Learning opportunities - school choice - includes related article

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by David Boaz

THE 1993 defeat for school choice in California seems to have spooked choice supporters and set them to thinking about alternative strategies. Only in Arkansas and Oregon were choice initiatives circulated in 1994, and both of those drives failed. Many activists have decided the voters aren't ready for choice, so it might be more effective to seek change through the legislative process or the courts.

For supporters of real choice, there are problems with both legislation and litigation. The biggest danger of school vouchers is that they will be used to regulate, control, and eventually destroy private schools. The experience with government aid to colleges, which are now subject to a plethora of rules and regulations, makes it hard to ignore that concern. The authors of California's Proposition 174, the most carefully crafted choice initiative yet, tried to avoid the problem by providing that no new regulation of private schools could be imposed without a three-fourths vote of the state legislature or, in the case of city or county regulation, a two-thirds vote of the relevant governmental body and a nearly unobtainable majority vote of the voters in that jurisdiction. It is impossible to imagine a state legislature building such protections--against itself--into choice legislation.

As for litigation, the Institute for Justice lawsuits against the Chicago and Los Angeles school systems, which argue that the promise of "equal educational opportunity" requires school vouchers, are a noble attempt to put public education on trial. But a victory--a court-ordered voucher plan--would surely constitute appalling overreaching by the courts--"right-wing Warrenism," in the words of former Bush administration speech writer Daniel McGroarty.

Choice advocates should not give up the initiative effort. Many past initiatives--notably Proposition 13, the Jarvis--Gann tax-cut proposal--failed many times before finally amassing a majority. And the campaigns to pass an initiative are an important way of educating the public about the voucher idea.

One lesson drawn by many choice advocates from the California experience was summed up by The Economist: "Proposition 174 might well have passed if it had simply contained provisions requiring schools that received voucher money to meet some basic standards set by the authorities." Such provisions would make a choice plan a Trojan horse, concealing a regulatory monster inside an education plan. And the initiative probably still would have failed if it had included such provisions, given the lack of genuine public understanding and the massive spending by opponents of choice. Not only did the California Teachers Association and its allies spend some $16 million to defeat Proposition 174, but the anti-174 spots were virtually the only political ads on television in a special off-year election. The ads would not have had such an impact had they been swallowed up by commercials for gubernatorial, senatorial, congressional, and legislative candidates (as they would be in 1994 or 1996).

The best approach for choice advocates now is to try to place initiatives on as many state ballots as possible in 1996 (23 states allow voter initiatives). Such initiatives are part of the process of developing public support, and a large number of initiatives would force the opponents of choice to spread their resources thin. Remember, those who man the Berlin Wall keeping students inside the state monopoly system must defeat choice everywhere. Those seeking to liberate children and families need only one victory to show the rest of the country the superiority of markets over monopoly.

Choice advocates need to gain a broader base of support as they work to qualify initiatives for the ballot. Previous initiatives have generally been developed by small groups of conservative or libertarian ideologues. Those groups must bring in the support of business, minority voters, elected officials (in California the opposition of the Republican governor was an obvious failure of the choice campaign), and suburban voters.

It will not be easy to find a specific choice proposal that appeals to all those groups. Thus choice advocates should adopt a conscious strategy of designing different proposals for the ballots of different states. Along with expanded polling and focus-group efforts, that will help us determine just what kind of plan can garner majority support. The objections that have been raised in previous choice campaigns can be answered in various ways.

Suburban voters are not persuaded that their school systems need shaking up. They do--those schools are good only compared with other monopoly American systems--but that realization can wait for another day. Meanwhile, suburbanites fear that the schools they have struggled to pay for with big mortgages and high property taxes will be destroyed by an influx of poorly educated, undisciplined students from inner cities. Few people articulate this concern; a notable exception is syndicated columnist Samuel Francis of the Washington Times, who put the argument in its sharpest form: "Maybe the suburbanites know that once |choice' passes into law, the private suburban schools they've worked hard to choose won't be worth choosing as minorities move in." Some will suspect racism here. But it is understandable that suburbanites would object to bureaucrats in a distant state capital forcing them to accept an infusion of disruptive students, whatever their race, in their schools.