The Politics of School Reform
By Dennis Doyle, Jonetta Rose Barras

School reform ought to be a hot political issue: 67 percent of Americans rate better schools as a higher priority for the next President than crime or the economy, according to a recent usa Today poll. Yet the topic will only elicit yawns if Clinton and Dole simply repeat their parties’ past mantras.

The Democrats are now so beholden to the teachers’ unions that they cannot put forward any scheme that might actually endanger the (appalling) status quo. But they do have a traditional approach that serves them well, and Clinton has mastered it: Just pronounce more high-sounding rhetoric and promise more money, and both the unions and the public will be mollified.

Republicans, on the other hand, have yet to learn that their old refrains of "cut spending" and "improve efficiency" are hopeless losers. Only if Dole seizes the initiative and proposes something different can he take the high ground on education and win votes.

That won’t be easy, for Clinton has even mastered those parts of the old Republican message that do work with voters: "end the era of big government," no more intrusive federal role in education, let the states do it, insist that kids be responsible, have school uniforms, and get rid of incompetent teachers. That’s what he told the governors at their recent summit and they loved it.

Unfortunately, Dole has inherited a traditional Republican message of "cut, squeeze, and trim" that is politically damaging. It costs votes. The public is convinced that education is in trouble, but it doesn’t think cost-cutting is the solution. Americans want better, not less, education. Conservatives simply have not made a convincing case for spending less, and they’re not likely to make it over the next six months.

The growth of education spending tells the tale: From 1973 to ’83, real expenditures for elementary and secondary education increased by 20 percent, and from 1983 to ’93, they increased by 33 percent. By 1993, per-pupil spending reached $5,700.

Educational interest groups, together with the liberal media, have convinced the American public that teachers are underpaid, schools underfunded, and students on short rations. And not only is the public not convinced that we are spending too much, the public, in poll after poll, reveals its willingness to spend even more. In an extraordinary example of prospective generosity, polls even find the public willing to pay higher taxes for education—and not just for the education of their own children.

Republicans ignore these facts at their peril. What to do? For years fiscal conservatives—largely Republicans—have argued that we must first trim funding, then improve schools. This strategy only wins votes from a few economists and accountant-types. The "efficiency and competitiveness" argument at the heart of the past decade’s calls for vouchers won’t wash either, even though it happens to be true. Who, after all, chooses to attend a school because it’s "efficient"? Exeter doesn’t sell itself that way, nor does the elite Quaker school the First Child attends.

Private schools don’t tout their efficiency; they stress their high academic standards and commitment to shaping character. Their "marketing strategy" consists of demanding courses, safe halls and grounds, humane administrators, caring and smart teachers, and students who are all above average. Not even low-cost parochial schools boast about their efficiency. On the contrary, they—and their clients—wish they had more money to spend. Almost all private school administrators and parents want more resources. Sidwell Friends School, where the Clintons placed Chelsea, is exactly what most parents want for their children.

And whether the Clintons want it or not, they are also receiving one more thing most parents want in their schools: religion. Sidwell Friends is a Quaker parochial school. And while by Catholic, Lutheran, or Jewish standards a Quaker school may seem rather light on religion, make no mistake: In Quaker schools the religious presence is real. It is a central part of the school experience, even though only a handful of Chelsea’s 1,000 schoolmates are themselves members of the Society of Friends.

If Republicans can’t win with their traditional "cut, squeeze, and trim" or "efficiency" pitches, how can they win? Is there an issue that could simultaneously be denied the Democrats and galvanize public support? Yes. Not vouchers as they have been traditionally talked about, not charter schools, not magnet schools, but something that is already within walking distance of most Americans: existing private schools. There are almost 25,000 of them (compared to 85,000 public schools). As it happens, 85 percent of them are parochial, and over half are Catholic.

Catholic school enrollments, especially in the inner cities, now include many non-Catholics, but for a variety of reasons their number of students has been decreasing just as the need for high quality schools has increased. In 1960, Catholic schools enrolled 5.3 million kids out of a total school-age population of 44 million. In 1990, they enrolled 2.5 million out of a total 46 million. Despite this declining enrollment, they achieve a far better degree of racial integration than public schools.

