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- Contents:
- IN THIS REPORT
Readers will find descriptions of important state-level parental freedom efforts and developments, indications of interesting late-arising support for school choice, the Editor's explanation of our reliance on the concept of "EFM," more on the NEA's current Handbook, and David Kirkpatrick's comments on the NEA's new President.
FLORIDA
Florida's legislative session ended on May 2 without
further progress in either the House or the Senate on the school choice
bill known as PEEP — the Public Education Enhancement Program. (See Educational
Freedom Report #33 for the details of PEEP.) Sponsored in the House
by Representative Steve Wise and in the Senate by Senator John McKay, PEEP
will begin next year's session in the House Education Fiscal Committee,
where it left off, but will have to start anew in the Senate.
IOWA
Senate File 538, the tuition tax credit bill (see Educational
Freedom Report #46), is alive and eligible for debate next session.
In the final days of this session the bill became entangled with another
controversial issue when a group of Senators attached an amendment to it
which allowed tax credits for fees at public and nonpublic schools. This
move increased the cost of the legislation by over $3 million and disallowed
additional action on the bill this session. (Iowa Catholic Conference
Newsletter, 05-02-97)
MICHIGAN
The Detroit News and Free Press released
an article in its April 20 issue which contains significant news for the
school choice coalition in Michigan. The "politically influential" Council
of Baptist Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity "may be on the verge" of directing
their support towards the achievement of comprehensive school choice. At
the urging of the TEACH Michigan Education Fund these Detroit clergy have
been studying the voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland in the last
year, and have been concluding that parents deserve as much freedom in
schooling as possible.
The group is still gathering information and considering whether or not to pursue the issue of vouchers as a group. However, quotations from the leaders of this council demonstrate that they favor parental freedom in education. Reverend Ned Adams Jr., pastor of True Faith Baptist Church has said, "Anywhere schools do not demonstrate an ability to educate students, parents ought to be able to take their children to a better school and take the money with them." The Rev. Edgar L. Vann, President of the Council and pastor of Second Ebenezer Baptist Church, believes that there is no reason why every school — public, private, or parochial — "should not be part of the mix of positive choices available to parents." Rev. Samuel Bullock thinks that a tax-supported program which gave parents true choice among public and private schools would encourage "a moral renewal" in the Detroit community: "Parents who care about development of their child certainly would want their children to be reared in the mores germane to that family's belief system."
MISSOURI
On a vote of 18-13 the state Senate approved an amendment
to a larger tax plan which would allow tax deductions for parents of children
in private and parochial high schools in Missouri. The amendment is backed
by Senators John Schneider and Peter Kinder. Parents could take up to $2,500
in deductions for tuition, school supply, or transportation costs. The
entire tax plan is now in House-Senate Conference. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
05-02-97)
OHIO
Tragically, but not surprisingly, the monopoly's defenders
of the funding status quo found an ally in the Ohio District Court
of Appeals. The Court ruled 3-0 against the Cleveland parental freedom
effort, stating that the Cleveland Scholarship Program is unconstitutional
based on both federal and state constitutional grounds. The program currently
provides scholarships to about 2,000 public school students in grades K-3
to attend one of 53 private schools in Cleveland, most of which are sectarian.
The Court decided that the program "provides direct and substantial non-neutral
government aid to sectarian schools." The Court also ruled that the program
violates the state's "uniformity clause." The uniformity clause says that
a provision included in a general bill, such as the budget bill, must have
uniform applicability throughout the state. The Institute for Justice,
leading the defense of the program, is filing both an appeal and a motion
for stay with the Ohio Supreme Court. They furthermore hope to receive
an expedited appeal so that a decision can be made before the next school
year begins. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 05-02-97; Institute for
Justice memorandum, 05-06-97)
One of the three judges, Judge John Young, wrote: "The only real choice available to most parents is between sending their child to a sectarian school and having their child remain in the troubled Cleveland City School District. Such a choice can hardly be characterized as 'genuine and independent.'" In saying that the Cleveland program is unconstitutional because only parochial schools are able to provide seats, the court unwittingly confirms the most vicious results of EFM. As in earlier cases (see The Editor's View On a Monumental Irony regarding the case in Washington D.C., Educational Freedom Report # 27) the logical effect of the court's ruling is this: EFM has killed off all city independent alternatives except the remaining struggling parochial schools. That is, EFM has left only a few schools standing, too few for "real" choice, therefore let us crown it by saying, "let no choice exist." This is perfect illogic. Cleveland's poor parents knew some choice was better than none. And anybody with common sense knows some dollars in the choice pipeline will encourage new alternatives. The words of the Ohio District Court of Appeals represents static thought, susceptibility to smoke screens, and a confirmation of the worst in EFM's tendencies.
