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- Contents:
- IN THIS REPORT
Readers will discover splendid state-level developments, including a Minnesota demonstration of effective political leadership; encouraging national-level activity; a discussion of the reasons for and timing of the closing of the Blum Center; and David Kirkpatrick's look at Thomas Jefferson.
CALIFORNIA
An effort is now underway in California to include in
the June, 1998, state ballot a measure entitled "The Campaign Reform Initiative."
The initiative would prevent labor unions and employers from using the
salaries of workers to make political contributions without the express
written consent of the employee. Many different groups, even those unconnected
with school choice, are putting their support behind this effort. Especially
considering how school choice proponents were so badly outspent in California
during the 1993 Proposition 174 effort, the measure would likely have very
significant effects on the California battle for parental freedom in education.
For more information on the effort, please contact Mr. Mark Bucher, Campaign
Reform Initiative, 18001 Irvine Blvd., Tustin, CA 92780, (714) 573-2275.
COMMONWEALTH OF THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS
(CNMI)
The American commonwealth known as CNMI, whose capitol
city is Saipan, lies east of the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean. CNMI
has suddenly attained great significance among school choice proponents,
since the commonwealth's legislature is reportedly on the verge of passing
a comprehensive voucher program for its islands. CNMI public schools are
currently experiencing the same ills as our public schools on the mainland.
The commonwealth spends $5,000 per student in its public schools, but the
students score in the bottom quarter on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
The public schools are overcrowded and generally unsatisfactory, which
has caused many parents to lie about where they live in order to avoid
the worst schools. As in America, the environment is ripe for reform, and
a natural solution has been proposed: parental freedom in education through
vouchers.
As in America, there is a broad range of natural constituencies in CNMI which perceive that vouchers are a badly needed solution to their educational ills. However, there are no teachers unions in CNMI, so the natural support for vouchers has developed unimpeded among the people there, and the support for vouchers is almost unanimous. Governor Froilan Tenorio and Representative Heinz Hofschneider of the commonwealth's legislature introduced the Parental Choice Scholarship Program this year, and it may even be implemented as soon as this fall. The program would give a scholarship, probably worth $1,500, to each of the 12,000 students in the CNMI student population which they could redeem at any school chosen by their families. The Blum Center will keep its readers apprised of any further developments it learns regarding the CNMI legislation. (Wall Street Journal, 06/10/97)
MINNESOTA
In the words of the July 3 issue of the Wall Street
Journal: "Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson... has just taken on the
teachers unions and won." He did so when, during the last week of June,
he "arm-wrestled his... legislature into giving every family in the state
either a tax deduction or a tax credit that can be used for expenses at
any public, private, or parochial school of their choice." Towards the
beginning of the year the Governor threatened to veto any education bill
that didn't expand school choice to all parents in the state. Not taking
him seriously, the legislature passed a $6.7 billion public education bill
without an expansion of school choice in it. As we reported last month,
he vetoed that bill on June 4 and refused to budge from his original position.
Finally on June 26 the legislature passed a bill that included an expansion
of choice, although the Governor's proposal was somewhat compromised.
The compromise expands the state's current tax deduction law for educational expenses for tuition, fees, textbooks, instructional materials, and transportation costs to also include summer school and camp costs, tutoring, and personal computer costs. The deduction will be increased from $650 to $1,625 per child in grades K-6 and from $1,000 to $2,500 for grades 7-12. The bill also includes a refundable tax credit of $1,000 per child, capped at $2,000 per family, for families with annual incomes of less than $33,500. The credit can be used for all of the items listed above except "tuition." While very limited, the program indeed offers true choice to all Minnesota parents, and its passage brings Minnesota all the closer to the goal of comprehensive choice in education.
The Blum Center notes two things about the bill's passage which should provide school choice proponents with great encouragement. First, there is quite simply the excellent example set by Gov. Carlson. He himself manifests what political leadership is all about — persevering against heavy odds until successful. Second, there is this very important fact: in order for the bill to have been passed, it needed majority support from Minnesota's DFL (Democratic Farm Labor Party) legislature, which it did receive. In order for that to have happened, the DFL had to separate itself to a necessary extent from the educational and bureaucratic unions it usually supports. The bill's success therefore represents the weakened capacity of central educational finance monopoly (EFM) structures to keep control over the DFL, as it becomes clearer to the DFL, that a broad range of citizens no longer wants the maintenance of the monopoly.
