There's just no competition

NEA Today, May 1999

What would you do if millionaires started handing out vouchers to your students?

Edgewood, near San Antonio, may be a low-wealth district94 percent of its 13,300 students are economically disadvantaged-but parents and school staff are proud of their public schools.

They've got a nationally recognized special ed program, training partnerships with firms like Microsoft and American Airlines, programs for latchkey kids and pregnant teens, and three magnet high schools.

In 1989, a statewide funding equity lawsuit gave Edgewood educators the funding to improve facilities, technology, and training.

And the district is staying on track under the guidance of a progressive superintendent, Dolores Munoz, and a five-year strategic plan.

The results speak for themselves.

Edgewood has boosted test scores, kept all of its schools off the state's "low-performing" list, and brought down the dropout rate-from 13 percent in 1991 to 3.5 percent this year.

But a small group of wealthy business leaders pushing school vouchers is determined to undermine Edgewood's progress. Last fall, they launched a privately funded, $SQ million "scholarship" plan directly targeted at the district's poorest students. The money comes from the Children's Educational Opportunity (CEO) Foundation, established in 1994 by James Leininger. who made his millions manufacturing hospital beds.

Five years later, the CEO Foundation says it's funding "scholarships" in 30 cities, including Edgewood.

With its deep pockets, the foundation hands out annual stipends of up to $4,000 a year, for private or parochial school tuition. The basic political goal: Undermine public education and generate support, especially from lowincome parents, for tax-supported vouchers.

In Edgewood. some 700 students have already taken the vouchers, a public school enrollment decline that will rob the district of $4 million in state funding next year.

Galvanized by this challenge, administrators, parents, and the 130 members of the Edgewood Classroom Teachers Association are hitting back.

With the community organizing and communications expertise of both NEA and the Texas State Teachers Association, Edgewood educators are coalescing to keep the district on the quality path and to publicize why Edgewood schools are the better choice for kids.

Increasingly, Edgewood parents are hearing that their public schools offer: Equal access to all students, regardless of ability or disability. Ask special education teacher Karen Rodriguez how well inclusion works in Edgewood, and she'll tell you about a disabled second grader who takes dance classes in her wheelchair at a magnet high school for fine arts.

"Special ed students are included in all aspects of school life here," Rodriguez says, "like the special ed student who's a water boy for the high school football team."

Not true at Edgewood's vouchersupported private schools.

"The second grade dancer's mother tried and failed to get her daughter into a voucher school," says Rodriguez, the Edgewood CTA president. "The school had no ramps, no registered nurse to handle her catheterization, and no specialists."

Accountability to parents. The tightly knit Edgewood community is used to controlling public schoolsthrough an elected school board-and watching over them. Parent volunteers, guided and trained by a paid parent liaison at each school, log some 100,000 hours of donated time a year.

Committed, experienced staff. Edgewood educators, many of them products of the district's schools, are loyal to the community, despite higher pay elsewhere in Texas.

"We have pride in our ability," stresses Rodriguez, "and we know our students can achieve." Her ultimate goal: to spread that pride in public education community-wide.

Voucher Lotte"'

Eager to create an appetite for taxsupported tuition vouchers, two of America's wealthiest men-financier Teddy Forstmann and John Walton, heir to the Wal-Mart millions-have created and partially funded the Children's Scholarship Fund. A CSF lottery this spring awarded private school "scholarships" to 40,000 low-income kids across the nation.

Now the "winners" enter another crap shoot: the admissions process.

In a survey of private schools, the U.S. Department of Education found that interest in participating in voucher schemes "would decline considerably" if the programs forced schools to accept students through random assignment, serve kids with special needs, participate in state assessments, and permit exemptions from religious instructions.

Edison Loses to the Facts

Armed with unflattering info on the for-profit Edison Project that she obtained at a national conferenceand turned off by a slick, "nothingnegative" tour she took of an Edison school-a local Association leader returned home to successfully lobby against Edison's plans to manage a school in her North Carolina district.

Working with UniServ staff, Lisa Faulk, president of the NEA local affiliate in Winston-Salem/Forsyth, researched an Edison information packet for the school board.

Faulk "saturated" board members with these findings, and even persuaded two of them to accompany her to Edison's only North Carolina school, located in Goldsboro.