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Choice Matters: About a year ago, syndicated columnist Matt Miller proposed a voucher plan aimed at making both friends and foes of school choice happy. The idea was to pick several school districts in which public education was failing and then do two things. First, increase spending by 20 percent, thereby pleasing those who claim that the biggest problem facing urban education is mainly lack of dollars. But second, instead of funneling all the money through the system as usual, the plan would be to give parents vouchers for the full amount of the funding, thus affording their children a shot at attending schools that are most fitting for them, be they public or private. When Miller sounded out Bob Chase, the president of the National Education Association, on the plan, this is what the head of the biggest teachers union had to say in their skewed conversation:
Consider now what another professed opponent of universal school choice has said on the subject, with what (on first reading) appears to be similar unequivocalness. Speaking to the Minnesota School Boards Association shortly after his 1998 election, Governor Jesse Ventura was quoted as saying: The ultimate report card on how you're doing is whether the word voucher' disappears from our vocabulary. I'm here to tell you that it isn't part of my vocabulary." As disappointed as I was by his remarks, I was informed shortly afterwards--by several players closer to the action than I--that what the governor was really saying went something like this: "Look, I'm really not any fonder of vouchers than you are. But I'm here to tell you that unless you make good on all that extra money I'm going to help you get for smaller class sizes and such--unless kids really do perform better--then all bets are off and l just may come out in support of vouchers." Am I confident that this is what Ventura, in fact, meant? No, of course not. But in appreciation of how political roads often wind, permit me to respectfully make a few points and predictions. Unless it's used as an epithet, the word "voucher" is barely part of anyone's vocabulary in Minnesota any longer. It's certainly true that former Gov. Arne Carlson pushed a low-income voucher plan during the 1996 legislative session. But that initiative went nowhere, as not only did liberals oppose it, but so did a critical number of religious conservatives. This was the case because they feared (incorrectly, in my view) that vouchers would inevitably lead to governmental intrusions in parochial schools. What we presently have are several potent constituencies which have coalesced into a strong movement on behalf of expanded credits and deductions; a drive which is reinforced by favorable public opinion as measured in numerous statewide polls. As was predictable. Ventura and the legislature did team up in 1999 to pass legislation aimed at reducing class sizes. But as was equally predictable, evidence is already mounting that buckets of those extra dollars are being used for other purposes--never mind that research is persuasive that class size has little to do with how well children learn anyway. And then there's the sad fact that a significant number of Minnesota teenagers, disproportionately poor and minority from Minneapolis and St. Paul, have just failed to graduate high school because of their inability to pass embarrassingly simple "basic skills" tests in math and English. How might all this add up? Given that Ventura reveres freedom, advocates like myself need to do a better job of demonstrating that school choice means freedom. And we need to repeatedly cite the obvious: That everything we know about competition dictates that it leads to better results than do monopolies and near monopolies. Likewise, we need to more successfully highlight how research increasingly shows that inner-city boys and girls tend to do better in private and religious schools. Which is to say I hold out hope that Governor Ventura, sometime before his term ends, will come to recognize that Minnesota children have not begun to realize the full bang for all the billions of new dollars he will have helped raise. And that it will be at this point that he may come to better appreciate--just like every governor since at least Wendell Anderson has--the possibilities of real school choice. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |