Gail Watson is a self-contained school reform movement, though she claims only to be a mother looking for the best education for her children.

Her son Jevonte goes to a small neighborhood elementary school in Hartford, Connecticut, where character development and values are as important as classroom learning. Another son, Dashawn, travels by bus to another town to attend a middle school (grades six through eight) for students with special needs. Her daughter Taquonda will graduate next year from a "magnet'' program at one of this city's four high (secondary) schools where students take Latin and read the Greek classics.

All are public schools. But instead of just sending her children down the street to the neighborhood schools as most parents in this aging factory town have always done, Watson has carefully selected each of them under a small but growing "school choice'' initiative.

Watson and her children are the first glimpse of an emerging concept, one where education is based on a simple idea: let parents decide.

The concept of school choice -- whereby parents may select the schools their children will attend, where they feel they will derive the most benefit -- has burst upon the national education scene.

To be sure, most children in the United States come together at the neighborhood or regional level under the "common school'' philosophy that began in New England cities such as Hartford hundreds of years ago, even before U.S. independence was declared in 1776.

(Common schools were public and theoretically open to all, yet they had a religious orientation and normally charged fees. The U.S. public school system developed in the mid-19th-century, spurred initially by educator Horace Mann in Massachusetts and later expanded to the rest of the northeastern United States and, eventually, nationwide.)

In general today, public school education is getting stronger. The achievement level for students across the country is on the rise, and indicators such as dropout rates are on the decline. Public opinion surveys often show that parents are satisfied with the quality of education at their neighborhood public school. Still, there are distinct gaps in performance between urban and suburban school districts, and between white and minority students. Those dissatisfied with their local public education are exploring school choice. Indeed, for state legislatures and local school boards, as well as for many citizens, the question of whether or not to create more choice for parents has become one of the leading education issues in the United States today.

"I just want my kids to get the best [education] they can. This is really getting them thinking,'' says Watson, who attended average public schools while growing up in Hartford. She now thinks competition and choice are the only way to revive low-performing school districts like hers, located in one of the poorest cities in the nation.

Watson discovered school choice mostly by luck, when her children attended a neighborhood school where a crusading teacher was trying to launch an alternative program that stressed values and character education as well as learning.

It has been her good fortune to be a parent at a time when school districts and states have been desperate to improve student performance and have begun experimenting with a number of dramatic ideas, such as school choice.

This strategy gives parents a true menu of options -- offering them different types of schools once open only to those wealthy enough to afford private school education. Often, this means selecting a school or specialized program built around a particular theme, such as the arts, science and technology, or character education (although character education -- the instilling of values in students as part of the school program -- has become more of a given in schools across the nation today).

At the same time, supporters of even more freedom advocate giving cash "vouchers" to parents who opt to send their children to the private school of their choice, for use in paying tuition. A handful of cities, such as Cleveland (Ohio) and Milwaukee (Wisconsin), have been flirting with this idea. Thus far, U.S. courts generally have held that the use of public funds to pay for private schools is not legal. Soon, perhaps as early as 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court -- the nation's highest judicial panel -- may consider this issue.

Meanwhile, a minuscule percentage of students -- one million out of 53 million public and private school students -- are opting out completely from traditional schools. Known as "home-schoolers,'' these students are taught at home by their parents. Although small, the number has grown substantially during the last 10 years and is yet another reflection of a growing desire for educational choice in the United States.

"Parents ought to be able to choose," argues Stephen C. Tracy, a former superintendent of a public school district and now an executive with Edison Schools, Inc., a leading for-profit company that manages public schools under contract. "Even within the establishment today, there is recognition that this demand for choice is almost undeniable." Edison, which has yet to turn a profit, will be running about 100 schools serving more than 50,000 children when the fall 2000 term begins.

"We live in a consumer society -- we are so used to having choices," Tracy adds, pointing out that people no longer accept "the notion that you have no choice when it comes to schooling. There are two essential arguments for choice. The first is that things will get better ... that competition leads to better performance. The other is that choice is about liberty.''

In the last five years, Tracy and others maintain, a "tremendous change'' has begun to seep into America's classrooms. As many as three percent of American students now have some sort of choice in their public education -- a number unheard of just 10 years ago.

The landscape is varied. In some states, like California, there can be a variety of choices for parents living in cities or suburbs. In other states, like Watson's Connecticut, the choice movement is largely confined to cities where student achievement has been the lowest -- and poverty rates are the highest.

Slowly, however, the idea that schools should offer choices -- not unlike the selections of food in supermarkets or movies at multiplex theaters -- is taking hold in a country where a free and public education is one of the most closely-held values.

Charter schools

Two of Gail Watson's children attend "charter'' schools, which receive public tax dollars but operate largely independent of local education bureaucracies. These schools, begun in Minnesota just eight years ago, have quickly become the focus of the choice movement in the United States.

By fall 2000, more than 2,000 charter schools are expected to be functioning in more than three dozen of the nation's 50 states. In some states, schools are free of long-established mandates, such as the requirement to hire certified teachers. This, in itself, is a matter of controversy and debate.

Supporters say charter schools allow innovative teachers to try new ideas, as parents select the type of school they want for their child. These institutions tend to be small, often faculty-directed and organized around a theme. Critics say the schools are rife with mismanagement, with little oversight and even less evidence that they improve student achievement over the long-term.

"More school districts are going to start charters," says Joe Nathan of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. "The public is demanding options. The charter movement says we can have higher expectations of public education."