In fact, despite all their achievements, Catholic schools are still the stumbling block on the road to choice in education. The roots of the problem lie in old-fashioned anti-Catholicism. Until the 1840s, Catholic schools were supported with public funds in most of the states of the Northeast. But as nativism became triumphant, state legislatures began to cut off funding.

Yet if anti-Catholicism fueled the end of public support for Catholic schools, perhaps the end of anti-Catholicism will fuel public support for private education of all types. And the end of anti-Catholicism as a political force may be the single most important aspect of the recent contest for the Republican nomination for President. Little-noted but sure to be long-remembered, Catholic Pat Buchanan’s candidacy gained the support of Protestant fundamentalists across the nation. Although President Kennedy’s election in 1960 is credited with ending anti-Catholicism in America, it only signaled the beginning of the end. Whatever one’s views about Buchanan, his candidacy does mark the end of more than a century of Protestant anti-Catholicism. (Now anti-Catholicism finds its home among the cultural elites, as the old saying, "anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals," reminds us.)

Admittedly, many Americans are wary of government monies going to religious schools, but their fears would likely be assuaged if politicians educated voters on the peculiarity of this nation’s anti-religious stance. Simply put, America is the only civilized country in the world that does not support religious elementary and secondary schools. Australia, for example, has even adopted our First Amendment into its constitution word for word, yet it also funds students (rich and poor) at religious schools.

Even in America, other areas of government beneficence are free of anti-religious bias. No one dreams, for instance, of forbidding Medicare recipients to choose care in a Jewish, Lutheran, or Catholic hospital, insisting instead that they only patronize secular government hospitals. Nor does anyone demand that Social Security recipients forego the services of a religiously oriented nursing home and live in a government institution.

Similarly, the federal government does not agonize over government aid or tax credits helping to support religious pre-schools, kindergartens, or colleges. (Is it coincidence that American elementary and secondary education is deeply troubled, while our higher education remains the envy of the world?) You might say, then, that the last unserved minority group in America are poor children whose families prefer religious education for grades 1-12.

The example of government support for religious schools in other democracies should reassure those who fear that it can only lead to religious tyranny. In the Netherlands, for example, 70 percent of children attend denominational schools at public expense. Denmark, when it created a national school system, quite naturally required religious observance because the national church was Evangelical Lutheran.
Being a genuinely tolerant people, however, the Danes decided that any group of parents who among them had 24 children could start their own school, largely at government expense, for any reason: "religious, political, or ideological."

The issue should be no different in this country. Parents everywhere endorse public support for private education not because it’s good economics (although it is), but because it reinforces the intellectual and moral integrity of the family. It’s values, stupid! Competition and efficiency may interest economists (and terrify the teachers’ unions), but they make voters’ eyes glaze over. Parents simply want good schools. And they overwhelmingly support private schools: In poll after poll, parents indicate that they would choose private over public schools if they had the resources.

Sure, parents want educational funds to be managed prudently, but they do not want schools to spend less just to spend less. Indeed, they do not want them to spend less at all. They want better, wiser, smarter spending, not less spending. Most parents share the folk wisdom of the jazz singer who intones, "I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and rich is better."

They also believe that, contrary to liberal dogma, some schools are better than others, and they’d like to enroll in the good ones, thank you very much. Thoughtful parents are confident they can tell a good school from a bad one, and they don’t need bureaucrats in Washington or Sacramento or Albany telling them what’s good for them. Like Justice Potter Stewart, who couldn’t define pornography but knew it when he saw it, parents know good schools when they see them. So, too, do teachers and students.

Indeed, as census data reveal, public school teachers in the nation’s central cities are much more likely to enroll their own children in private school than the public at large. (See indicators, page 18.) Hypocrisy? Perhaps, but a plausible interpretation would be connoisseurship, like the GM executive who drives a Land Rover or Mercedes.