TEXAS
Senator Teel Bivins' bill, SB 1206 (see Educational
Freedom Report # 46 for details), passed out of the Senate Education
Committee and waits now to be brought up for a vote on the Senate floor.
SB 1206 is a bill that primarily provides public school choice, but allows
the opportunity for private school choice when public school options have
been exhausted. A House version of the same bill, HB 318, sponsored by
Representative Henry Cuellar, passed out of the Senate Education Committee
on May 15, but the private school choice aspect of it could not be added
to it (via amendment) on account of a parliamentary maneuver.
The excellent progress of these legislative efforts appears to be a reflection of the growing awareness of support for school choice in the state of Texas. In a poll done recently by the University of Texas' office of survey research, 62% of Texans would support a comprehensive voucher system. (Washington Times, 04-13-97)
Also, providing strong support for educational choice efforts now in Texas is a new organization: "Putting Children First." Started in January, Putting Children First works to organize and focus school choice lobbying and grassroots efforts in the state. One of the group's goals is to emphasize the non-partisan, mainstream appeal of school choice, and it favors a broad coalition of a wide variety of constituencies. For more information on Texas choice efforts or on Putting Children First, please contact Greg Talley at (512) 476-6195.
LONGER AND SHORTER ROADS TO PARENTAL
FREEDOM
One of the Blum Center's most popular brochures is "All
Roads Lead to Educational Choice Without Financial Penalty." It shows the
many paths that parental freedom supporters may follow in coming to realize
the virtue of school choice. People who see early and clearly that a) monopoly
is a destructive funding mode and b) parental love for children is a superior
basis for educational funding decisions, should not look smugly at those
who come to this realization more slowly, by longer routes. These latter
have had to free themselves from their own special forms of social inertia.
The April 25 New York Times editorial acknowledgment (see "Noteworthy Items" below) that "choice may be irresistible" under certain conditions is an example of very late, and very incomplete, but very interesting awakening. New York Democratic Congressman Floyd Flake's positive consideration (see Educational Freedom Report # 45, March 21, 1997) is a more constructive late arrival. The Detroit black pastors endorsement of the choice option (Detroit News, April 20, 1997) is a very important recent sign up. And the May 5 announcement (see "Noteworthy Items" below) by the Annie Casey Foundation — no "right wing agency," as EFM's defenders are fond of labeling parental freedom supporters — that catastrophic inner city education may call for choice as part of the solution is yet another case of late but useful realization. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 5, 1997)
From long-standing advocates of parental freedom the appropriate greeting to such late-comers is not "what took you so long?" The appropriate greeting is "Welcome. We're glad to have you with us." Such a unifying spirit is the only formula strong enough to dislodge educational finance monopoly (EFM).
Noteworthy Items
¨ The statement is brief,
but the significance is great: in an April 25 editorial about the success
of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the New York Times said
that "if [public] schools do not improve quickly, vouchers could become
irresistible." This represents a change in position for the paper, which
has in the past characterized vouchers as nothing other than destructive.
¨ The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national philanthropy for disadvantaged children, stated in its 1997 Kids Count Data Book that charter schools and school choice programs are among a "variety of non-traditional options and approaches" that need to be considered, because public education for poor children is in such bad shape. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 05-05-97)
- Why am I so insistent
on repeating the term "educational finance monopoly," or EFM? Why does
it appear so often in Blum Center literature? I am insistent on using the
term because I have not found another which explains as fully as it does
the exact nature of what I take to be America's paramount educational problem.
