School choice without lobbies

Can a single state bring off a reform that sways a nation, even in an era of extraordinarily tenacious lobbying by entrenched interests?

It's tough. But it can happen. In St. Paul last month, supporters gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of just such a breakthrough — America's first program to let impatient juniors and seniors skip a beat in regular high-school curriculums and take courses in state colleges and universities, earning credits both toward their high-school diplomas and college degrees.

Called Postsecondary Enrollment Options (PSEO), the program was in fact the first statewide school-choice legislation in America. It was followed — Minnesota again leading the nation — by laws letting parents and students (instead of school bureaucracies) select which public schools the students should attend, even across school district lines.

Impatient with that reform, Minnesota led once more with America's first public charter schools. In each case, reformers associated with the Twin Cities Citizens League and major business interests supported bipartisan alliances of legislators to take the next steps.

Invariably, the "education establishment" of politically potent teacher unions, school boards and principals objected strenuously and fought back hard.

Minnesota's PSEO law was especially galling to the education lobby because it directed that money would "go with the students" — from the high school where they were omitting classes to the college where they picked courses. A monopoly was threatened: suddenly schools would have to compete for their dollars.

Just after Democratic Gov. Rudy Perpich, the lead advocate for the legislation, signed the bill into law, a lobbyist for the Minnesota School Boards Association assailed it as "the most devastating piece of legislation in the past 20 or 30 years."

Twenty years later, modeled largely on Minnesota, 18 states have comprehensive programs allowing high-school juniors and seniors to apply to take courses in state colleges and universities at minimal or no cost, the course credits honored at both the high schools and colleges.

One study estimates up to 30 percent of U.S. high school juniors and seniors, under varieties of new state programs, take at least one college course before graduation.

In Minnesota, 110,000 young people have taken advantage of the program since its inception. And the results have been nothing less than stellar, asserts Joe Nathan, now senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a member of the support team when the legislation first passed in 1985.

Polling, Nathan reports, shows 97 percent of the young people who took advantage of PSEO report they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with it. They cited learning more than their high schools could offer, being challenged more than in high school, feeling better-prepared academically for college, saving money they'd have to expend later in full college tuition fees, and saving time by getting high-school and college credit simultaneously.

Is there a message here for an America where alarmingly high numbers of students fail to go beyond high school, or if they enter college, need remedial classes and too often drop out?

Yes, asserts Nathan, PSEO is proving it can both motivate and prepare young people for college success. But survey data, he warns, show PSEO is working better for girls (67 percent of participants) than boys, and has notably weak black, American Indian, Hispanic and low-income group enrollment. The underrepresentation, he says, is "disturbing," suggesting the program needs much higher visibility.

The issue is hardly unique to Minnesota: a deep information/motivation gap is holding back millions of young Americans from college and lifetime opportunities across 50 states. Online information systems and personal, trustable counseling, may be a first key to progress.

But new challenges shouldn't detract from the PSEO's smashing victory over its early opponents. In 1985, the education lobby bloodied the program so badly a statewide survey showed the public opposed it, 60 percent to 33 percent. Today's figure: 82 percent to 11 percent in favor. The school-choice programs that built on it have soared in popularity.

The moral: Big civic victories can be won. But not without policy entrepreneurship and really tough legislative battles.

Neal Peirce's column appears alternate Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com