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- Contents:
- IN THIS REPORT
Readers will find important state-level and D.C. developments, discover that there is no Catholic exception to the ravages of educational finance monopoly (EFM), encounter the Editor's View on recent Ohio legal actions, and the last part of a four-part Editor's View on the NEA. A synthesis of those four parts is contained in the attached new Blum Center brochure. Last but assuredly not least, we present David W. Kirkpatrick's "Choice Reports."
LOUISIANA
On May 1 the Louisiana Senate Education Committee defeated
a $300 million voucher proposal for private and parochial schools on a
vote of 4-3. This bill, SB 343, was sponsored by the Committee's Chair,
Senator Tom Greene. SB 343 would have phased in the "Educational Voucher
Program" over the course of twelve years, starting with Kindergarten and
first grade. The voucher amount would have been based on the state per-pupil
spending figure, which currently stands at about $2,500. Senator Greene
introduced the bill in order to empower parents and introduce competition
into Louisiana education. The bill had the support of Ed Steimel, former
president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and the
Public Affairs Research Council. Before the proposal was defeated Mr. Steimel
said, "This proposal, if enacted, won't destroy public schools, it will
strengthen them." Unsurprisingly, SB 343 was opposed by the Louisiana School
Board Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the local teacher
unions. (New Orleans Times Picayune, 05/02/97)
MINNESOTA
On June 4 Governor Arne Carlson vetoed the $6.7 billion
school funding bill for the state of Minnesota, because the bill did not
contain his tax credit proposal, which would provide all Minnesota families
with genuine choice in education. (See Educational Freedom Report
#42 for more information on the provision.) It appears that there has been
little movement from the legislature on the issue, while the Governor continues
to vow that he will stand firm on behalf of parental freedom in education.
At some point a special session will need to be called to resolve the matter.
If the issue is not resolved by July 1, parts of Minnesota's education
department may be closed, unless alternative funding sources are found
to keep it open while the impasse continues. Public schools will be funded
at current levels if the stalemate is not resolved by the time school starts
this next fall. It is possible that no action will occur before the beginning
of the next school year becomes imminent. (Information provided by Kristin
Robbins of Minnesotans for School Choice.)
MISSOURI
Last month we reported that the state Senate had approved
an amendment to a larger tax bill which would have provided tax deductions
for parents with children in Missouri's private and parochial high schools.
The entire tax plan then went to a House-Senate Conference where the amendment
has since been dropped from the plan. The amendment was backed by Senators
John Schneider and Peter Kinder. Senator Kinder's office reports that although
the amendment was not a success this session, school choice received more
support than ever this year in Missouri, and the legislative environment
seems altogether positive for future endeavors. (Information provided by
the office of Senator Kinder.)
NEW MEXICO
Senator Joseph Carraro introduced SB 595 this past session,
which would have allowed full public school choice through a coupon
system, and would have provided the parents of children attending accredited
private schools with refundable tax credits. The bill was tabled early
in the session and was not reconsidered before the session ended. (Information
provided by the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.)
OHIO
The Ohio Court of Appeals ruled on May 30 that the Cleveland
Scholarship Program may continue until the end of this school year or June
30, whichever is later. However, if state officials wish to run the program
next year again, they will need to request another postponement of their
May 1 ruling. The court ruled on May 1 that Cleveland's voucher program
is unconstitutional (Plain Dealer, 05/31/97). For more on that May
1 decision, please refer to the editorial on page three: "Ohio: The Travesty
of Judge-Made Law and the Tragedy of Static Thought."
Meanwhile, on May 28 the Senate Finance and Financial Institutions Committee approved a two-year budget which contains a provision that would freeze the Cleveland Scholarship Program at its current spending and enrollment levels. The budget as passed by the House in March would allocate $15.8 million to the expansion of the program, so that 3,100 students would be added over the next two years. The two versions of the budget are currently being debated in a House-Senate Conference Committee. If approved, the Senate's freeze provision would apply to the scholarship program pending the status of the May 1 Appeals Court decision. (Plain Dealer, 05/29/97)
OKLAHOMA
The Committee for Oklahoma Educational Reform (COER)
has developed a plan for basic education reform and enhancement of parental
freedom through the amendment of the state constitution, and they are presently
circulating surveys among state legislators and assembling reactions to
the COER plan. The main goals of the plan are: to increase educational
freedom among all parents, especially those with children in private and
religious schools; to deny graduation to illiterates; to equalize and stabilize
funding on a per-student basis; to guarantee against government imposition
on non-governmental schools; to introduce competition between all schools;
and to eliminate hierarchical bureaucracy through a "site based" approach
to management. The plan also includes provisions for funding, accountability,
and competition issues. (Information provided by Mr. Hubert Belisle, Publicity
Director of COER.)
