Orange County Register, March 6, 2007

*Please note that an error was made in the following article. Only one A was awarded in the report. This A was given to the state’s academic content standards.

A Utah-style voucher system would give families an escape hatch from underperforming campuses

Parents know it's difficult when children struggle in school with report cards full of F's and D's. Getting a poorly performing child to succeed in school can be daunting.

How much more so when the school itself struggles? What can be done when the California public school system's report card has 11 D's and F's out of 17 grades?

The Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based free-market think tank, recently released its periodic California Education Report Card, and concluded the situation is "quite dismal."

According to PRI, California public schools are failing in six areas: school accountability, language and math standards , remedial instruction, class-size reduction, school facilities construction and finance. PRI also gave public schools five D's for a majority of children falling short in reading and math, the lack of "a sound way of comparing year-to-year student progress" in English proficiency, high dropout and low graduation rates, students taking few difficult courses and because the system has become "over-bureaucratized" with nonteachers accounting for 47 percent of employees.

"California has one of the best sets of academic content standards in the nation," PRI observed of one of four areas it gave state schools an A grade. "Unfortunately for its students, the standards have been inconsistently implemented." The state also successfully aligned curriculum and testing to its standards, "Yet, despite these positive and encouraging reforms, there are still aspects of education in California that are hardly different today than they were 20 years ago," PRI found.

"Spending on public education has gone up, but the way that tax dollars are spent has not changed much over the years. On some programs ... California Department of education officials still have no idea where the money goes or what it does."

Aspiring to high standards is admirable. But when aspirations and striving still earn F's and D's after years of increased funding and "reforms," we believe the solution lies elsewhere.

In Utah, parents and school officials are pioneering elsewhere. The state recently adopted a law allowing any family in the state to remove children from public school and take a voucher to pay for private education.

We suspect parents allowed to spend vouchers for their children's education won't settle for schools earning D's and F's. They're likely to shop for schools where their vouchers buy a better education. That's missing in California's D- and F-heavy public schools, where if students want to leave, they must leave behind their funding.