Transcript
PAUL T. HILL: This was a good time to take a look at choice. There's a great deal of new research in the last 10 years, and though you've heard the headlines about it, where people are still contending over whether choice helped this child or did good in that area, beneath those generalizations, there's a lot of information about how choice works and when it doesn't work, and we've used that quite well I think.
The second point that makes this timely is evolution of law and policy. Certainly the Zellman case on the Supreme Court made choice a more live issue and opened up new possibilities of how it could be done, and No Child Left Behind, along with state standards-based reform laws, in many cases, required districts to create options for parents, especially parents in low-performing schools.
The point is that we, and the funders, thought that choice is here, like it or not. I live in a city, Seattle, that may be extreme in this respect, but I don't think so. In the last 30 years, the school population of the central city district has declined from 109,000 to 47,000. It has become one of the few cities in the country with the fastest-growing and largest private school sector, and now every child in Seattle is in a school chosen by the parents, whether it was the first choice or the tenth choice, nevertheless it's impossible to go to school in Seattle without choosing.
And that is probably an extreme case, but it's happening in a lot of places, with the growth of charter schools, with the growth of district-run choices and the like. And because of that, because of all of these things, we think that communities, especially big-city communities, face a crossroads whether to let choice happen willy-nilly or to be thoughtful about it to make sure that we get the best out of it. And it was on that focus that the Commission got to work.
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