SACRAMENTO – Dan Weintraub, the perceptive columnist for the Sacramento Bee, shows a knack for piercing the excuses put forward by education special interests. He recently argued that public schools need incentives to implement high-performing school models. While Weintraub didn’t specify the incentive, the obvious candidate would be greater school-choice options, especially vouchers.

Weintraub cited Ralph Bunche Elementary in the Compton school district, where nearly eight out of 10 African-American fourth graders scored proficient in math, compared to only about four out of 10 statewide. Other California public schools with challenging demographics have produced similar eye-opening results.

At Oakland’s American Indian Public Charter School, profiled in Free to Learn: Lessons from Model Charter Schools, the Pacific Research Institute’s influential 2005 book, an amazing 98 percent of seventh graders scored proficient in math. The school is virtually all minority and located in one of the city’s typical tough low-income neighborhoods. As Dan Weintraub noted, the reason for the success of schools like Bunche and American Indian isn’t rocket science.

“Research shows that high standards and high expectations – for students and parents – are the starting point for successful schools serving low-income and minority children. A clear and consistent curriculum linked to the state's academic standards is another factor. And discipline, including strong support for teachers who try to keep order in their classroom, is a must. Another crucial ingredient: highly motivated, energetic administrators who are determined to overcome the inertia that often locks schools into a cycle of low performance.” Many low-performing public schools, however, seem uninterested in replicating models of success.

According to Ben Chavis, until recently the principal at American Indian, no one from poor-performing Oakland schools or the school district ever showed up to see what was going right in his classrooms. Former U.S. secretary of education Rod Paige explained the reason for this lack of interest: “Under the current monopolistic system, public schools have no incentive to embark on substantial reforms or make major improvements because no matter how badly they perform: their budgets won’t be cut; their enrollment won’t decline; [and] the school won’t close down.”

 Indeed, under California’s accountability system, none of these consequences have ever befallen poor-performing public schools. Perhaps the best incentive for improvement is a school-choice program that gives parents a voucher to choose a private-school option for their children.

When Wisconsin approved a voucher program for low-income children in Milwaukee, the city’s public school system responded by: raising graduation requirements; closing and reconstituting failing schools; implementing accountability reforms based on measurable objectives and reported results; improving the school selection process for parents; expanding kindergarten; increasing fiscal autonomy for schools; and creating parental and community involvement programs.

John Gardner, a former union organizer who served on the Milwaukee school board when the voucher program was being implemented, observed that school choice forced the school district to “begin treating poor children of all races as valued customers, in large part because, for the first time, they are.” “The pressure for school choice creates more than a safely valve,” noted Gardner, it’s “the energy to transform bureaucratic systems of juvenile warehousing into public education.”

Dan Weintraub urged legislators and the governor “to find the right combination of carrots to induce struggling schools to drop what they are doing now and look to Bunche Elementary and other success stories for a road map to improvement.” Market-based competition is the best incentive to force public schools to improve, and school-choice voucher programs have shown that they can effectively provide this competitive incentive. If 2008 is to be the year of education reform, vouchers need to be a key part of the reform agenda.