- IN THIS REPORT
Readers will read about vital developments at state-level and in D.C., important new publications, timely advice from Kevin Teasley, and the Editor's View on "Those Wicked Windfalls for the Wealthy."
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
As part of a larger appropriations package, the U.S.
House of Representatives approved on November 2 Representative Steve Gunderson's
tuition scholarship program for low-income D.C. residents. Scholarships
could cover the entire cost of tuition—up to $3,000—for students in families
below the poverty level, and one half of tuition—up to $1,500—for students
between 100% and 185% of the poverty level. Scholarships could be redeemed
at participating private schools in the District as well as any public
or private school in surrounding jurisdictions. The package also includes
scholarships for extracurricular activities or transportation for low-income
students at public, charter, or private schools. The entire appropriations
package now goes to a conference committee, where it must be reconciled
with the Senate's appropriations package. The Senate's package does not
contain a school choice proposal. (November 2 memorandum from Nina Shokraii
of the Institute for Justice; Education Week, 11/08/95; Washington
Post, 11/02/95)
FLORIDA
Representative Steve Wise reports that thirty-two House
members are now supporting his "K-12 Tuition Assistance Pilot Program"
bill. In addition, Senator Don Sullivan, Chairman of the Senate Education
Committee, will file the bill in the Senate. The pilot will effect from
three to five counties in Florida, with up to 5% of the public school student
population eligible for tuition assistance at the school of their choice.
While Representative Wise is hopeful of a hearing in the House Education
Committee and is excited about its prospects in the Senate, Governor Chiles
may veto such a bill if it makes it to his desk. Chiles narrowly defeated
school choice supporter Jeb Bush in the 1994 Governor's race. Representative
Carlos Valdez has filed his Miami/Dade voucher pilot again for 1996 (H
131) and speculation is that two or three educational choice-type bills
will surface before the 1996 Legislative Session. Also, Representative
Joe Tedder has filed a Charter School bill (HB 9). Florida's 1996 Legislative
Session begins March 5, 1996. (Information is provided by Gary Lieffers
of Representative Wise's office.)
MINNESOTA
On October 25 Governor Arne Carlson made a trip to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, seeking ideas and encouragement for his own Minnesota school
choice proposal. After spending the morning with reporters and state officials,
Gov. Carlson visited Holy Redeemer Christian Academy, a private religious
school that was set to receive voucher students this year through the recently
expanded Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) before an injunction
was issued by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. While Gov. Carlson discussed
political strategy with Wisconsin officials, his staff revealed that his
own proposal will most likely offer vouchers of approximately $3,000 to
parents throughout the entire state of Minnesota who earn as much as $40,000.
Gov. Carlson plans to reveal the official proposal soon—perhaps later this
month. (Star Tribune, 10/26/95)
Meanwhile, state Republicans announced on October 23 the creation of a Task Force on School Choice. Ronald Eibensteiner, a Minneapolis venture capitalist, will act as chairman of the group. Also participating in the group will be state Senators Tom Neuville and Gen Olson—sponsors of the "Minnesota Educational Certificate Aid Act of 1995" (SB 1377). For more information on that bill, please refer to Educational Freedom Report #25. (Star Tribune, 10/24/95)
NEW JERSEY
Governor Christine Whitman's Advisory Panel on School
Choice has completed three public hearings as required by Executive Order,
and has developed draft legislation for consideration at the panel's next
meeting. The vast majority of those who testified at the hearings spoke
in favor of a full and fair test of school vouchers in Jersey City.
Separately, the office of Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler announced the introduction of a privately funded voucher program for the city. The "Jersey City Scholarship Fund" will provide scholarship assistance in the form of vouchers to low-income parents who wish to send their children to private schools. Scholarship recipients, chosen by lottery, will receive vouchers worth up to $1,000 (or half the tuition of participating private schools) and are guaranteed assistance for at least three years. The program will begin in January of 1996. It will be funded in part through ongoing contributions from the Pepsi-Cola Renaissance Scholarship Program.
Jersey City's Scholarship Fund for Inner-City Children, which will administer the vouchers until a separate agency is created, has also received a grant of $100,000 from the Bodman Foundation to begin the program. (October 18 press release from Dan Cassidy of the office of Mayor Bret Schundler; Jersey Journal, 10/19/95)
PENNSYLVANIA
Governor Tom Ridge released on October 8 the details
of his latest voucher proposal—a "trimmed" version of the proposal he submitted
to the legislature last May. The revised version of the "Keystone Initiative
for a Difference in Our Schools" ("KIDS 2") would create a five-year pilot
voucher program, offered only in selected counties and cities in Pennsylvania.