OHIO
In spite of the fact that the Ohio Court of Appeals ruled
on May 1 that the Cleveland Scholarship Program is unconstitutional, the
Ohio legislature has approved funding for the program for the next two
years, in case the program survives the courts. (Education Week,
07/09/97) Meanwhile, the research team of Paul Peterson of Harvard and
Jay Greene of the University of Texas at Austin released a study at the
end of June which states that students in the Cleveland program showed
moderate gains in reading and even greater gains in math. (Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, 06/28/97)
PENNSYLVANIA
On June 9 a group of legislators that includes Rep. William
Adolph Jr. said they would oppose Gov. Ridge's charter school proposal
unless it included a school choice provision. Rep. Adolph and others feared
that passing a charter school bill would end or diminish efforts to enact
genuine school choice. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 06/10/97)
WASHINGTON D.C.
Last month we reported on the latest D.C. school choice
effort. Please see Freedom Report #48 for information on the bill.
This month we add some details: House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX)
introduced the bill in the House as the District of Columbia Student Opportunity
Scholarship Act (DC-SOS). His cosponsors include Representatives Lipinski,
Watts, Goodling, Riggs, Davis, Flake, Schaffer, and Talent. Identical legislation
was introduced in the Senate by Senators Coats, Lieberman, and Brownback.
Senator Brownback, who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee,
moreover wants to attach the bill to the Clinton administration's broad-based
aid plan for the District. The Senate version now also has the support
of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), which is significant since she has received
campaign support from teachers unions in the past. Sen. Landrieu believes
that the pilot program is worth trying. (New Orleans Times Picayune,
06/15/97; June 4 press release from the office of House Majority Leader
Dick Armey; Washington Post, 07/04/97)
VERMONT
On June 27 Rutland County Superior Court Judge Alden
Byron ruled that it is unconstitutional for the Chittenden school district
to cover tuition costs for children attending religious schools in the
area. See Freedom Report #39 for background on the case. The Chittenden
school board voted shortly afterwards to appeal the case to the Vermont
Supreme Court. (Education Week, 07/09/97)
NATIONAL NEWS
We are pleased to mention three items this month that
pertain to national school choice news. First, Senator Paul Coverdell (R-GA)
introduced an amendment to S. 949, the Senate's tax package. As amended,
S. 949 was approved on a vote of 80-18. The Coverdell Amendment expanded
the purpose of "education IRAs" in the original bill to include post-tax
savings and withdrawal for expenses, including tuition, associated with
any K-12 school or any home schooling. For details on the amendment or
the tax package, please contact Terry Delgadello in Senator Coverdell's
office, (202) 224-1326. (July 8 memo from the Institute for Justice)
Second, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced H.R. 1816 on June 5, the "Family Education Freedom Act of 1997," a bill which would give parents a $3,000 non-refundable tax credit for expenses incurred in educating their children. The bill would apply equally to parents whose children are home schooled, or attend a private, parochial, or public school. (July 9 memo from Of the People)
Third, on June 23 in the case of Agostini v. Felton the Supreme Court overturned Aguilar v. Felton — a 1985 decision which disallowed the use of public support for remedial education services in religious schools. Though this decision does not directly affect school choice, it can only be helpful as precedent in clarifying that assistance to religious school students is permissible if it does not have the effect of advancing religion. (Education Week, 07/09/97)
A Word from the Editor
On June 30 a large cancer was found on my colon. July
8 that cancer was removed. Seventeen lymph node sections were removed for
biopsy. One was found cancerous. Therapy will begin shortly.
- The Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education will
cease operations on May 31, 1998. Until that time it will continue to operate
as it has in the past and, indeed, will offer some special activities between
now and the time it closes.
The Blum Center, of course, was never created to last in perpetuity. It was created to work on a specific task, to help achieve that task, and to close when the task had been achieved — or earlier, if the Director ran out of time. Thus, for example, I never sought endowment to provide permanent funding for the Blum Center because its entire nature was oriented to the achievement of parental freedom in education or at least the beginning of that process, sufficiently to be able to say it was assured, as it moved from state to state throughout the union. Because the Blum Center was always meant to close, to be time-limited, I sought only operating support for it, and we received all of that we ever needed from a variety of sources, including especially the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. To all those benefactors I offer our profound thanks.
