Investor’s Business Daily, December 8, 2000

BRAIN TRUST:

On election night, National Education Association headquarters resembled a luxury skybox of a booster of the winning team, according to Education Week. The millions the NEA spent playing politics paid off in many contests, including the school choice initiatives in California and Michigan, and NEA officials were feeling their oats. “Elections are the polls that really matter,” said NEA president Bob Chase. “The resounding defeat of vouchers in Michigan and California should put an end to the myth that voters want vouchers.” NEA spokesperson Kathleen Lyons had similar thoughts. “It’s time to move on,” Lyons told Education Week. “It’s time voucher proponents got that message.”

There’s no denying the NEA’s victories. In California, voters rejected by a margin of 71 percent to 29 percent an ambitious proposal to provide nearly every Golden State student a $4,000 scholarship. Michigan’s voucher proposal was more targeted. If passed, parents of students attending schools in districts that graduate fewer than two-thirds of their students could have claimed a $3,300 voucher. No matter. It went down 69 percent to 31 percent.

One could offer plenty of excuses for the defeats. In California, the principal backer, a high-tech millionaire, was too ambitious and failed to consult battle-tested experts and build a coalition of support before heading into politics. In Michigan, Republican Governor John Engler actively opposed the initiative, worried that it would drive Democrats to the polls and help defeat Republican candidates, such as Sen. Spencer Abraham and George W. Bush. That happened anyway. But the bottom line is simply this: proponents of freeing America’s children from the public school monopoly suffered defeats this November. So Chase and Lyons can enjoy their Champaign but they should know what they’re celebrating: a successful battle, not the end of the war. Despite their wishes, school choice proponents aren’t going anywhere. In fact, there are many reasons for long-term optimism.

The movement for school choice has enjoyed many successes, including public scholarship programs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and Florida. These programs are popular with parents, succeeding with students, and surviving the courts.

Even though public voucher successes have been fewer than hoped for, our movement has spurred positive collateral victories. Charter schools, one of the fastest growing trends in education, are a direct result of the school choice movement. While laws vary greatly among states, charter schools generally offer parents more choice than the government system would otherwise provide them. And they wouldn’t be around without a robust choice movement.

In addition to these public programs, private scholarship programs are up and running in dozens of American cities. Although they require significant financial commitment from low-income parents, they are widely popular, with more than 1 million kids applying for 40,0000 spots when the program was rolled out in 1998. Perhaps more important, they are showing impressive results. In DC, students using vouchers scored 9 percentile points higher than the public school students who were unable to secure vouchers. These programs build both better lives and a political coalition for broader change. They also blow over two strawmen erected by voucher opponents: that low income parents can’t be trusted to choose their children’s schools and that schools won’t accept low income students.

The most significant cause for long-term optimism is a subtle shift in how the issue is being framed from an issue of efficiency to an issue of justice. It’s a shift from a “market model” to an “opportunity model,” says New York University public administration professor Joseph Viteritti, who recently published a book, Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society. This is exactly how Howard Fuller, former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, and Willard T. Fair, president of the Greater Urban League of Miami, see it. Says Fair, “There’s nothing more important to us in terms of our civil rights than to be able to have a proper education.” To these names you can add the Reverend Floyd Flake, former Democratic congressman from New York, and even former secretary of labor Robert Reich is giving vouchers a second look. A further sign of this shift: The Washington Post gave a tepid endorsement to both the California and Michigan initiatives on the eve of this year’s election.

So I say to those at the NEA. Enjoy your victory this year and drink up that Champaign. We will prevail in the long run. In the meantime, we'll keep our bubbly on ice.

Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.