"What Research Can Tell Policymakers about School Choice" by Paul Teske and Mark Schneider, in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (Fall 2001), John Wiley & Sons, 605 Third Ave., New York, N.Y. 10158.

School choice has been around in one form or another for several decades, and while Teske and Schneider do chant the old academic mantra, "more studies are needed," they say there’s enough evidence now to point toward some conclusions about the effects of choice. Most of them are pretty positive.

The two political scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook surveyed more than a hundred studies of school-choice systems, ranging from 1960s-vintage magnet schools to charter schools and different voucher schemes now being tried out on a limited scale in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other cities. Their clearest finding: Parents who are able to choose where to send their kids are much more satisfied with the schools than those who lack this option. They also tend to be more involved in their kids’ schooling.

How do kids perform in choice systems? Answers vary. Charter schools represent the nation’s biggest experiment with choice, but it’s too soon to judge results. The best studies of voucher programs— which generally allow parents the widest array of school choices to put their kids in any school, public or private—show "modest to moderate test score improvements for some, but not all, students who participate." In New York City, programs that allow students to choose to attend certain public schools within their local school district appear to have helped lift test scores of all kids, including those who did not exercise choice. Perhaps, the authors speculate, the competition for students induced all the local schools to improve. Their bottom line: "While not all of these studies conclude that choice enhances performance, it is significant to note that the best ones do, and that [we] did not find any study that documents significantly lower performance in choice schools."

What about concerns that students who enter private schools under voucher plans won’t absorb democratic values? Studies show 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."

The "most important question" about school choice is "stratification," note Teske and Schneider. There’s not much question that white, better-educated, and more affluent parents are better informed about school choices than other parents and are more likely to take advantage of chances to improve their child’s schooling. Some systems seem to promote more racial and economic separation than others: Magnet schools perform poorly in this respect, while charter schools tend to better reflect the makeup of the general population. The authors say aggressive outreach efforts aimed at poor and minority families might mitigate the problem. They also wonder if the stratification seen in some school choice systems is significantly worse than what occurs in more conventional systems. To answer such questions, of course, more studies are needed.