Private vouchers are going public

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 8, 1997 | by Tiffany Danitz

Others are increasingly wary that the government may use vouchers to entangle private schools in red tape. "Once they receive money from 100 percent of the taxpaying American public they, in turn, will be held publicly accountable" Peterson says. And, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul agrees with the administration's assessment. When he offered legislation giving families a $3,000 tax credit per child to cover education cost, he said, "Unlike school vouchers, which increase federal spending and run the risk of having strings attached, this measure reduces a person's tax burden and frees that money for them to spend on their children."

But Section 115(b) of Coverdell's Safe and Affordable Schools Act specifically states that federal assistance used to pay voucher costs is not "federal aid to the school, and the federal government shall have no authority to influence or regulate the operations of a private school as a result of assistance received."

Bolick agrees that entanglement is a nonissue. He points to test programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland as examples in which neither pressures nor regulations were imposed on private schools that accepted voucher students. Instead, he says, there was an increase in the deregulation of the system, which created incentive through competition for students.

Schundler says competition and deregulation are the answers, rather than fiscal infusions. In Jersey City, he says, public schools are spending six times as much for their grammar students as are private schools, and yet it is the public schools that are in disarray. "Together with the ability to reform and the impetus to reform themselves" that comes from competition, "we could create a first-class learning institution," says Schundler.

The American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, calls this abandonment. "If, indeed, vouchers were universally available and every private school had to accept every student that applied for them, then there would be competition. This is escape, not competition," argues Joan Buckley, AFT associate director of education issues. "Wal-Mart is not competition for Nordstrom."

"They are saying that today's schools are prisons -- they should be ashamed for trying to maintain our children in prisons," rebuts Schundler.

Other voucher proponents say the AFT and other teachers unions are part of the problem. "The NEA [National Education Association] is going to make it extremely difficult for someone like Clinton to ever sign a school-choice bill into law," a Heritage spokeswoman says.

Common Cause, a campaign-spending watchdog group, says the Democratic National Committee received $454,400 from the AFT and $408,742 from the NEA in soft-money donations for the 1996 election cycle. The GOP was ignored by the AFT, but the NEA contributed $43,500 in soft money to it. These figures do not include the $38 million spent by all of organized labor to defeat Republican congressional candidates during the last election.

Coverdell says the NEA and AFT defend the status quo while ignoring alarming data about the state of the U.S. educational system to protect their own perquisites, privileges and salaries. "Anybody defending the status quo has got their head in the sand," says the senator. He laments that Clinton is beholden to the unions. However, Peterson claims teachers unions do not wield undue influence.