What that support enabled, for what will be six years when the Center closes, is a programmatic effort in support of parental freedom in education around the United States. It has been programmatic, that is, in contrast to what would have been otherwise simply my own personal contributions during those years. As I went from seventeen years as Marquette's Executive Vice President back to long-desired faculty status in 1991 I had determined to concentrate on parental freedom, but the choice I had to make was to do it as an individual scholar, or do it within a programmatic structure. I decided the programmatic structure was most appropriate, and the Blum Center was the structure created for those purposes.
What the Blum Center was designed to do was to bring into itself all pertinent information on parental freedom activity seeking true school choice, choice extending to religious-based schools, as well as all other parent-endorsed private and public schools, wherever that activity might occur in the United States. We wanted to bring that information in, organize it, and array it for easy accessibility. If the first step were taken successfully, we could take the second: to provide that information to all parties anywhere in the country who wanted information concerning school choice developments around the nation. We could, for example, quickly advise beginning efforts in one jurisdiction about comparable developments elsewhere, provide pertinent documentation and models, and lessen unneeded wheel reinventions to some extent. On such bases as these, with such information available, it seemed likely that the Blum Center staff could itself contribute to the literature on parental freedom in education via school choice without financial penalty, and that would be the third step. The Freedom Report exemplifies this latter step, as does the whole catalog of Blum Center publications. Because many of these materials have been widely reprinted, their circulation numbers in the millions.
When the Blum Center was begun, then, it was begun with the intention that it would cease. Ideally, it would cease when the job was done, that is, when the snowball of parental freedom was not only perched and ready to start down the hill, but had begun its path down the hill and was safely gathering mass and momentum sufficient to make it possible for any rational observer to say the snowball could not be stopped, and that educational finance monopoly (EFM) was surely to be broken. But I always knew that the Blum Center might reach an earlier deadline: if my retirement from Marquette arrived before the maturation of the parental freedom movement around the nation. That is what has happened.
This is not the perfect time for closing the Blum Center, then. Workers in the parental freedom vineyard have not achieved nor even guaranteed comprehensive parental freedom in education in the United States, obviously. But the snowball has been perched and has begun its descent. It could be detoured if its supporters buy out too cheaply, as in accepting charters as sufficient, rather than as a stop-gap forced on states until church-state smoke screens are removed. It could still be blocked, presumably, by the insidious and powerful forces of those who defend educational finance monopoly by well-funded political liaisons in state legislatures. But the fact of the matter is that in the United States a great deal has been accomplished for parental freedom in K-12 education. We cannot claim parental freedom has broken out everywhere, nor that it is "inevitable" as some too-glib commentators are prone to say. (In saying such things they actually make the task harder by unintentionally justifying inactivity. If something's inevitable, why fight it or fight for it?) But the developments of the last several years in the United States give us substantial reason for hope. In 1992-93, the first year of the Blum Center's existence, there were very well-publicized problems for school choice. Too easily frustrated, and unwilling to commit to "the duration," many people thought them to be insuperable problems: inadequately designed and prepared referenda efforts to achieve parental freedom in Oregon, California, and Colorado were heading toward ignominious defeat and they were ignominiously defeated; a more or less supportive national administration was also being defeated, though not for reasons of school choice, obviously, and was destined to be succeeded by a new administration tied to EFM; what looked like the first parental freedom break-out in Puerto Rico turned out to be quickly aborted by judicial intervention. Thus, the political landscape in 1992-93 did not seem encouraging for the prospects for parental freedom. The faint of heart, or the politically unaware or impatient, found plenty of reason to abandon the struggle.
However, if one looked beyond superficialities, even in 1992-93, it was possible to discern that what I call the "natural constituencies of choice" — the groups and persons who, from different perspectives, recognized that the status quo of educational finance monopoly was destructive for educational purposes in the United States — were beginning to take root and to expand. I am talking about the natural constituencies of parents in general who began to realize increasingly that the educational system was not producing excellence for their youngsters; the parents within the major inner cities of the United States who particularly saw these developments as a crisis besetting them and their youngsters, youngsters more and more being consigned to society's junk heap because of educational failure; the business community, which began to be concerned about the educational capacities of the workforce in an increasingly competitive international environment; people who began to understand that monopoly anywhere is open to question, always should bear the burden of proof, and that the only true description of American educational finance in K-12 was that of educational finance monopoly; the burgeoning numbers of parents who realized that the educational systems at work under EFM's umbrella were becoming ethical wastelands, places in which parentally-affirmed moral structures could not be brought to bear upon the educational experiences of their youngsters; groups who recognize that the escalating costs of American education, costs unrelated to the delivery of quality, were in substantial part themselves a function of monopolistic conditions and that cost restraint could only be assured when and if educational alternatives were able to be offered in the United States in genuinely competitive frameworks; and those growing groups of parents and educators who saw educational alternatives that were worth trying but were financially impossible under conditions of educational finance monopoly.
