SACRAMENTO, CA. -- Gray Davis’ plan to revive California’s schools includes intensive reading programs, a mandatory high school exit examination, and more accountability for teachers. Nothing in that list will disturb those responsible for the dismal state of education in this state. Of more interest is what Davis did not mention.

Allowing community organizations, including parents and teachers, to establish charter schools--deregulated
public schools--is the most meaningful reform on the current scene. There are now more than 150 charter
schools in California, most with waiting lists and high levels of satisfaction on the part of students,
parents, and teachers alike. The likely reason the governor failed to include an increase in the number of
charter schools as part of his agenda is that teacher unions and education bureaucrats have opposed them. The
governor has also ignored the recommendations of state agencies.

For example, California’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has supported a pilot program of vouchers for students in the worst schools. Allowing parents to choose their children’s form of education is not part of Davis’ vision, but he thinks it may be coming anyway.

If we do not fix the schools, he says "we’re looking at vouchers or some other seemingly attractive concept
that will be imposed on us by the voters" (emphasis added), a revealing formulation.

Politicians and unelected regulators, not voters, are the ones who impose policies, many of them bad, on the
populace. Fortunately, California’s ballot initiative system allows voters to get rid of them. For example,
unelected bureaucrats had imposed bilingual education on the populace and voters wanted it abolished, voting
for Proposition 227. Politicians imposed high property taxes on the populace and by passing Proposition 13
voters chose to lower them.

The "us" Davis refers to is the professional political class of which he is a leading member. This class, like
royalty past, sees itself as above the common herd whose taxes support it, and considers itself possessed
of a higher wisdom. Only a member of that class perceives the populace as "them," a threat, and an
expression of the popular will as an imposition. But the governor’s prophecy about vouchers is likely
correct.

Reform rhetoric, increased spending, and even measures like charter schools have not removed the push for
choice in education. Indeed, some prominent African-Americans such as Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman from New York, see parental choice in education as the civil-rights issue of the next century. Some backers of vouchers are now considering a bid for early in the new millennium and polls show that a majority of voters support school choice, a proven concept the governor should understand.

Davis is a veteran, eligible for the GI Bill. The same day Davis warned about vouchers, a congressional panel
in Washington urged expansion of veterans’ benefits to let former service members study at private colleges.
The plan, like the GI Bill, funds the student, not the system. Vouchers would extend the same privilege to
children in the K-12 system.

If, as Davis predicts, voters approve such a measure, they won’t be "imposing" anything on anybody. They will
simply be saying what our professional political class, including the governor, fails to understand. All
parents should have choice in education as a matter of basic civil rights.

-- By K. Lloyd Billingsley