Contrary to some analysts' claims, that essential problem is certainly not state public schools — in a comparative and competitive context, if society wants such places, why not? If made to compete and encouraged to excel, and if their educational outcomes are comparable to others, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such schools. They will succeed or fail according to their level of attractiveness to parents. The problem with public schools in the U.S., then, is that they are sheltered by EFM, need not compete, and cannot be compared to non-state schools (indeed, they strongly reject the relevance of comparisons, saying such self-excusing and other-condemning things as 'we have to pick up society's refuse, and substitute for wayward parents'). In such a situation, the monopoly school systems tend toward bureaucratization and toward the proliferation of secondary and tertiary programs, rather than concentrating energy and resources on essential classroom work.
And the essential problem is certainly not teachers, who tend to be well-disposed, natively altruistic, and can be educated to be good educators, if they are able to join in the "natural moral contracts" created with parents, students, and staff when they are all freely joined. The problem for the teachers is a set of policies and systems which invite them to be as concerned with the maintenance of the funding monopoly as with the educational welfare of the students. This lessens their professional capacity.
By the same token, the essential problem with America's education is not the abstract concept of teachers' trade unions, such as the NEA and AFT. The problem with those groups is that funding policies and structures have permitted these unions to exist in a vacuum, to operate without basic countervailing forces in the public school arena. In normal private environments management is a natural countervailing force for efficiency and excellence, without which the firm will die. Management and labor, unionized or not, can work together in a natural dialectic which can serve the welfare of the firm, employees, and stockholders. They dare never be oblivious to the competitive and comparative environment if they wish to prosper. But under EFM school administrators and teachers are allies in support of maintaining the funding monopoly. School boards and PTAs, thought by some to be controls on the unions and professional staff, are more often just co-opted by them, imagining themselves to be at the service of the "professionals" (see Educational Freedom Report #45, March 21, 1997, p. 4). Teachers can be professionals, indeed, but when defending a monopolistic funding spigot via unionized organizations, they look like most other self-interested groups and like most other monopolies.
So, if the essential problem is not public schools, is not teachers, and is not the concept of union, what is it? Public schools become ineffective, even catastrophic in many cities, because they are permitted to operate in the vacuum created by educational finance monopoly (EFM). EFM is a shorthand description of the basic school funding method in all 50 states: the tax dollars devoted to K-12 education are assigned by the states' own monopoly mechanisms to the states' own monopoly schools. Parents have no right to choose where such dollars will go. Such a system damages all independent schools, because it exacts a huge financial penalty on parents who choose them, thereby diminishing demand. And it damages the states' schools as educational providers, for the public schools need not compete, need not compare or be compared, need not excel so as to be choiceworthy. Only a utopian could imagine public schools doing as well as they should in such circumstances. Teachers, natively desirous of helping youngsters grow intellectually and morally, are shunted away from the "natural moral contracts" which encourage such growth by the bureaucratic and monopolistic structures which invite them first to serve the maintenance of the system itself, educational finance monopoly (EFM). Educational trade unions, which exist in the first place, as unions naturally do, to serve the financial and material interests of their members, find themselves in the non-competitive vacuum previously described and naturally exploit that vacuum by running as far and fast as they can, but, above all, by dedicating themselves to the maintenance of the vacuum itself — educational finance monopoly (EFM). Again, only a utopian would expect them to do anything else.
Thus EFM, not public schools, teachers, or unions, is seen to be the essential problem, and thus the Blum Center and I are driven to point to it repeatedly. We repeatedly recite "educational finance monopoly" not because it is elegant but because we think it describes the essential reality and problem better than other terms do. To know the nature of America's educational problem requires especially knowledge of the nature of monopoly generally, and educational finance monopoly (EFM) particularly.
One other thing: to recognize that the essential problem is a funding system which creates monopolistic structures to preserve itself goes far to depersonalize the struggle which is called for to change the destructive system. It is bad policies and bad supporting structures that must be changed, not "bad guys" who must be attacked or demeaned.