WASHINGTON D.C.
On June 4 there was introduced in Congress legislation
to bring the beginning of educational freedom to low-income parents in
the District of Columbia. This is an updated version of similar legislation
introduced in 1995. (See Freedom Report #29, 11/17/95, for a summary
of the previous proposal.)
Despite the obvious educational merits of the 1995 effort, greatly desirable to the District's most distressed parents; and despite the fact that it won solid majority support in both houses of Congress; the legislation died at the hands of a threatened filibuster by the monopoly's supporters and a promised veto by the President. Thus did educational finance monopoly (EFM) defend itself and vanquish effort to achieve justice for the District's parents. (See Freedom Report #33, 03/22/96, for the story.)
The current legislation has these essential components:
it would provide opportunity scholarships for grades K through 12 for District
residents whose family incomes are below 185 percent of the poverty level.
The scholarships could be used for tuition costs at public or private schools
either in the District or in the in adjacent counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Students whose family incomes are below the poverty line would receive
scholarships of up to $3,200, while those between the poverty line and
the 185 percent line would receive the lesser of 75 percent of tuition
or $2,400. Those students using the scholarships for tutoring assistance
would be eligible for up to $500. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King
and champion of D. C. parental freedom, says "An ocean of choice lifts
all boats. We need not rescue just a handful of children; we can save them
all." (Wall Street Journal, 06/12/97) Will there be legislative
coalitions able to overcome EFM's self-serving defenses?
- Education Week of June 4 had a large story on
a conference held at Catholic University. The conference was convened to
discuss "three separate surveys from the U.S. Department of Education,"
surveys thought to shed light on "the forces reshaping Catholic education."
The Education Week story would be amusing were it not so sad.
It notes that Catholic education has been lauded for excellence in working with the big city poor, but ". . . over the past 20 years, the typical Catholic secondary school student in the United States has, in fact, become more likely to be financially well-off." One of the conferees is quoted as saying that these schools ". . . are getting dangerously close to where if you go another 10 years the majority of students in the schools will be upper-middle-class kids." And the piece reports that "Fewer than 20 per cent of all school-age Catholic children now attend a Catholic school, down from nearly 50 per cent in 1962." Finally, the reporter observes that "Researchers speculate that many of these trends are driven by rising costs [emphasis added]." Indeed!!!
This "speculation" that Catholics, too, may have to confront economic reality — the reality of the financial vise, one jaw of which is (nondiscretionary) rising taxes to pay for educational finance monopoly (EFM) public schools, and the other jaw being (entirely discretionary) rising tuition for private schools deprived of their natural enrollments — is downplayed in much of the rest of the story, as it puts forth other possible explanations. Is Catholic enthusiasm waning? Are bishops and pastors not as encouraging as they once were?
Such "speculations" are logically germane, but so secondary as to be of marginal importance at best. Anyone who has watched the demise of Catholic city school after Catholic city school knows that the financial vise has squeezed them out of existence, even in the face of massive parent and parish support. Freedom Report readers are asked to consult "Two Ghastly Specters," #36, 37, and 38; and "Blaming the Victims," #35 (05/24/96). To "discover" that average Catholic high school students today come from wealthier families than was true two or three decades ago is essentially to discover that, with the loss of nun-provided free Catholic education, there is no Catholic utopia to hold Catholics harmless from EFM's killing embrace.
