ABSTRACT
While during the 1980s the professional leadership of American secondary public education was losing its bearings, parents and politicians in cities and suburbs turned to the school-choice movement for relief. School choice, as Paul Peterson has pointed out, had begun in the 1950s, slowly expanded in the following decades, and emerged as a politically potent movement in the 1990s in the “segregated, bureaucratized, expensive, ineffectual central-city schools.”1 In these schools the concept of comprehensiveness had become a mockery and a farce because it was the comprehensiveness of the ghetto of low-income, disadvantaged, and mainly minority students. School choice had initially been employed by southern segregationist and northern well-to-do parents to pull their students out of integrated schools and schools with low academic standards. In the inner cities, it had by the 1990s become a preferred rescue operation for poverty-stricken and minority families. In Milwaukee, one of the centers of this movement, parental approval stressed the disciplined learning environment choice schools provided.2 It made little difference whether choice schools were privately sponsored or were parts of the public school system. Their small size alone made them contrast favorably with the comprehensive schools. Demanded by parents and pushed through by politicians, choice schools torpedoed any hope public school people might have had to keep reform efforts under their undisputed supervision.