During the first year, vouchers would be available to parents who earn $15,000 or less in federal taxable income. During the second year the income limit would be raised to $25,000, and then capped at $35,000 during the third year. Grant amounts would break down according to income level: parents who earn $15,000 or less could receive $350 vouchers for half-day kindergarten students, $700 vouchers for kindergarten through eighth grade students, and $1,500 vouchers for students in grades nine through twelve. Parents who earn $15,001 to $35,000 would receive the same for lower grades, but only $1,000 for students in grades nine through twelve. The Governor's staff estimates that the program will cost $134 million in the final year of the pilot—approximately $166 million less than his previous proposal.
Gov. Ridge's previous proposal, which fell short of passage by seven votes in the Pennsylvania House in June, would have established a full-fledged voucher program for the entire state after three years. Pennsylvania's Secretary of Education, Eugene Hickok, agrees that a more limited approach will more easily gain political momentum in the legislature: "A lot of people have said they would support a pilot program. We think we have an excellent chance of getting this through." The Pennsylvania legislature reconvened on November 13. (Patriot-News, 11/09/95)
WISCONSIN
Freedom Report readers know that the Wisconsin
legislature authorized limited but genuine school choice for Milwaukee
parents. The defenders of the humanly-destructive status quo have
sought to obstruct this carefully-developed political achievement by legal
intervention. The Wisconsin Supreme Court granted a temporary injunction
halting the Milwaukee program while it sorts out the constitutional confusions
introduced by the educational unions and their allies. Recently, the local
NAACP asked to join the defenders of educational finance monopoly (EFM)
in opposing parental freedom in Milwaukee.
As reported in the October 28, 1995, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the NAACP "charged that the expanded choice program would encourage segregation because white parents would use the program to avoid sending their children to the Milwaukee Public Schools." This is asserted by an organization famously interlocked with the educational union and bureaucratic structures, and despite the fact that the city's private schools, the very schools which parents could choose if school choice existed, are models of integration and racial harmony.
And it is asserted despite the fact that today's funding policy, EFM, has contributed to the emptying out of city schools and neighborhoods, segregation by relocation out of the city. The same day's newspaper, for example, reported that, from 1990 to 1995, Milwaukee's "white student population has decreased by 8.2 percentage points (from 33.5% to 25.3%)." How long will EFM's defenders continue to call parental freedom segregationist, when the overwhelming fact is that EFM has contributed time and again to segregated cities, neighborhoods, and schools?
SOME COUNSEL FOR
CAMPAIGNS TO COME
The Blum Center's focus from the beginning has been on
these two questions: If parental freedom and school choice are as virtuous
as they seem, why have they been prevented in the United States? And, given
this history of frustration, how are they to be achieved? Blum Center publications
generally, and the Freedom Report particularly, have explored many
of the answers to these questions. We know that educational finance monopoly
(EFM), the school funding antithesis to parental freedom, arose in history,
had time to sink its roots deeply, and then developed vested interests
with material dependence on EFM.
Those interests, and the "altruistic corollaries" who work with them, defend the financing status quo and obstruct parental freedom and school choice. In so doing, they employ such smoke screens as "Those Wicked Windfalls of the Wealthy," discussed elsewhere in this issue. Such smoke screens make it hard to get the argument right for those new to the issue and overcoming these obstructionist efforts is made more difficult by the "social inertia" which surrounds and supports a long-standing policy such as EFM. Forthcoming issues of this Report will examine both "getting the argument right" and social inertia at greater length.
But another reason why parental freedom has been insufficiently achieved in the U.S. reflects this fact: many people who have seen the abstract beauty of school choice have not worked out the practical steps needed to achieve it. They have not seen the "means" as clearly as the "end." These thoughts come to mind because of a recent letter from Kevin Teasley, a leader in California's Prop. 174 effort in 1993, and currently Vice President and Treasurer of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. We are pleased to pass along to Report readers and school choice workers some very prudent counsel.
From Kevin Teasley:
Do you have a plan that shows how you will win? Many efforts in the past have lacked the basic ingredients to win; first and foremost, a plan. It is important that school choice supporters take the time to map out their strategy for winning. Key questions that need to be answered by this plan include: How much will it cost to run your campaign successfully? Who are your friends and how do you plan to build on this base? Is your base representative of your state? How do your elected officials feel about school choice? Are they neutral, supportive, or adamantly opposed? What is public opinion on the issue?
Do you have the resources to win? Once you have the plan, which should include costs to win, supporters need to identify their current financial support base and, if that is not sufficient to win, how they will build on this base. Interviewing supporters is a good way to map out your fundraising potential.
What is the level of public awareness on school choice? Too often supporters automatically assume people know what school choice means and forget that many voters do not know its meaning or its various forms. Also, many people believe the schools may be broken, but not their particular school. As such, the demand for reform may be less than expected. Supporters need to do more than sell school choice, they need to make the argument that the system is broken and that your solution is part of the answer.
There are numerous other questions that need to be answered but these are the basics and perhaps the most important. Funders and grassroot activists need to ask themselves these questions, and answer them to help avoid another losing effort. Remember, to make school choice a reality, it requires much more than a well-written initiative or piece of legislation, it requires a plan and the funds to support its success.
