- The
Blum Center's Premise, Goals, and Methods
Working for Parental Freedom in Education:
Rx for America's Schools and Families
by
Quentin L. Quade
The Center's Premise
Within analogy's necessary limitations, the Blum Center's work compares to basic educational research as public health study compares to basic medical science. For example, public health services, while naturally open to evidence to the contrary, assume that Salk and Sabin correctly identified the cause of and social cure for polio. On that premise, public health officials aim to understand the best ways to ensure that the preventive cure — prevention for the person, cure for society — is everywhere employed. Thus, they are concerned with implementation techniques, social and family conditions and habits which impede the use of the cure, and the like. They are not centrally concerned with the prior questions of what causes and what can prevent polio.
So it is with the Blum Center. All evidence and analysis convince us that the cause of much American educational inadequacy is educational finance monopoly (EFM). Similarly, all evidence and analysis convince us that the cure for EFM's unfortunate symptoms and for EFM itself is educational choice without financial penalty. EFM and choice are diametrically opposed funding policies.
EFM assigns all K-12 education-dedicated tax dollars through monopolistic bureaucratic structures at state and local levels, and only to public schools. The immediate educational effects of this are twofold: the public schools sheltered by these monopolistic financing methods are deprived of the normal human incentives to excel; and parents who want to choose independent educational alternatives are forced to pay a large and often impossible financial penalty for such a choice. The penalty: paying ever-increasing taxes for the public schools and ever-increasing tuition for any alternative selected.
The negative implications of those two effects are inescapable: the public schools, absent a comparative and competitive environment, tend to underproduce qualitatively; personnel and program proliferation characteristically occur; vested interests grow up around the monopoly financing structures to ensure they remain intact; political alliances form for this purpose; poor educational performance in the artificially-protected public schools becomes the (ironic) justification for increased funding and citizens tire of such budgeting; and, in the meantime, most independent schools, often performing superlatively, are under constant financial pressure and in constant peril.
An obvious alternative to EFM is to place some or all of education-dedicated tax dollars in parents' hands, thus creating choice without financial penalty. Inevitable positive impacts: public schools, subject to comparison and competition under this new arrangement, will be stimulated to excel and to economize; independent options will be encouraged; citizen confidence in budgetary processes will be restored; and family integrity will be strengthened because families will actively choose their child's school, public or private.
While we remain open to any compelling evidence to the contrary, the foregoing
judgments accurately represent the Blum Center's operating premise.
On that basis we pursue the following goals with the indicated methods.
The Center's Goals
One: To comprehend educational freedom documentation and literature; critique, improve, and synthesize it; and offer such evaluations and materials back to all persons and groups engaged in educational choice efforts.
Two: To do more original work on the theoretical and rhetorical issues, not on whether but how to achieve parental choice, drawing on the information obtained in normal Center operation.
Three: To establish a state-by-state monitoring and data collection system, and to make Center information available to any persons around the nation who are working on educational choice.
Four: To work especially closely with the Catholic community, via U.S.C.C., N.C.E.A., and Catholic conferences in various states, thereby to encourage those groups to play a leading role in coalition-building; and use that community as an example of the theme of "multiple natural constituencies" oriented to support educational choice.
Five: To help make clear the fact and powerful relevance of the experience of this and other nations with parental freedom, thus disproving the contention that educational choice without financial penalty is radically experimental.
Illustrative Center Methods in Pursuit of Goals
Goal One:
- 1. Ongoing dialogue
via correspondence, phone interviews, Director's and staff's writing and
speaking engagements with various natural constituencies; specific counsel
to working groups around the nation.
2. Consistent surveillance via "DIALOG" data base and hard copy reviews of educational choice activities around the nation; solicitation of documents from those in the field; and the publication of a monthly newsletter, the Blum Center's Educational Freedom Report, which presents synopses of significant developments and issues nation-wide.
3. Updating and revising the Index of Documents and Services, and making part or all of the Index available to correspondents.
- 1. "Roadmap" and "All
Roads" documents designed and used as visual aids for natural constituencies
to encourage "whole picture" overview. We are also in the process
of producing a brief video tape designed to aid discussion by groups interested
in educational choice.
2. Brief, context-specific documents (e.g., 'Questions & Answers About School Choice,' and 'Five Smoke Screens and Five Truths'), and general, compact devices (e.g., 'A Primer on Educational Choice') designed and used to provide at-a-glance introductions to educational choice issues.
3. More complete, in-depth arguments (e.g., 'Must Tax Dollars Kill School Independence?' 'Smoke Screens - How to Clear the Air on School Choice,' 'Virgil C. Blum, S.J.: The Believer-As-Citizen,' 'The Family's Values & Educational Choice') used to encourage particular natural constituencies to realize their stake and mobilize, and used as occasions for filling out the array of intellectual capital necessary for full comprehension.
4. Parallel development of an action-oriented organization, Wisconsin PACE (Parents Acquiring Choice in Education), which, while separate from the Blum Center, incidentally has been a laboratory for the Center.
- 1. Monitoring major
newspapers and periodicals via DIALOG, subscriptions, and our own library
holdings.
- 2. Maintaining ongoing
correspondence with state-based efforts, especially umbrella efforts and
state-based leaders, maintaining current legislative activity information
and appropriate updates; Wisconsin Desk.
- 3. Offering disk and
modem capability information transfer via p.c. Holdings Directory which
offers current educational choice information in the states and topical
access to related issues.
- 1. Ongoing correspondence
and cooperation with state conferences, U.S.C.C. liaisons, Catholic parents'
groups, hierarchical leadership, etc.
- 2. Addresses and presentations
to such groups as the N.C.E.A.; parish commentary via U.S.C.C.; meetings
at local levels to encourage discussion and promote greater Catholic interest
in educational freedom.
- 3. Extension of the
constituency theme to business community, taxpayers groups, private educators
organizations, other religious communities, et al.
- 1. Developing appropriate
contacts with relevant persons and organizations in other nations.
- 2. Exploration of
and stress on all analogous educational efforts, e.g., Roman Catholic experience
of choice by the teaching and administrative contributions of religious
orders, other denominational experiences, pre-school vouchers, G.I. Bill,
state tuition grant programs, Pell, and the vast experiences of other nations
where choice without financial penalty is seen as natural and educational
finance monopoly is seen as socially perverse and destructive of family
capacity to fulfill responsibilities.
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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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