So broad is the charter movement that it is supported by both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government (the Clinton Administration and the Congress), advocates of for-profit schools, Christian fundamentalists, and the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the two largest union representing public school teachers.

"The movement has grown from one state to 37," Nathan points out. "It is expanding and it is expanding very fast. There are hundreds of thousands of kids doing better in school than they were before,'' said Nathan, who works with charter schools across the country.

The midwestern state of Michigan could very well be the focal point of the school choice and charter schools movements. While some states have only made tentative forays into the choice movement, and have comparatively few charter schools running, Michigan has granted charters to dozens of the independently run schools, largely because of chronic low-performance in its urban schools and long-standing inequities in school funding between cities and towns. Nearly four percent of the state's students are enrolled in charter schools, many managed by for-profit firms like Edison.

"There are a lot of reasons why people are doing this,'' David Arsen, a professor at Michigan State University, suggests. "There are some charter schools that are very innovative, but that is not an apt characterization of the set of schools as a whole. It is still a heterogenous set of schools.''

Arsen's research supports the notion that parents in the worst schools want an option, even if it means depleting resources at traditional community public schools that are most in need. Charter critics have long charged that these schools merely drain away vital dollars from schools that are often trying to educate the poorest Americans coming from families with the least education.

The new charter schools are "tending to locate where the traditional public schools are more troubled," Arsen says. "They are draining funds from the public schools facing the most challenges.''

And yet, in states such as Michigan and Arizona, where charters are common, Arsen and others believe, charters have also begun to force regular schools to make some changes, lest too many families pull out.

"If you lose three or four percent of your students to choice, you are paying attention,'' Arsen says, citing growing marketing efforts such as instituting all-day kindergarten and advertising on billboards and on the radio. "There is a new ethos to be more solicitous to parents,'' he adds.

Most of the time what's different is how the schools are run -- not what is taught, according to research by Arsen and his colleagues.

"There is very little change in the instructional core,'' he said. "The innovation is coming in governance and school organization.''

Private vouchers

Although the courts have blocked most of the limited voucher programs, supporters of the idea have come up with another method to keep the idea alive: free scholarships.

Wealthy investors who eventually want to see a public voucher program have begun privately funded voucher initiatives in dozens of cities across the United States. The largest experiment to date has been in San Antonio, Texas, where a group of conservative business people raised $50 million and offered every child in one of the city's public school districts a voucher to use toward private school. Still, for nearly all of the 47 million children attending public primary and secondary schools in the United States, private school scholarships are not an option.

Nina Shokrai Rees, an education analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a free-market supporting policy research group, says school choice's strongest advocates are found among supporters of parochial school education and inner-city minorities who are seeking better schools. Opponents of vouchers include those citizens who view the taking of public money for private schools as a violation of the federal constitutional provision separating church and state. Still others argue against vouchers as something that takes money away from the neediest schools, thereby draining funds from the nation's inner cities.

Earlier this year, in a variation of the "voucher" theme, a federal (U.S. court) judge in the state of Florida halted one of the most dramatic school choice experiments. It would have allowed parents of students attending failing public schools to attend another school, public or private, at state expense. The court said public tax dollars must go to public, not private, schools.

More parents want a choice

During the 1990s, steadily rising percentages of Americans have said they favor giving parents the right to choose the school their children attend. Some districts and a few states even offer parents the right to select virtually any public school they want, provided there is classroom space.

Ted Carroll, a public school parent and former elected member of the board of education in Hartford, says he believes that giving parents the right to select from a menu of small schools is critical to the future of public education.

Carroll is now a member of the board of directors at the Breakthrough Charter School, a small publicly funded elementary school that attracts students from throughout the Hartford area, including Gail Watson's son Jevonte. It is one of the few charter schools in the city.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the parents who have their children at Breakthrough are thrilled,'' says Carroll. "They feel very engaged in the children's education process. The staff and the board of Breakthrough clearly expect that. Every staff person understands the mission. And size [of the student population] is pretty important. There is a point beyond which schools could lose the intimacy required for groups to feel like a genuine community."

Breakthrough's 150 students easily fit into the school auditorium. On Friday mornings, school director Norma Neumann-Johnson leads them through a few songs or a discussion topic. It's the sort of small-school event common at Breakthrough.

Inspired by the success of small schools in New York City's East Harlem school district, Neumann-Johnson has built an alternative school around real-world problem solving, character development and parent education programs.

"If every parent has to choose, they get on their horses and start investigating,'' she says.

Her school not only attracts motivated parents, but teachers looking for something different.

"Research shows that results occur when there is teacher commitment," Neumann-Johnson maintains. "There were 98 applications for seven teaching positions [when the school opened]. Everybody here is passionate. If you had only schools of choice you wouldn't have bad teachers.''

It's that kind of logic that supporters hope will push charter schools and school choice into even the most conservative of American communities.

"The charter movement says that we can have higher expectations of public education," says Nathan, of the University of Minnesota. "It is a very positive view of what schools can accomplish.''

Perhaps the most striking change of all is that merely being against choice is now viewed as being opposed to school reform, according to Jeanne Allen, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform.

"The concept of choice is now well-ingrained in public policy. If you are not for it you are defining yourself against it,'' she explains. "The public's appetite has been whetted.''

For Watson and her three children, the choice remains a simple one -- how to find the best public schools around.

"Charter and magnet schools are one of the best things that have come about,'' she says. "These schools have so many ways of helping kids to learn. They just didn't have this when I was in school."

----------

Rick Green is a veteran education reporter for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, and winner of the Education Writers Association grand prize for his coverage.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.