VOUCHING FOR BETTER EDUCATION
Families can only benefit from the freedom of choice that school vouchers offer
BY KEN WARD
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Ken Ward is opinion page editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla. A Las Vegas resident from 1990-2002, he was a freelance columnist with the R-J and assistant managing editor at the Sun. E-mail him at [email protected]
Other stories by Ken Ward
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From the beaches of Miami to the Intermountain West, public education�s iron curtain is coming down. In Florida this summer, a handful of black lawmakers, including former U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, announced support for school vouchers. And the venerable lawmaker put her money where her mouth is: Her foundation will fund hundreds of vouchers to go to low-income students in her hometown of Miami.
When Meek, a lifelong Democrat, starts talking and acting like Jeb Bush, you know change is a�coming.
Then there�s Utah, where voters approved the nation�s first statewide voucher program. This is a paradigm shift in a Mormon-dominated state that has a strong commitment to public education and whose schools perennially post among the highest test scores in the country.
But the pace of reform continues to be glacial. The idea of empowering parents to exercise choice in their children�s education remains radical stuff. It threatens the K-12 bureaucrats and the politicians who see themselves as losing power.
Desperately trying to fortify their islands of socialism amid a rising tide of competition, old-school liberals keep insisting that vouchers will doom public education. Apparently, they haven�t been paying attention.
As columnist Bill Maxwell noted recently, all 11 �F� schools in Florida�s Duval County are predominantly black. Indeed, majority-minority campuses are failing students across the Sunshine State. You would think this might tell black �leaders� something.
To their credit, Maxwell and his fellow black �progressives� have dropped the simplistic spiel that schools merely need more money. Decades of special programs and billions of dollars in Title I allocations have blandished minority classrooms with more per-capita outlays than their white counterparts. Washington, D.C., schools are the best funded in the nation � and the worst.
Admitting the weakness of their prescription, Maxwell & Co. now pitch the notion that black and minority communities must muster the �social capital� to lift themselves out of academic cellar. That sounds so nice. Because this approach goes beyond dollars and edges toward community responsibility, it�s at least an incremental improvement.
But the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, et al., have been preaching this sermon for years. The results are no better than the test scores.
Fact is, there is no substitute for p-e-r-s-o-n-a-l responsibility, and that�s centered in the home � not in some governmental cubicle or idealized (or non-existent) �community.�
Though the Florida Supreme Court has decreed that public schools are �equal� by law, any honest educator will tell you otherwise. A disproportionate share of black and Hispanic students are trapped in dangerous, dysfunctional institutions.
Despite the aforementioned federal funding, class-size reduction, statewide testing initiatives and No Child Left Behind, problems metastasize. Court-ordered desegregation, another failed liberal antidote, is increasingly problematic when fast-growing minorities constitute an ever-expanding majority in more and more K-12 systems.
Bottom line: Government-run schools are out of ideas.
School vouchers � privately or publicly funded � have the power to break this cycle of intellectual poverty because they put the decision-making power in the hands of families and open the floodgates of competition. It�s the ultimate choice.
Yet retrograde lawmakers, backed with teacher-union money, insist on barring the schoolhouse door and holding youngsters captive. The National Education Association has sent $1.5 million to Utah to repeal vouchers there, and another $1.5 million is pledged.
Many of these same politicians (and educators) enroll their children in private schools, but they don�t want you, the lowly taxpayer, to be afforded that same opportunity.
While hypocritical elites and their lackeys argue that vouchers take money from public schools or skim the cream of the student body, their scary scenarios don�t hold up. In every publicly funded voucher program implemented thus far (Stateline.org counts a dozen state offerings), the money that goes with a student is only a percentage of the standard per-pupil allocation.
Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby, in a groundbreaking study of Milwaukee schools, found that city�s voucher program actually i-m-p-r-o-v-e-d public-school performance there.
�They had to compete,�� she explains.
The 81-year-old Carrie Meek looks at it this way. �I used to think vouchers were taking away from public schools. The way I see it now, they are not taking away.�
Will current and future minority leaders promote that clarity of vision?
Families, particularly those on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder, can only benefit from the freedom of choice that vouchers offer � just as our quasi-monopolistic government schools could stand some healthy competition.
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