Choice and Competition: Tonics for the U.S. Public-School System

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 15, 1999 | by Adam Meyerson

During the next two years, Congress will reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, a $13 billion federal program that encompasses most federal legislation affecting K-12 education. At the heart of ESEA is the infamous Title I program Aid to the Poor. This $8 billion annual disaster has spent more than $100 billion since its inception in 1965. Its catastrophic result: 57 percent of central-city fourth-graders in public schools cannot read.

Education historically and rightfully has been a state and local responsibility. Title I reauthorization offers an excellent opportunity to transfer resources and responsibility back to states and to show how vouchers and other choice models would improve education for poor children. Reauthorization also gives federal legislators an extraordinary opportunity to focus national attention on the failures of inner-city education. Indeed, congressional hearings and surrounding media events could be modeled on Ronald Reagan's ideological offensive against the Kremlin.

Reagan pursued successful military, economic and political strategies against the Soviet Union. But perhaps his most important contribution to Cold War victory was his ideological strategy to delegitimize communism -- to make Soviet leaders so embarrassed, so ashamed of themselves, that they no longer were willing to kill to protect their own power. This is why the "Evil Empire" speech was so significant: Its biggest impact was on Kremlin leaders, who knew in their hearts Reagan was right. A daffy barrage of public diplomacy through Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and other avenues drove the message home.

By the mid-1980s, top Soviet officials were beginning to make public apologies for the crimes of their regime. In 1987, Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. In 1988, he took his message of freedom to the very bosom of the enemy -- beneath Lenin's statue at Moscow State University. Under Reagan's withering moral pressure, the nomenklatura lost so much confidence in itself that in just a few years it voluntarily gave up power and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

The public-education establishment today is where the Soviet Union was in 1987. It looks all-powerful. It rules by fear and intimidation (though, of course, it does not commit the physical atrocities of the Kremlin). But it is an ideological house of cards that will collapse if conservatives go on a sustained moral offensive and highlight its failure to teach basic skills to poor children. In so doing, conservatives can deny defenders of the education monopoly all moral legitimacy -- in their own minds.

Already, the education establishment is starting to confess its crimes. The most dramatic example was the June 1998 Wall Street Journal article by Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teachers College, saying maybe America should try choice for the poorest urban students.

Conservatives can accelerate the momentum by making common cause with education's dissidents. Black America, the very community the monopolists purport to represent, is beginning to rise up in righteous anger against the failure of public schools. The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, the Democratic former congressman, is emerging as the Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn of American education, the prophetic voice willing to decry inner-city schools as the gulags they've become.

Reagan offered his hand of friendship to the Russian people even as he denounced the evils of communism. He made it clear he was pro-freedom, not anti-Russian. So, too, should conservatives demonstrate they are friends of teachers and principals, friends of public schools. It is precisely because they care about public schools so deeply that conservatives denounce the "evil empire" of monopoly and bureaucracy, of low standards and expectations.

Conservatives should make it clear that vouchers are not the cure-all for the crisis in education. Genuine choice and competition require public schools to be reformed as well. They must be given the combination of freedom and accountability that makes private and charter schools so effective. Education reform benefits all schools: public, private and parochial.

With all its might, the education establishment is fighting both choice and competition, as well as the reforms that would save public schools. But they know they are wrong. They know they are failing America's children, especially our poor children. Now is the time to nourish those secret self-doubts and bring them into the open. Just as Reagan told Gorbachev that if he cared about openness to tear down the Wall, so conservatives can tell the education establishment that if it cares about children to allow schools to excel.

Reagan predicted in 1982 that Marxism-Leninism soon would be consigned to the ash heap of history. The same prediction can be made today of the evil empire of American education.

Adam Meyerson is vice president for educational affairs at the Heritage Foundation. An earlier version of this article was published in the foundation's Policy Review.