievement.

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262 E X C H A N G E

without much improvement at the lower levels.

Altogether, the argument against full- scale choice in education, with vouchers for attendance at public or private schools, is based on the failure to recognize two points: First, in a system of education that is currently highly stratified through selection based on money and race, the introduction of choice, which would free school atten- dance from students' place of residence, would not increase social stratification in education, but would only shift the grounds on which it takes place. Second, shifting the basis of stratification from money and race to performance and

behavior would introduce appropriate incentives, and the resources to imple- ment these incentives, for students and parents on one side, and for teachers and principals on the other. It is through such incentives that improvement in educational outcomes takes place.

James S. Coleman, Ph.D., is Profes- sor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago. His main fields of interest are educational sociology, collective de- cisions and social choice, and mathemat- ical sociology. His current work is on the social theory of the formation of norms and on the functioning of schools.

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