Reviving the failing public-school system

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 22, 1996 | by Stephen Moore

In Bill Clinton, it's now obvious, America has another "education president" on its hands. The nation's children simply can't afford many more of them.

But Clinton is right about one thing: There probably is no greater single threat to the American Dream than the inferior education the public-school monopoly is providing children. Almost every study on education quality in the last 15 years confirms what Americans have come to know -- public schools deserve failing grades. "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned that the "educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity." In most inner-city schools today, mediocrity is something to be sought.

High percentages of high-school graduates do not know what the Federalist Papers are, do not know what 9 percent of 100 is, cannot say within 50 years when the Civil War was fought and cannot figure out a bus schedule. Seventy percent of Americans rightly think the quality of education is worse than it used to be.

Clinton has defined his commitment to education in the traditional liberal fashion: by his willingness to throw money at the problem. But before there was a Department of Education spending $30 billion a year, America generally had good -- and in many cases superb -- public schools. The public-school systems in inner cities such as New York, Chicago and Washington are worse than they were before there was a Secretary Lamar Alexander, Bill Bennett or Richard Riley and 10,000 other Education Department workers in Washington. Where is there any tangible evidence that inner-city children have benefited from the $350 billion in federal money that has been thrown at the schools during the past 20 years?

Perhaps what is needed is an "education Congress." This year the House and Senate got off to a good start by proposing to cut the budget for most of the failed federal elementary-and secondary-education programs. To return schools to the level of achievement that was common 30 and 40 years ago, removing the federal role altogether is the single most sensible proposal. But if, for political reasons, the federal dollars cannot be terminated, Congress should reorient the debate about school reform by offering any or all the following proposals.

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Option 1: Enact a Pell Grant program for the neediest parents of elementary- and secondary-school children. The federal government now provides about $10 billion a year in aid to elementary and secondary schools. The programs should be terminated and the money given in the form of $2,000 grants to parents of 5 million school-aged children. Those grants first should be allocated to parents with the lowest incomes. The parents could redeem the grants at any public or private school. For private schools with tuition costs of more than $2,000 a year, the parents could supplement the voucher with their own money or private scholarships.

Especially for inner-city parents, the voucher could be a godsend. The well-respected Rand Corp. recently compared the achievement of students in the public and Catholic schools of New York. It found that for about $2,000 less per student, the city's Catholic schools produce kids who, on average, perform one grade higher than their counterparts in the public schools and have Scholastic Assessment Tests, or SAT, scores that are 170 points higher -- even when socioeconomic backgrounds and other potential explanatory factors are considered.

Option 2: Establish pilot grant programs in the worst 100 school districts in America. Why not take the 100 worst-performing public-school districts in America and give $3,000 education grants to the parents of kids trapped in those schools? Under such a program, Congress could say to the low-income parents in those districts: Here, we are giving you a $3,000 grant that you can use to send your child to any public or private school you wish. We think you can spend this money more wisely than Washington can.

Option 3: Allow families to opt out of schools that are beset with guns and violence. Why not start immediately by offering parents who are forced to send their kids to a public school where a child has been injured with a gun or where there is a well-founded fear of violence a grant to pull their kids out from under the cloud of terror? A recent national report found that there is an "epidemic of violence" in many inner-city schools. Congress should announce that it's unfair to force parents to send their children to schools that cause them to worry more about whether the kids will be assaulted rather than how they did on their last test.

All these proposals will, of course, invite hostility from the education establishment in Washington. But a genuine education-oriented Congress must reject Clinton's conventional school-reform agenda, which has mightily benefited liberal constituencies (the educrats) but not the real victims of schools that don't teach--innercity families. America's schools need an "education Congress," not another "education-establishment president."