Hi Ish, check this article out. Even liberal web sites are abandoning Gore and telling him to support Bush's school vouchers for the poor idea. Although they coudn't bring themselves to admit it, and instead called it Lieberman's plan.
Easy Choice
By THE EDITORS
Issue date: 09.11.00
Post date: 08.31.00
thenewrepublic.com
When Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman to be his running mate, Democrats praised the Connecticut senator's bipartisanship. And then they rushed to suppress its every manifestation. On school vouchers in particular, Lieberman, facing a barrage of friendly fire, has beaten a hasty retreat. "If you ask me personally, I'm still for a test of vouchers," Lieberman confessed to CNN on August 13. "But I understand how this works when you are vice president." We understand too--when the presidential candidate says, "Our administration will be opposed to private school vouchers," the vice presidential candidate keeps his mouth shut. Too bad. Because, in this case, the presidential candidate is wrong and the vice presidential candidate is right.
This magazine supports vouchers for empirical reasons, not ideological ones. Many on the right believed in "school choice" years ago, before its efficacy had ever been tested, for the same reason they believe in privatizing the post office--because the free market is supposedly always preferable to government control. We don't view vouchers as a matter of faith; we don't believe that a "public school monopoly" is in principle a bad thing, and we don't believe in vouchers for everyone. California's current voucher initiative, for instance, would award any parent, regardless of income, $4,000 per year toward private-school tuition--money that would come out of the public school system. By contrast, we think that any voucher system should be accompanied by more government funding for public education, not less, so that the majority of poor students do not suffer for the benefit of the motivated few. What's more, we see no reason to subsidize well-off parents who are already sending their children to private schools, as the California proposal would do.
But it has become painfully obvious that conservatives are not the only ones who care more about dogma than about vouchers' actual effects on children's lives. The response of the teachers' unions to vouchers is to defend endlessly the principle of public schools--when, by their implacable opposition to virtually every effort to hold the public schools accountable, they themselves ensure that many of those schools make a mockery of the ideals upon which they were founded. We do not fully know whether vouchers will work. But the Democratic Party must no longer be afraid to find out.
That is the idea behind the limited voucher plan Lieberman proposed. Vouchers would be capped by income, limited in number, and restricted to communities with the worst schools. The hope is that experiments with vouchers, far from dismantling bad public schools, would help resurrect them. And there is some evidence that they might. At Milwaukee's Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, which was losing students and funding to neighboring private schools through the city's voucher program, county administrators hired a new principal who instituted an intensive reading program that raised the school's scores, once among the lowest in town, to above the city's average. In Escambia County, Florida, where failing test scores at two schools triggered the state's voucher program, principals initiated small-group tutoring, required parent-teacher conferences, and extended the school year by 30 days. By year's end, both schools had raised their test scores enough to remove the voucher threat.
The poor students who have used vouchers to escape failing schools also appear to have benefited. Over two years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Georgetown, and Harvard tracked test scores among low-income students in three cities who used vouchers to attend private schools. African American students who attended private schools scored six percentile points higher than corresponding students who remained in public schools.
Democrats used to say you can't make anti-poverty policy without listening to the poor. Fair enough. Last year, a poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that 72 percent of African Americans in low-income households supported vouchers. Voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Dayton, New York, and Washington, D.C., have been inundated with applications, even though most of these programs require a significant supplementary payment. Last year, 1.25 million low-income children applied for the 40,000 vouchers offered by the private Children's Scholarship Fund. All these people may be misguided. Vouchers' widespread use should be based on systematic, unimpeachable evidence, not assumptions--even the assumptions of the people most directly affected. It's possible that the inner-city poor are wrong about the appropriate remedies for their plight. But surely America's dispossessed, their children systematically robbed of a decent education, at least deserve to find out. |
