Public-school perversity - Wisconsin plan to give educational vouchers to poor families

National Review, July 9, 1990

Public-School Perversity

IT IS NOT the usual thing for a state superintendent of schools to hold a news conference begging someone to sue him. But Wisconsin's Herbert Grover is in an unusual position. The state legislature has passed, with Governor Tommy Thompson's strong support, a law that gives poor parents in Milwaukee a say in who educates their children. Mr. Grover dislikes the law intensely and wants someone to get an injunction that prevents him from carrying it out. Ever ready to defend the educational status quo, the teachers' unions, plus old civil-rights groups such as the NAACP, have gone to court to have the law declared unconstitutional.

On the other side are poor parents and community and religious leaders, led by black State Representative Annette (Polly) Williams. Mr. Williams is credited with creating the modest but innovative plan for educational choice. The plan would give one thousand (out of about one hundred thousand) Milwaukee public-school students $2,500 vouchers to go to any "private and nonsectarian" school that will have them. The plan is limited to families that earn no more than 175 per cent of the federal poverty level ($22,236 for a family of four), and to students who are currently in the public-school system. The children involved must also meet strict achievement standards if they are to continue to qualify for the funds. a number of private schools have declared their readiness to participate in the program. The Milwaukee plan is far short of a comprehensive voucher system, but the educational establishment knows a camel's nose when it sees one. A story in the Milwaukee Journal ends with the laconic observation, "State teachers' union have long opposed choice plans because they see it as a threat to public-school funding and, in turn, to their jobs."

In reacting against educational reform, the unions argue that some teachers in private schools are not even certified. (How dare they teach without a license.) They point out that some schools do not have programs for children with "special" problems. (Assuming there is a demonstrated connection between such programs and the addressing of those problems.) They claim private schools may promote children automatically in order to stay in the program. (Assuming that poor parents don't know or don't care whether their children are learning.) The protestations, in sum, are perversely procedural and self-protective.

The deeper perversity, however, is in the unions' claim that the plan violates Wisconsin's Public Purpose Doctrine. The constitutional tenet holds that public funds may be expended only for public purposes. The unions and the old civil-rights syndicate take the position that "public" means "governmental." It follows that only government schools are public schools. Fatal to the establishment's monopoly on government funding is the insight that, in a free society, public purposes are advanced in myriad ways. Indeed, in a society more free than ours at present, education would typically be under nongovernmental auspices. Unless of course parents, in the absence of a financial incentive to do so, would send their children to government schools. Given the performance of those schools, especially in our urban areas, that seems highly improbable.

The nation has a stake in the Milwaukee plan for educational choice. If it happens there, it can happen elsewhere. The Milwaukee plan isn't what it should be, but it's better than what is. We wish the reformers well. The poor deserve a break from the failed tutelage of a self-serving system that relies on legal coercion when it has lost public confidence. By its own implicit admission, it has lost public confidence. Otherwise it would not fear the idea that people should have a choice.