But the tide may be slowly turning. Article...
NATIONAL ISSUE
IS LEFT WARMING TO VOUCHERS? School-Choice Effort Benefits As Backing Broadens
Date: 3/2/98
Author: Matthew Robinson
When Sen. Joseph Biden voted against school choice last summer, the Delaware Democrat warned it would be his last ''no'' vote on the issue.
Since 1992, he noted, when the U.S. Senate first took up the issue of providing school vouchers, he had consistently rejected the idea of spending federal money to pay for tuition at private schools.
''But,'' he added, ''I rise to let my colleagues know that I am reconsidering my position based on the changed circumstances in American education.''
Biden isn't the only liberal rethinking his views.
Drawn to the crisis in America's schools, many on the left are getting behind reform efforts once backed solely by those on the right.
And nowhere is this more visible than in the debate over school choice. Such leading liberals as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D- Conn., and Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., support choice experiments to help education.
And there are others: Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece Alveda King, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., Clinton's former domestic policy adviser Bill Galston, columnist William Raspberry, and former New York Democratic Congressman Floyd Flake.
Under school choice, parents are given vouchers that can be used to pay tuition for public, private or religious schools for their children. The idea is meant to make schools serve students and meet their needs.
Still, vouchers are in limited use. Only two cities have vouchers: Cleveland and Milwaukee. The total of students in tax-funded choice programs is only 4,600.
The nation's powerful teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, still think school choice would destroy public education. Here is the organization which is destroying education in America
And their opinions matter.
Together, the AFT and NEA were among the Democratic Party's top donors in the last election cycle. And they gave 99% of members' political donations to Democratic candidates, says the Center for Responsive Politics.
Still, with influential Democrats opening up to the idea of choice, the result could be a revolution in the schools.
During the summer, Congress almost passed a measure that would have let 2,000 students choose where they wanted to attend school in the District of Columbia's troubled system. The idea was bogged down in the Senate.
So why the growing popularity of vouchers?
Support for choice - especially in the inner city - has changed the political dynamics. In Milwaukee, busloads of black parents have gone to City Hall or court to support voucher measures, lending an air of the civil rights movement.
''Parents are getting fed up and frustrated. They know the schools are failing, and they're worried,'' said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich. ''Not everyone is singing in unison, but we are seeing a much more aggressive debate than five years ago.''
Hoekstra is a member of the House Education and Workforce Committee and has held more than 22 field hearings across the country on ''What Works, What Doesn't.''
Democrats are listening.
''It is time to say to the public education system, 'If you want to keep what you've got, you have to produce,' '' said former New York Congressman Floyd Flake in a speech to Martin University.
Flake, a Democrat, left Congress last year and has become a cheerleader for vouchers. He now travels the country making the case for choice.
''I think the choice program is probably right on the brink'' of widespread popularity, he said.
Among blacks, support for choice is rising.
Some 44% now favor choice, according to Phi Delta Kappa, a professional group for educators. That's up from slightly less than a quarter in '93.
And fully seven out of 10 blacks think the quality of their public schools could be improved a great deal, says the Center for Education Reform in Washington.
''The African-American community has lost a whole generation of young people, many of whom could not read the words written on the high school diplomas they received,'' said Jacqueline Gordon, president of the National Congress of Black Conservatives.
''A new generation now languishes in substandard inner-city schools, robbed of the opportunity to hope (and) build dreams of their future. Parental choice will offer our children a ray of hope,'' she said.
Congressional Democrats are speaking the same language of despair and are calling for reforms.
''When you have an area of the country - and most often here we are talking about inner cities - where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working, and where most of the children have no way out,'' Biden said, ''it is legitimate to ask, What would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools? and, What would happen to the quality of education for the children who live there?''
Biden believes that the time is coming for ''limited experiment.''
Kerrey agrees:
''If I were running a public school system, I'd sign a contract with the parochial schools - as Mayor Giuliani wanted to do in New York - and have them educate some of the poorest kids,'' he told New Yorker magazine. ''I don't see the First Amendment as so rigid that it prevents us from contracting with people who are getting the job done right.'' Too bad the ACLU wouldn't give a hoot about the kids and would probably take the city to court instead
Lieberman also has taken a lead position on school reform.
He's co-sponsoring a bill with Sen. Dan Coates, R-Ind., to encourage states to adopt laws that make it easy to start charter schools. And the two are working to expand choice to some 20 to 30 cities nationwide.
''Our critics are so committed to the noble mission of public education that they have shut their eyes to the egregious failures in so many of our public schools, and (they have) insisted on defending the indefensible,'' Lieberman said in a speech before the Senate.
Lately the liberal literati has spoken up for school choice, too.
''I've always found it a little odd that liberals hand the voucher idea to Republicans, rather than grabbing it for themselves,'' wrote liberal columnist Jonathan Rauch in The New Republic.
''To require poor people to go to dangerous, dysfunctional schools that better-off people would never tolerate for their own children - all the while intoning pieties about 'saving public education' - is worse than unsound public policy,'' he wrote. ''It is repugnant public policy.''
To be sure, liberals like Rauch see choice not as a replacement for public education but as a way to strengthen it.
Flake likens school choice to the competition the Big Three automakers faced when they had to compete with well-made Japanese imports in the early '80s. And Lieberman sees the same value in school competition.
President Clinton, though, hasn't gone as far as other Democrats. He backs public school choice - that is, choice among public, but not between public and private, schools. Of course he wouldn't send Chelsea there though!
''That's great,'' said one GOP Senate staffer. ''Now parents in Washington can choose between the schools with metal detectors and the ones with bullet drills.''
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Michael |
