For the last 10 years, polling data have recorded a consistent decline in the American citizen's support for public education. While public schools experienced an 8 percent decline in enrollment between 1968 and 1978, private school enrollment grew by 12 percent. The decline in quality of public education over the last 50 years appears strongly related to increasing pressures toward centralization and a steady increase in government control. Centralization and state control have resulted in withdrawn parental authority and decreased public school diversity. Public school improvement now depends on the creation of policy options for competitive public school systems that would restore the full participation of individual citizens to educational policy-making. Such participation does not necessarily mean a decentralized system, but one based on foundations of choice, opportunity, and community. These moral principles would be served at the state level by guaranteeing, for example, the rights of all students to attend any public school in their state and of all citizens to form their own school systems. Federal policy should demonstrate remewed support for individuals rather than institutions, through such policies as voucherizing Title 1 funds to maximize the choices available to disadvantaged students to obtain remedial work and compensating schools on the basis of performance criteria. (JBM)