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Education Vouchers: America Can't Afford To Wait (IP-13-1991)
December 12, 1991 Issue Paper By Tom Tancredo Executive Summary
What Are They So Afraid Of? A voucher system would convert state and local education dollars from huge lump sums controlled by district bureaucrats into individual scholarship certificates for parents to spend at any school of their choosing. When the idea was petitioning for a place on the Colorado ballot in 1990, those same bureaucrats warned of its dangers, and a governor who had paid to send his own seven children through private school argued against giving such a choice to parents of lesser means. When legislators tried again to place vouchers on the ballot in 1991, they were out-muscled by lobby groups and unions representing employees on the government education payroll. The doubly cautious 1991 proposal would merely have let statewide voters approve a local option for district voters (or their elected school boards) to say yes or no on the individual scholarship certificates in their own communities. But this was still too threatening to the NEA monopolists, who brandished their electoral and financial power to peel away nearly half the House Republican majority in a decisive floor vote after the bill had prevailed in committee. Vouchers are already the subject of experiments in Wisconsin, Indiana, and New Hampshire. They have the support of President Bush and of Education Secretary Lamar Alexander. Yet scare propaganda continues to mislead many Coloradans and other Americans about their likely benefits. What is really at stake in the controversy over education vouchers? How would the reform benefit students, their families, and our democratic capitalist system? Why do teacher unions and the public education priesthood resist it so bitterly? What about the seemingly plausible objections to vouchers? Independence Institute asked Tom Tancredo, a leading expert on school performance and school reform options in the Western states, to prepare this primer on the issue. Symptoms Of Monopoly Since education is the topic here, we will start by taking a test. Read the following quotes and guess the subject to which they pertain. Hint: they describe something about which we are hearing or reading every day. Here they are:
You were correct if you recognized that all of these statements refer to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. They, could however, easily describe another huge, unmanageable, unresponsive, dictatorial, and collectivist government monopoly. This monopoly in our own midst is one that abhors initiative and rewards mediocrity. Its enormously wasteful, top-heavy, and bureaucratic. Many aspects of it are destructive to the family and have a decidedly anti-religious bias. While all around the world similar structures are crumbling, this one is as powerful as ever. It operates here in the United States and is the only option for most consumers. It is, of course, our government school leviathan. The power and influence of the public education establishment are as great as ever, even though it has been discredited by every standard used to gauge its output. The system remains undisturbed by a miserable performance record and almost daily revelations of its inadequacies and excesses. Many government schools, as an enterprise, failed long ago; but because the resources flowing into them are not influenced by the degree to which they are unsuccessful, they cannot go out of business. We need to change the system. We can do it with choice, the kind of choice that allows parents and students to pick from the widest possible variety of educational opportunities, both public and private. The best way of providing that choice is with education vouchers. Many Americans are increasingly turning to reforms based on parental choice of schools as the best solution to Americas education crisis. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, minorities and whites support choice. The liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative Heritage Foundation have identified it as the most important aspect of reform. One good way to make a case for vouchers is to deal with the typical arguments made against them. Here are five of the most frequently heard objections. (1) The fallacy of creaming: The first and most commonly heard criticism of vouchers is that they will siphon off the best and the brightest, so that the inner city public schools will be left with only the poor and otherwise educationally disadvantaged children. Of course, the fact is that today the only group which is not able to escape a rotten school is the poor. Wealthier parents can already exercise choice by moving to a better neighborhood, or by paying tuition at private schools. (2) Misplaced racial fears: Some suggest that vouchers will once again create segregated school systems. The fact is, in most urban areas, parochial schools, which compromise 80% of all private alternatives to public education, are more highly integrated than their public school counterparts. Unfortunately, though, racism does play an unadmitted role in the other side of the debate over vouchers. Many suburban schools fear the "invasion" of minority youngsters fleeing the violence and academic bankruptcy of their urban educational environments. Yet the fact is that in a true free market of educational services, there would be no need for anyone to flee their neighborhoods. Entrepreneurs go to where their market exists. If, however, after having been given the economic key to the door, some minority parents did choose to use it, who in good conscience could deny them? (3) Regulatory disadvantage: Another criticism of vouchers is that public schools would be at a competitive disadvantage to non-public schools because the latter are not forced to "play by the same rules." The implication here is that it is impossible to have high-quality education occurring in any classroom regulated by the state. The fact is, there are some great public schools and some lousy private schools. Without the benefits of free-market competition, however, there is little if any incentive to expand the number of the former or eliminiate the latter. The rules that actually produce a successful school are the same for everyone everywhere. A school succeeds because it (a) maintains high academic standards, (b) maintains a disciplined environment, and (c) presents a challenging curriculum. There is no reason that public schools cant "play by these rules." To do so, however, requires a tremendous amount of effort and commitment by everyone involved. The present system offers educators no incentive to maintain this effort over a long period of time. (4) Violating the Constitutions "establishment of religion" clause? Some contend that providing state-funded vouchers for use at schools having a religious affiliation would breach the separation of church and state. Certainly such vouchers would have to meet the Supreme Courts Lemon test, which requires that any government action serve a secular purpose, have a "primary effect" that will neither advance nor inhibit religion, and foster no "excessive entanglement" with religion. But a well-crafted choice plans could in fact meet that test, as Heritage Foundation research has shown. Provided that voucher legislation avoids discriminating in favor of any religiously affiliated school, and that the voucher is placed in parents hands to be used against tuition charges as they see fit, I believe the establishment-clause challenge can be withstood. In addition, it is highly likely that the Supreme Court as now constituted will review and relax the Lemon test. (5) Endangering a shared culture? Choice opponents assert that parents and students rights should be subjugated to societys greater goal of preserving a common consensus in support of our fundamental political, social, and economic institutions -- and that allowing parents the freedom to seek out schools which reflect their own religious