These are examples of the natural constituencies of school choice — constituencies potentially so powerful as to be unstoppable if they will but unite for political purposes — and these natural constituencies were out there stirring even in 1992 and 1993, when on a superficial level it seemed that the conditions for school choice were deteriorating. They were not deteriorating. What they required was change in political conditions in some of the states, breaking the iron triangle of educational finance monopoly, the linkage of educational bureaucracies and educational trade unions with pockets of power in state legislatures. What happened in 1993-94 and thereafter was exactly the breaking of some of those iron triangles. Some November, 1994, elections created conditions in which the natural constituencies of choice were able to begin to achieve victory. And thus, in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Iowa, now most recently in Arizona, there were achieved genuine — partial and small and only beginning, but nonetheless genuine — parental freedom enactments that permit us to say that now in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota (an early pioneer in tax deduction/tax credit legislation), and Arizona there are fully-enacted, beginning programs of legislatively-achieved school choice, the enhancement of parental freedom in education, and the beginning erosion of educational finance monopoly. The American tragedy of judicial interference with legitimate legislation complicates the implementation of some of these enactments, and until such judicial minority-rule is stopped advocates of parental freedom have to clear away the debris of such interventions. But even as that is done, no one can deny that in five states responsible governmental bodies have enacted beginning, genuine parental freedom policies. In five states, social inertia, and EFM's ability to manipulate it, have been weakened or broken, and political will has been mobilized to begin the liberation of parents in those states.
In addition to those palpable, and, in their different ways, definitive achievements we have seen markedly strengthened developments in a variety of other states, in Texas, New York, Kansas, Florida, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Missouri, to name but a few. We have the beginning of serious grass-roots work and political organization which, when political conditions are ripe, will enable parents to achieve parental freedom in education through school choice without financial penalty. And we have the beginning effects of "parent awareness" and "parent envy" as neighbors of newly-liberated jurisdictions can see the positive effects of parental freedom and begin to ask "why not here?" We have also some stirring at the federal level, despite the current pro-EFM administration.
These are just examples of the developments now underway in the United States. As I said, closing the Blum Center in May of 1998 cannot be described as ideal timing. Too much remains to be done. But surely, though not ideal, the timing is much, much better than one might have hoped just a few years ago and the odds are that American parents can be liberated from the shackles of educational finance monopoly. The defenders of the monopoly's financial spigot will defend that spigot at every step. But if America's parents and their allies do not succumb to these self-serving forces, those parents can finally achieve freedom via school choice without financial penalty.
What a privilege it has been to work on this tremendously important issue over these last half-dozen years! What I did in creating the Blum Center, and what my younger colleagues have done with me in the years since, was to create an enterprise whose only purpose was to serve, to serve the natural constituencies of school choice, wherever and however those constituent groups needed assistance on this noble task. It has been our pleasure to work with people all around the nation, people who are genuine heroes in the task of accomplishing parental freedom in this country. Those people have had to labor against long-established historical patterns, social inertia, and the extremely well-funded, massive, self-interest groups that fight to maintain the status quo, EFM. These kinds of efforts are very, very difficult, and not well rewarded in customary senses. The reward is in the effort itself and in such accomplishments as they are fortunate enough to achieve in favor of parental freedom. The ultimate reward will come to all when America's parents can begin to exercise that freedom without financial penalty known to parents in other democracies around the world.
The Blum Center will do all it can to assist these efforts until we close our doors, and we will encourage and help other organizations to carry on the services we now provide. Personally, I intend to remain actively engaged in the great effort to achieve educational freedom for America's parents. If I can assist that effort on any of its fifty battlefields, I will be pleased to do so.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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