This situation presents the Republicans with an extraordinary opportunity to seize the initiative. Dole should promise a Junior G.I. Bill for the nation’s poor and dispossessed.

Best of all, most of the money needed is already in place, in the form of federal Title I education funds. In fiscal ’95, Title I aid reached 6 million disadvantaged children. At nearly $7 billion a year, it is by far the biggest federal lower education program, and it has virtually no critics outside the academy. Schools love it, school districts love it, and members of Congress do too (it reaches every congressional district in the nation). Eligible children, almost all of whom are poor, are a cross section of the nation—black and white, Anglo and Hispanic, northern and southern.

While on average, federal funds account for only about 6 percent of all money spent on lower education, Title I currently makes available more than $1,000 per eligible child. That’s not much compared to the amount spent per pupil in many states. But it would have a dramatic impact in most private schools, where the average elementary tuition is less than $2,000 a year. In parochial schools in particular, a thousand dollars goes a long way. (See nearby chart on public vs. private school costs.)

What about the Supreme Court? Will it tolerate a program that permits students to attend denominational schools if their parents choose? Good reasons exist to think it would. First, the Court’s jurisprudence in this area has become embarrassingly chaotic. In one case it permitted government aid to go for textbooks in religious schools; in another it forbade government monies be spent on related materials like maps—leading Daniel Patrick Moynihan to wonder what the Court would make of atlases.

In the 1985 Aguilar decision, the Court ruled that Title I funds may not directly subsidize parochial schools, but Justice Powell in his concurring opinion took pains to point out that several forms of indirect aid had been approved in earlier cases. Congress, he wrote encouragingly, "could fashion a program of evenhanded financial assistance to both public and private schools that could be administered without governmental supervision in the private schools." If Congress adjusted Title I to fund poor children directly, rather than schools, the constitutional issue would finally be resolved in a sensible way.

How could Dole be sure such legislation would pass? On this issue he can make common cause, not just with Republicans, but with big-city Democrats. Although estimates differ as to the number of poor children currently not being served, an additional million children would cost a billion dollars. With this as a rough guideline, Dole should promise that as President he would fully fund the Title I program, with one condition: that the children be permitted to take their funds to any school that satisfies their state’s compulsory attendance laws.

Full funding of Title I is already supported by groups with impeccable liberal credentials like the Committee for Economic Development and the Children’s Defense Fund. They just haven’t called for making it a voucher program. Dole should ask for their support as well.

President Clinton would have a hard time attacking the proposal, and Dole would gain the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of working-class blacks and white ethnics who have the most to gain from such a program. Because Clinton is in thrall to the teachers’ unions, he would be unable to flank Dole. His only posture could be direct opposition, an idea that flies in the face of emerging public opinion across the nation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, turning Title I into a voucher program makes it a federal education program consistent with conservative principles. It emphasizes that the family and the student are central and that Washington has no business selecting schools on behalf of citizens, who can do that for themselves. Lastly, it sets the stage for the 50 states to follow through on school choice, throwing wide the door for governors like Tommy Thompson, John Engler, and George Voinovich, who are already experimenting with limited voucher programs.

Today, urban public schools are about as popular as work houses in the nineteenth century, or county hospitals in the twentieth. People generally use them because they must, not because they prefer them to the alternative. After pointing out that only America denies the poor the right to attend the school of their choice, Dole should repeat the words of former New York City school official Sy Fliegel: "What’s good enough for rich kids is good enough for poor kids." And when the teachers’ unions howl, Dole can reply, "If private schools are good enough for your children, why aren’t they good enough for poor children?"

The kindling is ready. The Republicans need only light the fire.

Denis P. Doyle is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Unions & Pols 1, Kids 0

By Jonetta Rose Barras

Back in the 1980s, the income I eked out as a free-lance writer was hardly enough to feed my daughter, buy decent clothing, and pay bills. Sometimes assignments were plentiful: other times I found myself in landlord-tenant court because I came up short on the rent. My greatest concern was my daughter’s education.