Announcements
¨ Forthcoming from the
Sheed and Ward publishing house is a new book by Blum Center correspondent
Joseph Claude Harris, The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools.
Harris examines the problems of financing parishes and parish schools.
Among other things, Harris urges active Catholics to consider vouchers
as a solution. The book is previewed in the October 6 issue of the national
magazine Commonweal. (Star Tribune, 10/26/95) Sheed and Ward
can be contacted at this toll-free number: 1-800-333-7373.
Reports and Studies
¨ A recent study done
by the Public Agenda Foundation—"Assignment Incomplete: The Unfinished
Business of Education Reform"—shows that American support for public schools
is by no means stable. For more details on the study, see the October 18
issue of Education Week, or contact the Public Agenda Foundation
at (212) 686-6610. The study costs $10, plus shipping and handling.
¨ For those readers concerned for the general health of American education, the Blum Center briefly notes the front-page headlines from two very recent issues of Education Week: "Students Post Dismal Results on History Test" (11/08/95), and "Students Fall Short in NAEP Geography Test" (10/25/95).
- In Freedom Reports #27 and #28 we examined several
cases wherein defenders of educational finance monopoly (EFM) used an EFM-induced
problem to sustain the bad monopolistic policy which created it. Another
case, obviously though wrongly influencing many well-intentioned people,
is reflected in this oft-heard comment: "If we adopt true school choice
without financial penalty, it will create a 'windfall for the wealthy.'"
The views of a prominent opponent of comprehensive school choice, as summarized
in the press, are illustrative: "Most families who send their children
to private schools have above-average incomes." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
March 14, 1995) What a shock! We certainly would not want those
people to have free use of their tax dollars!
This entire approach to school choice is a travesty and a tragedy as well. Educational finance monopoly, the status quo, automatically imposes a financial penalty on parents who choose an independent school. By definition, the "better off" are better able to pay EFM's financial penalty — ever-increasing taxes to support public schools and tuition for private schools if that is where they think their children should be going. So the better off are more apt to be in private schools. Elite public schools in wealthy suburbs, havens for those who have abandoned the cities and EFM's worst schools; and flourishing private schools in such areas — both are direct off-shoots of educational finance monopoly itself. By making independent schools difficult or impossible for those who are not well off, EFM directly creates the "windfall for the wealthy" that choice would bring, and then uses that windfall to block school choice and divide its constituents along class lines.
Indeed, using the so-called windfall to block parental freedom is just another class warfare effort. It is essentially irrelevant to the question of whether choice would improve education for all. It speaks as if the money were not the citizens' to begin with, and once again makes educational policy carry the burden of wider social policies, which always damages it. It is hard enough to do education itself in the modern world, let alone make educational funding policy
carry the burden of social redress of grievance, economic
imbalance, and the like. Just go to parental freedom via school choice. The poor, now without choices, will be the first and primary beneficiaries. In the clear-eyed words of the October 21, 1995, Economist: "School vouchers, nice for rich whites, are even more desperately needed by children stuck in failing and gun-ridden inner-city schools."
Tax those able to carry the burden, as normally. Let parents and the virtues of love and justice work. That is what school choice is about. School choice without financial penalty done properly and appropriately is a general policy, and it will give the poor a measure of the educational freedom the "better off" already have. It is simply not accurate to describe the concept of school choice as advantageous to the wealthy. There is no logic which says school choice should stop at any particular income level or any municipal boundary line.
But using relative wealth to help decide how to begin a school choice program is an altogether different question. If from a practical point of view it is impossible to start with a universal system because of up-front costs that the state budget cannot support at a particular moment, then it is reasonable to look for ways to ease the start-up costs problem. There is absolutely no violation of principle, and it can be an entirely prudent calculation to say that we will phase in any particular choice program over a period of time so as to contain costs and give the choice system time to pay for itself, by encouraging students to attend less costly independent schools and to reduce tax burdens by not attending higher cost state schools. In such a case, the usual tests would apply. Is the new system really moving toward the North Star of parental freedom and empowerment? Is it beginning the dismantling of educational finance monopoly? If the answers to those questions are positive, then the only other question is whether it goes as far as practical at this particular historical moment. If the answer to that is "yes," then a prudent calculation has been made. The class warfare trap has been avoided, and all school choice advocates should be able to work together on the proposal — whether they are moved primarily by a general desire to see competition at work in education, or to see greater economic capacity for the poor. Parental freedom via school choice without financial penalty — that will be a "windfall" for all, not just for the wealthy.n
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The Blum Center grants full permission for all of its documents to be copied, in part or in whole, to extend the reach of the Center's messages and information. We appreciate it when our readers keep us apprised of state and national developments in the area of school choice, particularly legislative developments. Any Blum Center documents not available on our web page may be obtained by contacting us by telephone, fax, or mail. Virgil C. Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education |
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