I feared that, unless we took drastic action, this pattern would only continue. I considered school choice to be an innovation strong enough to change the course of what was widely recognized as an ailing system. Parents want academic excellence for their children. They also want to know that there is someone in their child s school who is accountable for achieving those high academic standards. In most cities in this nation, however, if your child is zoned into a school that is not performing well academically, and where teachers and administrators don t see themselves as being responsible for academic performance, parents have no recourse.
Parents can only send their child to that school and hope for the best.
Under a school choice plan, a parent would have options. There would be consequences for a school s poor performance. Parents could pull their children out of poorly performing schools and enroll them someplace else. Any corporation that tolerated mediocre performance among its employees, unresponsiveness to the complaints of its customers, and the promotion of a large number of failed products, would not survive in the marketplace very long. What is true of corporations should also be true of poorly performing and poorly run schools.