A Gauge of Distress with Public Schools

By Joseph A. Califano Jr.

I HAVE WITNESSED decades of an education debate in which warring statistics and clashing studies often serve more to obscure than to illuminate. But on April 21, something extraordinary happened. A new verdict rocked the educational establishment. It was issued not by a government agency, a think tank or a court of law, but by parents of 1.25 million low-income children who applied to the Children’s Scholarship Fund for the chance to send their children to the public, private or parochial school of their choice.

I joined the fund’s board because I knew that every one of the 40,000 partial, K-8 grade scholarships the fund offered would make a difference in the lives of young children. But in offering this opportunity, we have uncovered an alarming level of distress among low-income parents and a demand for a decent education for their children. Consider this wake-up call:

— Scholarship applicants came from all 50 states and from 22,000 communities representing 90 percent of all counties.

— While scholarships were offered nationally, in many urban school districts a quarter to more than a third of the eligible children applied: 33 percent in Washington; 26 percent in Atlanta; nearly 20 percent in Los Angeles. Now that’s demand.

— Parents were so eager to secure a better choice for their children that they were asking to pay $1,000 a year on average to supplement the four-year scholarship.

These parents are sending a powerful message. They want out of schools that cannot protect their children’s safety, let alone teach them. Schools like those in Washington, D.C., where the financial control board concluded that the longer students stay in school, the “less likely they are to succeed educationally.”

This tidal wave of applications from parents desperate to give their children an opportunity to receive a quality education must serve as a wake-up call. The ideal of equality of opportunity in this country is predicated on a system of education that puts all children at the same starting line. Today the realities of public education have become dangerously alienated from this ideal. By quarantining poor, mostly minority children in schools affluent families would never tolerate, we do not preserve the institution of public education; we dishonor its guiding ideal.

Philanthropists, like this fund’s founder Ted Forstmann, will undoubtedly continue to do all they can to help. But if more than another 40,000, more than even 1.25 million children are to be helped, we cannot rely on the private sector. Ultimately the public school system must change. But the fund, by expanding education options can help children out of bad situations and can prompt the system, through competition, to start making overdue repairs.

Joseph A Califano is president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. He was the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1977 to 1979.