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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: long-gone who wrote (2790)	10/17/2000 7:45:17 AM
From: John Carragher	Respond to of 10042

The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition -- October 17, 2000 Review & Outlook The Other Bush George W. Bush has a brother who will cause him no embarrassment on the issues, especially education. In fact, it's a story well worth sharing during the next round of debate. The reason has to do with a Florida state court, which just made its own contribution to the argument over education. In a unanimous opinion released recently, a three-judge panel overturned an earlier trial court, this time finding that a key reform introduced by the other Governor Bush -- Florida's Jeb Bush -- was indeed constitutional. Called "Opportunity Scholarships," this program gives an out to Florida students at any school receiving a failing grade from the state education department twice in four years: They have the option to take a voucher to be used at a private or parochial school or to move to a good public school. Mr. Bush's ambitious bid to give Florida students trapped in dead-end schools some hope was dealt a huge blow in March, when a Florida judge said it violated the state constitution. The grounds for that decision go well beyond the traditional First Amendment objections over church and state. In this case, the scholarship program's opponents argued that a provision in the Florida constitution citing the "paramount duty of the state" to provide "a system of free public schools" should be interpreted as meaning the state must rely only on public schools. That was precisely the argument the three-judge panel rejected. Writing for the majority, Judge Charles Kahn Jr. declared that the Florida constitution "does not unalterably hitch the requirement to make adequate provision for education to a single, specified engine, that being the public school system." George W. ought to play this up in tonight's debate, and not just because it illustrates the kind of reforms that are needed. It also shows who is out there trying to kill these reforms. It's no accident, for example, that the chief legal eagle for the National Education Association, Bob Chahin, was personally involved in this case. Indeed, as the junior Governor Bush could tell you, the Democrats' core constituency groups are a big reason poor kids in miserable public schools are finding the exits blocked. It's no coincidence that NEA members accounted for the largest block of delegates at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. And a quick look at the associated groups litigating this case with them reveals almost all of the usual suspects lined up against giving some poor kid in a rotten public school a chance for something better: the ACLU, the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, the National School Boards Association, and so on. What all these groups have in common is that they share Mr. Gore's definition of the education problem that he gave at his convention: mortal opposition to "any plan that would drain taxpayer money away from our public schools and give it to private schools in the form of vouchers." The irony of ironies, though, is that Jeb Bush's Florida program shows that real reform doesn't so much attack public education as improve it. In the first year of the Florida scholarships, students from only two schools -- which had each received two "F's" -- were eligible. Some 78 other schools also received their first "F's." But this year, with the threat of the scholarships hanging over them, all those schools have improved to the point where they moved off the "F" list. Thus Governor Jeb Bush's initiative has helped not only the few dozen who actually received vouchers, but the thousands of other kids whose schools have now improved. At some level, what works should be the litmus test of success in a litany of Presidential proposals. The education status quo doesn't. Making the status quo compete, as in Florida, clearly does.