or social preferences could destroy this democratic ethos. I suggest, on the contrary, that the greatest threat to this democratic ethos is the radical multicultural curriculum we now see working its way into the public schools. This is an ethnocentric curriculum, politicized in the extreme. For the multiculturalists, race and ethnicity have become the one and only lens through which all historical events are examined. As the distinguished education historian and now U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Educational Research and Improvement, Diane Ravitch, has argued, Afrocentrism and other such curricular changes throw into question the very idea of American public education. When public schools cease to transmit common values and a shared culture -- and they are now dangerously close to doing just that -- the main argument in support of their exclusive claim to taxpayers money will have lost its force. Vessel to Impart a Moral Standard While we are on the subject of values, we should look closer at the area that is too seldom discussed in the debate over education choice. Im referring to the controversial role played by our schools as they act as a vessel to impart a moral standard for society. Judge Robert Donnelly, a former justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, recently published a provocative article in which he portrays our 1990s America as a nation where civility has succumbed to hatred and fear; a society where the criminal justice system has failed; and one devasted by drug use, imposed obscenity, sexual perversion, and broken families. Donnelly points an accusing finger at the public school system for having failed in its task of transmitting basic morality. He cites two U.S. Supreme Court cases as landmark decisions along the road to decadence. In 1962 and 63 in the Engel and Abington cases, the court held that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment precludes the states from requiring recitation of prayers or reading of Bible verses in public schools. These decisions, according to the judge, gave unwarranted power to those who wanted schools cleansed of any aspect of religiosity. Donnelly suggests that the opinions of the court may have been misinterpreted and misapplied in the ensuing three decades; but the perception continues to be that basic morality cannot be taught in our public schools. Instead, the nation has opted for "values-neutral" curricula. Those curricula have had an immense, and immensely harmful, effect. Harvard professor Richard Hunt reports that over half his students in one survey felt that the Nazis were not to blame for their atrocities. The students believed that Hitlers rise was "inevitable," that it was impossible for Britain and France to have resisted German imperialism, and that no one was really responsible for what happened in the end. "No-fault history" was the term Hunt used to describe his students refusal to ascribe moral responsibility to historical actions. We should not be surprised at this outcome. After all, the public schools epitomize a no-fault mindset. When was the last time you heard a public school administrator or teacher union leader accept even partial responsibility for the abysmal state of American education? How does this fit into a case for vouchers? I believe that there is a basic difference between what consumers want from their schools and what public providers are offering. Most parents believe they are sending their kids to school for cognitive development, the 3 Rs. Yet government schools increasingly stress affective education; such material now occupies 40% of the time in many schools. How Parents Can Get What They Want The average parent, recognizing economic realities in todays competitive world, would obviously prefer a system that teaches children how to read, write and compute over one in which children spend nearly half their time "getting in touch with their feelings." But its not hard to understand why the system has opted for the latter method. Which one of these two education philosophies is more difficult, if not impossible, to grade? Which philosophy makes accountability almost meaningless? Which one would suffer grievously in a free-market atmosphere? The shift to a fuzzy, unmeasurable curriculum, while no doubt sincere at one level, can be read at a deeper level as a classic blame-avoidance maneuver. Most parents want schools to share the responsibility for transmitting the values of honesty, rewards for hard work, and appreciation of our republican system. Some of these parents remember how they were positively influenced by the study of the great works of Western literature, or remember hearing their parents reminisce about the moral admonitions in their McGuffey readers. These parents remember developing an appreciation for the rule of law and the inviolability of the individual as they read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And in their hearts, these folks know that it is not just social continuity or personal happiness -- it is the very future of our political system, our republic, and our freedom -- which requires that we be alert to moral values, and pass them on to our children. It is apparent that this can now only be done when schools are free to respond to majority sentiment, to consumers voting not just with ballots but with attendance decisions and dollars. Of course, moving to this free-market approach to education would in itself send an important message. It would say that we recognize the merits of individualism over the collective, that risk takers are valued, and that monopolies, whether they are private or government, have the effect of destroying initiative. Abandoning or Upholding the Trust? If we are to cure Americas ailing public school system, we must establish competitive markets and parental choice. As the Brookings Institution researchers John Chubb and Terry Moe concluded, the organizational structure of school systems is the biggest factor contributing to the poor quality of public education in this country. Asserting in their book Politics, Markets, and Americas Schools that the "key to quality education is principals who give greater autonomy to teachers," Chubb and Moe urge a sweeping changeover to markets and choice in order to create a"highly competitive school system in which competent principals are rewarded by growing enrollments, while incompetent principals are punished by falling enrollments." The greatest challenge of our age is to create a literate society that recaptures a value system in which nuclear families are encouraged and a moral code actually guides the actions of its members. It is one that places an enormous responsibility on each of us who hopes for the preservation of liberty in a land characterized by material and spiritual abundance. We have, in the past, trusted our public and private schools to share this responsibility. Those educators that abandon their side of this trust should in turn be abandoned, in favor of educators who will uphold the trust and do right by the next generation. The reason America so urgently needs education vouchers is that they would give millions of parents the economic ability to make that kind of decisive change on their childrens behalf. Dueling in Print: Administrator and Reformer Square Off
TOM TANCREDO of Arvada is a former schoolteacher as well as a former member of the Colorado General Assembly. A founding member of the Independence Research Network, he has devoted full time since 1981 to studying public and private education in states throughout the Mountain West and at the national level. This paper is adapted from a speech he gave before the National Eagle Forum conference in September 1991. EDITOR of the Independence Issue Paper series is John K. Andrews, Jr., president of the Independence Institute. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an attempt to influence any election or legislative action. Copyright 1999 |
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