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

Reason, Nov, 1993 by Tim W. Ferguson

The Prop. 174 campaign got a boost when Ken Khachigian, a veteran of successful Republican campaigns who just missed last November with Bruce Herschensohn's Senate candidacy in California, signed on as chief strategist. This reassured some skeptics that the effort would not be "amateur hour," but statewide political figures, such as Gov. Wilson, remained opposed or distant. Tom Campbell, a former GOP congressman and Herschensohn's bitter primary rival in 1992, initially endorsed the measure and then danced away from it as he campaigned for a legislative vacancy and weighed a challenge to Wilson next year. (Campbell cited new fiscal considerations stemming from a reinterpretation of when the voucher would kick in. But his switch to opposition led Milton Friedman, one of his mentors and a choice enthusiast, to divorce himself publicly from Campbell's political bid.)

What might be more surprising than the disengagement of prominent figures is the silence or even criticism from private-school groups. The California Association of Independent Schools, its tone set by the blueblood academies, opposes Prop. 174, saying it favors "choice" but not at the expense of public schools (whatever that means), and besides, the $2,600 voucher the plan entails wouldn't pay the bill at their schools and they are full anyway. The largest body of Christian schools is merely "watching" the fight, and the Catholic schools are being discreet. So, although many private schools have permitted initiative sponsors to reach parents under their auspices, they do not promise to deliver legions to the polls. Half a million youngsters attend private schools in California.

In its objections, the private-school hierarchy seems as oblivious as many others to the kind of innovative teaching situations that might be created out of sheer energy in empty offices or commercial structures once a meaningful mass-consumer market existed. Supporters of Prop. 174 argue that 70 percent of California's existing private schools charge less than the voucher amount, although most of those are run by Catholic dioceses.

Thomas Tancredo, who is about to undertake his second Colorado voucher campaign, bluntly says, "Private schools are just as afraid of competition as the public schools. That's an important thing for people doing this to realize. [Established academies] have pretty much a lock on this. They have a couple of hundred kids on a waiting list."

An easier-to-swallow protest from some private-school friends is that state regulation inevitably will follow the vouchers. Llewellyn Rockwell, head of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, used a Sunday op-ed space in the Los Angeles Times to vent this and other fears from the right, opening up a second front against the initiative. Drafters of Prop. 174 included language intended to block additional encroachment by the state, but as Rockwell drummed home, courts could use other passages to gain leverage. Still, private schools would always have the option of refusing vouchers and, presumably, whatever baggage comes with them.