People talking about school choice for parents often wind up in a divisive debate over who will benefit, private schools or public schools.

But when a group of athletes, researchers and other civic leaders visited New York City schools recently, we discovered that this harsh choice between helping some people and hurting others may not be necessary. Does parental choice help government schools, or private ones? The correct answer, as our "Opportunity: Choice" group found, may be, "Yes, it helps both."

The very term school choice nowadays can mean different things to different people. The ultimate example is seen in Milwaukee, where parents can now use the public funding dedicated to their child's education for either the public or private school of their choice. In some cases, as in Harlem's District Flour, it simply means that parents can choose freely between different public schools, with less of the bother than usual if they want to have their child attend one other than the official school closest to them. In others, these choices are facilitated by the presence of a large number of charter schools, which enjoy public funding but operate without many of the heavy regulations that apply to other government funded schools. In still other areas, including New York and other major cities today, a large number of students can attend private schools with significant help from privately financed scholarships.

It's becoming pretty obvious that choice programs help the students that get involved in them. A study of the privately funded school-voucher program in New York City by Harvard University's education department found that after only one year, students who received a scholarship scored higher in math and reading tests. Students in fourth and fifth grades showed a sizable difference. In Milwaukee, which has had school choice for a number of years, the results are even more dramatic. After three years in the choice program, the typical student participant moved up by 2.7 percent as compared to their peers in reading, and 5.0 percent in math. After four years, the differences were 5.8 percent in reading, 10.6 percent in math.

There's even better news, though: Scholarship programs which help student participants and private schools don't have to harm public school students. In fact, the evidence is that everyone benefits - as we have seen with our own eyes in recent "Opportunity: Choice" tours of private and public schools in Milwaukee, Cleveland, New York, and Washington, D.C. One school our group visited in Harlem was PS. 154, now also called the Harriet Tubman Learning Center. P.S. 154 is part of a long-standing experiment in giving parents a choice between public high schools and junior high schools in Harlem's District Four. When parents were first offered this choice, Harlem stood 32nd out of 33 school districts in student performance on standardized reading tests. By 1986, choice had helped lift Harlem up to 17th, right in the middle, and it has remained well above districts with comparable income levels and non english-speaking populations ever since.

Parents of pupils at the school told the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTl) that much of the credit goes to Harlem's public school-choice program and to the city's relatively recent expansion of private scholarship vouchers.

At nearby St. Mark's, a private grade school, one parent indicated she has one child at St. Mark's and also two children at a public schools. "They've all benefited from the scholarships that the folks are funding," she said. "It makes all the schools better, lifts up the standards and the pride, and gives us parents a reason to be involved more."

In setting up tours of school choice systems for our "Opportunity: Choice" participants, Tocqueville staff have encountered a persistent us vs. them among various factions in the education debate. Those who want school-choice options often want to know, as one such supporter put it, "why we are bothering to go to the public schools." People opposed to it frequently ask why we're so interested in private ones. Indeed, Robert Chase, the president of the National Education Association, recently wondered aloud why athletes aren't doing more to help the public schools.

The answer is that a number of us are working to encourage school choice because we believe options and competition help all schools. We're working for school choice, public and private, but the point isn't to help one system or another. We want to help the kids.

Charlie Ward is a point guard for the New York Knicks and the 1994 Heisman TrophyWinner.