Choice's Tough Road: The obstacles to reform - school choice

National Review, Sept 11, 2000 by John J. Miller

Michigan's approach also embodies the school-choice movement's latest thinking about how to win politically. It doesn't offer private-school tuition aid to every child in the state. Instead, it promises vouchers worth up to $3,100-half of Michigan's per-student public-school expenditures-to kids in districts with less than a two-thirds graduation rate. Surveys show that parents are generally satisfied with the public schools their own kids attend; the education crisis, they believe, affects other people's children. This attitude is especially true among suburban voters. So instead of uprooting the way a whole state goes about educating its kids, the Michigan initiative identifies specific problem areas and works to fix them. That's the strategy Jeb Bush used with success in Florida; means testing is also a key element of the country's two other large school-choice programs, in Cleveland and Milwaukee, as well as the George W. Bush agenda. California: Winning by losing?

California's Proposition 38 rejects this tack. It's much more ambitious, offering a voucher worth about $4,000 to every child in the state, even those currently enrolled in private school, no matter what their parents' income. This is pure Milton Friedman, but also, perhaps, a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Proposition 38's hopes already look dim; an August poll by the Public Policy Institute of California gave it the slimmest of leads, 45 percent to 44 percent. Such a lousy showing three months before balloting typically is fatal for initiatives, whose popularity tends to erode as the election nears. What's more, Proposition 38 has alienated people who ought to form its core constituency. John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, professors of law at the University of California at Berkeley and pioneering liberal supporters of school choice, branded it "morally wrong" because it doesn't target poor families. It's also showing the same weaknesses that doomed its similarly sweeping predecessor, Proposition 174, in 1993: Non-Hispanic whites tend to oppose it, as do voters with higher incomes. The opposition, meanwhile, is repeating the strategy it mounted seven years ago: questioning the proposal's impact on the state budget, suggesting it will deflate property values dependent on current school-district boundary lines, and warning Christian schools about the dangers of accepting Caesar's money.

At least Proposition 38 will have real financial muscle behind it. Its author, Tim Draper-a Silicon Valley venture capitalist best known for an early investment in Hotmail-has pledged to pour $20 million into the campaign. That may not be enough, but at least the teacher unions won't outspend Draper by a factor of ten, as they were able to do against Proposition 174 (which lost by a two-to-one margin). The bad news for school-choice supporters, however, is that the measure may get drubbed anyway-and this time they won't be able to explain the loss by pointing to their puny bank account. Also, if Republicans have a worse-than-expected year in California races, some party leaders might blame school choice for poisoning the well-and guarantee that it's another seven years, at least, before such a proposal rears its head again in the state.