Her father and I decided to place her in Watoto, an African-American-owned and -operated private school in the District of Columbia, because the city’s public schools, then as now, were deplorable. As a single mother, I struggled mightily to meet Watoto’s modest monthly tuition of $200. My daughter’s father also had a hard time paying the tuition bills. (He paid the tuition for half the year; I paid the other half.) Our determination to obtain a first-rate education for our daughter forced sacrifices, but we managed to keep her at the school.

These experiences led me to embrace a proposal made earlier this year to create a federally sponsored school voucher program in the District of Columbia. And I’m not the only African American who supports educational vouchers. Nearly 48 percent of blacks surveyed by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies say they would support a voucher system in which parents would receive government funds to send their children to the public or private school of their choice. Over half of these school choice supporters had annual incomes under $35,000.

In November 1995, Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-Wisc.) introduced a bill that set aside $5 million out of a proposed $15 million in new federal aid for the District of Columbia’s schools to provide tuition vouchers. The tuition scholarship proposal was part of a larger Republican-led effort to reform the city’s troubled school system. The bill also called for creating publicly funded charter schools, establishing a charter school commission, providing job training for high school seniors, reforming school curricula, and renovating school buildings.

The voucher program—the most controversial part of the package—would have given $3,000 grants to parents with incomes below the poverty line ($15,000 for a family of four) and provided $1,500 grants to families with annual incomes between $15,000 and $28,000. In addition, all families with incomes below $28,000 would have been eligible for $500 grants to pay for such after-school activities as reading enrichment and creative writing.

School vouchers did receive some local political support. City Council member William Lightfoot complained that "the school system operates a monopoly not driven by the best interest of the child but controlled by the best interest of the bureaucracy." Vouchers, he said, would "level the playing field for poor children."

Proving Lightfoot’s point, local and national teachers’ unions mounted a formidable lobbying effort to kill the legislation for venal reasons. For example, Frank Bolden, president of the union representing the District’s public school principals, admitted he feared school employees losing their jobs.

In February the voucher bill passed the House after being endorsed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, but the teachers’ unions lobbied such powerful allies as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who obliged with a filibuster that prevented the bill from being considered by the Senate. Sen. James Jeffords (R-Vt.) attempted to reach a compromise that would have installed a limited voucher program. But his efforts failed, and by April the voucher bill died a contentious death.

Some vocal middle-class African-American residents also opposed the voucher plan, claiming it would destroy the city’s public schools. But this argument is ludicrous. The District has 80,000 public school students; the voucher program would have aided only 1,500—less than 2 percent of the total. In addition, many members of the middle-class opposition had already used their political and financial connections to secure places for their children in the city’s few decent public schools. Thus these school choice opponents, who claimed to be preserving resources for poor and working-class parents, were actually insisting that the children of such families remain trapped in schools that most of the middle and upper class had long abandoned.

The media also misreported the situation by presenting school vouchers primarily as an assault on the separation of church and state. Most reporters, particularly those at the Washington Post, assumed that vouchers would only be used for parochial schools, even though the District of Columbia has a substantial number of secular private schools, including four black-owned ones.

In the end, Congress acquiesced to the strong-armed lobbying tactics of unions, the misrepresentation of certain media outlets, and the territorial needs of local politicians. Lacking lobbyists, poor parents lost the chance to have their children obtain the quality education available to their wealthy counterparts. "The teachers’ unions put a line in the sand so deep, there is no way with our present makeup to have any kind of scholarship," Rep. Gunderson said in an interview.

Luckily, my daughter’s story ended happily. Despite my perpetually late tuition payments, the Watoto school let my daughter stay in class. By the time she reached the eleventh grade, my income made me a member of the middle class, and I used my clout to get her into a good public school. She had a wonderful two years there. But many parents, destined to remain poor or working class, will watch their children remain in deteriorating public schools until tuition vouchers are available.

Many people want to "maintain the status quo," says James Ford, staff director of the City Council’s Committee on Education. "Why can’t the kids come first, just once?"

Good question.

Jonetta Rose Barras is associate editor of the Washington City Paper and a columnist for the Washington Times.