- Speaking of such self-serving
institutions as the National Education Association (NEA), I regularly make
the point that there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of self-interest,
but there is much wrong with accepting as altruistic that which
is just self-serving, and giving any such self-serving group monopoly control
of finance.
In Freedom Report #44 we examined the strong and steady effort of the NEA to confuse educational ends and means, to get people to equate "education" with "state public schools." In #46 we looked at the specific case of their use of the "bedrock of democracy" smoke screen, to encourage the unsuspecting to imagine that those same monopoly state schools were not just equivalent to education, but imperative for democracy itself. That is a pipedream, of course, but it is one EFM's defenders are fond of repeating. And we saw how those efforts are prominently repeated in the NEA's latest 1996-1997 Handbook.
In this Freedom Report and the next one we will dwell a bit on the Handbook's resolutions A-25, A-26, A-27, A-28, and B-63 to show how the self-serving positions of the NEA move from general smoke screens, aimed to confuse ends and means, to the more particular smoke screens employed to obliterate any alternate funding method which might threaten the monopoly's control of the financial spigot. What we will see is that all such alternative approaches to achieving educational excellence via parental freedom and choice are treated with complete contempt, to the point of using caricature, rather than reality, to describe them.
Resolution A-25 in the current NEA Handbook is entitled "Charter and Nontraditional Public School Options," and it begins by asserting that the NEA ". . . supports innovation in public education" (emphasis added). And thus we see again, as we see routinely, the exclusive concern with state-owned schools rather than with education for youth. More pointedly, what we find in the balance of the resolution is utter preoccupation with control over finances, the tax dollars citizens intend to achieve educational goals, but the NEA intends to turn to its own betterment. The NEA asserts, for example, that when ". . . nontraditional school options are proposed, all school employees must be directly involved in the design, implementation, and governance of these programs." Talk about "dealer's control"!
Above all, according to the NEA, any new approaches (which must be 'public,' i.e., state monopoly, by definition) ". . . must not divert current funds from the regular public school
programs" (emphasis added) — not even if student numbers decline in the "regular" public schools, we are forced to conclude. There can be no change that disturbs current funding, they are saying. There can be no opportunity to reallocate some current dollars to promising better ways to expend them. Any state that accepts such categories confronts the need to increase expenditure as the price of any reform, rather than trying to increase the efficiency of tax expenditures. That preposterous presumption, in turn, becomes the cornerstone of the famous "break the bank" smoke screen used against efforts to promote parental freedom in education. "Break the bank" says, in effect, "Since all current and projected funding must be maintained, then any school choice program must have new dollars to sustain it " — and that, of course, could "break the bank." And that is self-serving bunk.
The NEA's Resolution A-26 is dubbed "Deleterious Programs" and mixes smearing techniques with logical failures to produce a truly amazing smoke screen. It begins by lumping together all sorts of unrelated items which, the NEA says, ". . . are detrimental to public education and must be eliminated: privatization, performance contracting, tax credits for tuition to private and parochial schools, voucher plans (or funding formulas that have the same effect as vouchers), planned program budgeting systems (PPBS), and evaluations by private, profit-making groups." What a collection! The single unifying reality among these disparate items is this: the NEA sees them as threatening monopoly control of educational finances. And A-26 elsewhere asserts that any ". . . weakening of collective bargaining protections would also be detrimental to the health and well-being of the public schools and should be defeated."
And so it goes, over and over in NEA Resolutions A-25 and A-26: essential preoccupation with self-interest and self-servingness; repeated portrayal of a means (the state's monopoly schools) as if it were the end (the educational welfare of the young); then, complete ignoring of that true end, nowhere referred to; and, above all, doing whatever it takes to preserve NEA control over all tax dollars dedicated to education.
In the next Report we will examine three other resolutions which, seen in context, will make even more plain that for the NEA as for any other trade union, its central business is self-enhancement and self-protection; and that anyone who turns to that organization to solve America's educational problems is making "The Wrong Diagnosis," and prescribing "The Wrong Cure." ('Fixing American Education Up to Now: Wrong Diagnosis, Wrong Cure,' Network News & Views, Vol. XIII, No. 8, August 1994 & Educational Freedom Report # 12, August 26, 1994)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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