Getting an education - the November 1993 school-choice movement polls - includes related article - Brief Article

Reason, Nov, 1993 by Tim W. Ferguson

With a big test coming up in November, the school-choice movement is learning from its mistakes.

"Think of it as the Thirty Years' War," says Oregon's Martin Buchanan of the national fight for school choice. And there is more than a durational likeness to Europe's 17th-century sectarian conflict. The public schools are America's official religion, an obligatory presence in every burg and hamlet. Attacks on them will be repulsed with heavy casualties, as Buchanan, a Portland-based writer of computer manuals, knows. The first statewide voucher initiative he drafted lost by more than 2-to-1 at the polls in 1990, and he is fatalistic about the second try, due next year.

Fatalism is also a good attitude to have about the choice initiative on California's November 2 special-election ballot. The most prominent attempt yet to allocate tax money to households instead of school districts so that everyone can enjoy reasonable alternatives to the government's Brand X, Proposition 174 is under withering bombardment from the education establishment. Early polls were favorable, but a mid-August Field poll found the initiative opposed by a 46-36 plurality. And the history of these initiatives--indeed, of citizen-placed ballot measures generally--is that they succumb to landslides once the other side unleashes its counterattack.

The school-choice movement has never won an election. It has scored victories--the state of Wisconsin agreed to let parents in some poor parts of Milwaukee choose private schools, and variations of choice among public schools are gaining approval around the country--but never a straight-out endorsement at the polls. The only thing close to a win for private schools--a 54-percent-to-46-percent OK for textbook loans in heavily Lutheran South Dakota in 1986--is set off against 19 losses, most of them lopsided, since 1966.

Most of these were forms of "parochiaid," a stopgap for keeping strapped religious schools from folding. Some opponents of choice, still obsessing on the religious question, see the current-generation proposals in the same light. But in fact they have a far more secular origin. An amalgam of libertarians, neoconservatives, business executives--and, yes, some church-school partisans, though they've rarely been leaders--has sought to challenge the ideological and pedagogical orientations of contemporary public schools.

Intellectual and political stirrings that go back to the school-prayer decision and the fights over busing, sex education, phonics, and the "3-Rs" underlie the confrontation in California. They have been given a cutting edge by concern about guns and gangs, condoms and bilingualism, and hard-sell "political correctness" on other classroom fronts, ranging from recycling to the rainbow of diversity. Through it all, the battle for the schools and now for choice has been for the prerogatives of parents and against progressivism, credentialism, teacher unionism, administrative bloat, and, ultimately, declining academic results. The original grassroots right has been supplemented by William Bennett and Jack Kemp and some prominent fellows at the Hoover Institution, for whom a change in the centralized, bureaucratic system has both social and economic significance. They know that a victory for radical change in the nation's largest state would have stunning effect.

Even with this heady heritage, California voucher proponents have carried only a grim optimism into the fall campaign. The recent plebiscites have been so discouraging--the Oregon loss and a similar setback in Colorado in 1992--that trepidation is in order. But win or lose, the issue isn't going away, and it clearly is preoccupying the other side, the education apparatus at every level.

The education establishment has begun to make concessions, the foremost being "charter schools," or independently run campuses within a district. Choice among public schools, at least within a district, is nearly a reflexive concession. Unionized teachers may even consent to giving principals authority at ordinary schools. Like Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for president in the first half of this century, choice is losing elections but advancing an agenda.

The California fight is paradigmatic of what voucher supporters can expect. The campaign was moved up to this fall by Gov. Pete Wilson, who called a special election on ballot measures, including one he is sponsoring that would raise sales taxes to benefit local governments. The governor has no use for the California Teachers Association but, like most of his big-business backers, he considers the school-choice measure a piping hot potato, one he would probably prefer to have off the political plate before running for re-election in a year.

Architects of Prop. 174 were caught underfunded for the early election, even though they had originally sought a November 1992 ballot placement. By early August, they'd raised only $1 million of the $5 million they had projected. The teachers unions, state and national, were in a position to outspend them by several times.