- In last month's Freedom Report we noted the May
1, 1997, decision of an Ohio Court of Appeals which said the Cleveland
pilot voucher program violated constitutional prohibition of church-state
entanglement. This decision itself overruled a state district court decision
that found exactly the opposite: that the program did not violate
the state or federal constitutions. The appellate court's decision is now
being appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, and we can safely assume that
the case will finally arrive at the U.S. Supreme Court. And thus we see
in detail a specific illustration of the American disease known by its
friends as "judicial review," but known by believers in democracy as "minority
rule by courts as law-makers," or "judicial tyranny." (For background,
see, e.g., 'The Editor's View on the Church-State Smoke Screen,' Freedom
Report #40, 10/25/96.; and the Blum Center brochure 'Attacking Religious
Influence: The Case of School Choice,' 1997.)
Legitimately constructed and enacted legislation such as that passed in Ohio to start the Cleveland pilot voucher program is the work of the peoples' representatives. In the case of legislation to enhance parental freedom, as Report readers know, this can be achieved only by overcoming massive obstruction from the self-interested forces of educational finance monopoly (EFM). In order for this to occur as in Ohio in 1995, it was necessary for Ohio's citizens to have dislodged from control of the Ohio legislature a political party deeply in league with EFM, and to re-elect by unprecedented, massive majorities a Governor who supported parental freedom. These titanic events occurred in the elections of November 8, 1994. When we look at the May 1, 1997, Ohio Appeals Court decision, therefore, it is most accurate to recognize it as what it truly is: an arbitrary, minority-rule judicial overthrow of the carefully, arduously developed political intelligence and will of Ohio's citizens, as expressed by their duly-elected representatives.
Of course, the court in question professes otherwise: as cover for its non-representative policy-making it claims to have found what the Governor, legislature, and district court missed: that the Cleveland program, designed to give some freedom of choice to Cleveland's poorest parents, instead "provides direct and substantial non-neutral aid to sectarian schools." According to this interpretation, naturally, such "direct" and "substantial" aid violates church-state separation. To arrive at this conclusion, the appellate court interprets prevailing federal constitutional law, as expressed in the Witters, Mueller, and Zobrest cases particularly, in a genuinely bizarre fashion. Indeed, the court stretches reason and logic so far as to suggest that when finally the case gets to the U.S. Supreme Court the Cleveland program will be affirmed. We can even hope that Ohio's own Supreme Court will see the errors of the appellate court's ways and undo them. Time will tell.
But in the meantime, what is vitally interesting and important in the appellate court's decision is this: the central ground of that decision is that the Cleveland public schools have become so horrible, and EFM's annihilation of independent alternatives so complete, that the legislative effort to create a neutral program is made impossible by EFM-created reality. That is, what the Court says is that, yes, the legislature intended church-state neutrality, but Cleveland's public schools are so bad, and the natural array of independent alternatives has been decimated by EFM so completely, that a) Cleveland's parents will predictably flee the public schools with the voucher dollars they now have and b) they will flee primarily to sectarian schools, those being the major alternatives left standing by EFM.
This is classic judicial extremism, if the truth be told. Its essential effect is to confirm and affirm the humanly-destructive status-quo. EFM has resulted in malfunctioning city schools, and EFM has killed off the natural variety of private alternatives. That is exactly what EFM does: it damages the public schools by keeping from them the normal incentives to compete and excel; and it damages or kills off the independent alternatives by making it financially difficult for parents to choose them. The Governor and legislature, seeing this truth, sought to empower Cleveland's poor parents in at least a beginning and partial way with the pilot voucher program. The effect of the appellate court's decision: those parents, the Governor, and the legislature be damned. We have "found" a constitutional problem where any plain reading finds none, and we do not care that the problem is itself a function of the perverse system of EFM which the legislation seeks to reform.
Freedom Report #27 commented on the monumental irony of opposing District of Columbia vouchers because, EFM having done its competition-eliminating work, there were too few private school seats available. The following comments from that Report apply equally well to the appellate decision in Ohio: "EFM is humanly destructive; school choice promises real relief; but we dare not use it since EFM has created such a mess. We must keep the status quo because we must keep the status quo . . . . To say 'No choice now, because limited supply now' is, in effect, to reward EFM for one of its worst results by ensuring the continuance of that humanly destructive condition." Judicial travesty becomes human tragedy for Cleveland's parents, and children. Resolved: clear away the arbitrary judicial obstructions, affirm the policy-making prerogatives of Governor and legislature, undo EFM, liberate Cleveland's parents and give hope to them and their children.
