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June 2006
By David Reinhard
How long, Portland, how long? How much longer will we consign North Portland students and their parents to public schools that have systematically failed them for decades?
At the end of another school year in the Jefferson High School cluster -- at the end of yet another year where we talk, talk, talk about doing something to improve the public schools there -- the questions are worth asking yet again. Happily, they were being asked last month in a forum sponsored by the Cascade Policy Institute and the Black Alliance for Educational Options. By Portland parents who are more interested in actually educating at-risk kids than making more plans to educate at-risk kids.
About 100 people -- half of them white, half of them black -- gathered at the Emmanuel Temple in North Portland to listen to Dr. Howard Fuller, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "I've seen the virtue of giving parents choice," he told The Oregonian editorial board earlier that day.
By that he means real choice, a choice to have their children attend private schools when an inner-city's public schools aren't satisfactory. He most certainly doesn't mean educational choice programs confined to the public schools. That's the "illusion of choice."
"We ought not to have a system in America where only people with money have choices." Fuller said.
Of course, that's the system we largely have now. People with money can move their families to neighborhoods with better public schools or send their kids to private schools. Poor parents cannot. They're stuck with schools that people with money would never tolerate for their own children.
Fuller has seen what giving poor parents a "real choice" through means-tested vouchers can do. Wisconsin has had a real private-school choice program for Milwaukee since the early 1990s. In 1990, it had 350 voucher kids in seven private schools. Today, there are 15,000 in the program in 110 private schools. What has been the impact on Milwaukee public schools? The former superintendent notes that the competition forced the district to change work rules that once based teacher placement on seniority. It has also required principals to go out and sell their schools to parents.
And the program's impact on student performance? "What we haven't done yet is to turn the corner on student achievement, Fuller said, "though the trend lines are moving in the right direction."
He doesn't oversell a private school choice for inner-city kids. He says it's one option that ought to be available, and it's no substitute for adequate funding. "Clearly, we need resources, but the question is how those resources get used."
Fuller thinks the private-school choice and the competition it injects through the whole system makes for a smarter utilization of resources.
Like Portland, Milwaukee spent years -- no, decades -- crafting one super-duper well-intentioned scheme after another to improve the schools in certain tough neighborhoods. Like Portland, a new class of largely African American students would pass through the schools -- or drop out -- and nothing would change. In Milwaukee, however, African American parents and politicians grew tired of asking "how long?" Ultimately, Fuller said, there was a greater openness to private school choice among black Democrats -- an openness he sees growing across the country.
Fuller, for his part, now believes school choice is the most important civil rights issue for African Americans today. That's no small claim, considering he started as a "Black Power" advocate in the 1960s. But he didn't get there by applying a market-oriented philosophy to the problem of underperforming inner-city schools. He got there from the ground up. He witnessed firsthand the failure of earlier school reforms, with all their good intentions, bursts of civic concern and, in the end, unmet promises. "At a certain point in time," he says, "you have to say that you have to try something radically different."
Some African Americans in the Jefferson cluster are ready to try. Smith Williams is the father of five and a Black Alliance for Educational Options member here. His kids have attended both public and private schools and even been home-schooled. As Williams told The Oregonian editorial board, "We know there are desperate parents out there."
The above appeared in the June 4, 2025 Oregonian
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