- To round out our examination of the NEA's 1996 - 1997
Handbook we will look briefly at three additional resolutions contained
therein: A-27, A-28, and B-63.
A-27 is entitled "Federally or State-Mandated Choice/ Parental Option Plans." It condemns and opposes any and all "such federally or state-mandated choice or parental option plans." Why? The answer to that question, as stated in the Handbook, is logically absurd, and presumably cannot be what they meant to say. What they say is that they are opposed to all such plans because they "compromise the association's commitment to free, equitable, universal, and quality public education for every student" (emphasis added). Surely not even the National Education Association would think its "commitment" is what counts in the objective order. Presumably, what they really mean is that parental choice, in their view, would "compromise" "quality public education."
Even if that logically intact thought is what they really mean, it is a shockingly self-serving assertion. It certainly would come as a shock, in any case, to the parents of those democracies around the world where parental choice prevails, and to those American parents fortunate enough to able to exercise choice now and in the past. But, of course, by this time we know what this and related resolutions are truly about: maintain monopoly financial control in NEA-type hands.
Resolution A-28 is brief but genuinely vitriolic. It says that the NEA believes that any forms of school funding which give parents the ability to decide how educational tax dollars are assigned "undermine public education," reduce funds for "public education," and potentially contribute to "racial, economic, and social segregation of children." What do we see in these few lines, then? We see first and repeatedly the purposeful recitation of the "ends/means confusion" previously noted, in which the onlooker is invited errantly to imagine that "public education" is the end to be served, rather than just one means to the end of educational achievement for America's youth.
And then we see the smoke screen broadside in which the simple justice of parental freedom in choosing the educational environment for children is portrayed as inflicting on society every imaginable cancerous disease. Parental freedom means attacking "public" education, we are told — when, in truth, such freedom would provide true incentives for those public schools to excel and thereby make themselves choiceworthy. Parental freedom will contribute to all forms of segregation, we are told — when, in truth, the state monopoly public schools of America's major cities are marked by massive educational failure and are
hugely segregated now, in exactly the ways the NEA decries: racially, economically, and socially; and even as the financially-deprived inner-city private schools continue to provide shining examples of positive integration of all faiths, races, and classes, while at the same time producing positive educational outcomes.
It would not be an exaggeration, I suppose, to describe such tirades as those contained in Resolution A-28 as examples of, if not the "Big Lie" at work, at the very least the "Big Smear." Throw enough mud at your target (in this case, parents' rights to see to the educational welfare of their children) and maybe some will stick. Throw that mud often and repeatedly, and surely some will stick. How else are we to explain such erroneous nonsense as we regularly find in NEA statements?
The last resolution to note at this time is B-63, "Home Schooling." What is interesting about this is not just its general contempt for home schooling which, we are told, "cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience"; nor is it just the NEA's insistence that, if home schooling must be permitted, let it only be permitted under the conditions of all bureaucratic complications and controls. What is most interesting is the NEA's final insistence — one may even say "ultimate and everywhere" insistence — that, whatever else may happen in home schooling, we must absolutely insist on "all expenses being borne by the parents." It did not take long to get to the NEA's bottom line, did it? No matter that each home schooled student reduces costs for the monopoly system. No matter that, when the home schooled number in the thousands, and then the hundreds of thousands, the monopoly system should have much less need for tax dollars. Even then, the NEA insists, do not let any of those dollars follow the child for his educational benefit! This is what EFM is all about, and it is perfectly represented by the NEA.
Seen in conjunction with previous essays, these glimpses of Resolutions A-27, A-28 and B-63 should enable any objective observer to grasp the reality of things: the NEA is a trade union; its purpose in life naturally is the financial and material betterment of its members and bureaucratic structures; that becomes educationally destructive only because this union and its educational cousins are able to operate in the monopolistic vacuum created by educational finance monopoly (EFM); once in the monopolistic saddle, the NEA strives above all else to maintain control, and characterizes as perverse any reform which would enable parents to help decide where educational tax dollars should be assigned. That which is shameful in all this is not that they act that way — that is in the nature of things. That which is shameful, rather, is that any objective onlookers permit their own vision to be clouded by such self-serving smoke screens. I hope these brief comments on the NEA Handbook can help "protect the innocent."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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