October
11 , 2000
America's
Education Repression
By Tom
Bevan
Nowhere can
you find a greater example of elitism and hypocrisy than the debate
over school choice. The issue has taken on a particular relevance
this year with both presidential candidates making education reform
a focal point of their campaigns.
Do vouchers
work? Results from recent studies of voucher pilot programs in
Washington DC, New York and Dayton are promising, though it is
far from certain that vouchers are the only answer to our failing
public education system. Do vouchers drain valuable resources
from public schools as critics argue? Again, there is little,
if any, evidence to support such a claim.
The fundamental
question is this: do Americans deserve the right to choose the
best possible education option for their children? If you answered
"yes," then it is absolutely immoral not to ask yourself why those
Americans of lesser means should be denied this right.
Surveys
show that a majority of Americans support alternate solutions
to education. The Heritage Foundation's School Choice 2000 Report
found that support for vouchers among public school parents reached
60% in 1999, up nine percentage points in the last five years.
Among minorities, for whom vouchers represent the greatest opportunity,
the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies reports that
60% of blacks (including 7 out of 10 blacks under the age of 35)
as well as 65% of Hispanics support vouchers.
So why don't
Americans have access to vouchers and control over their children's
education? Because the two most powerful teachers unions in America
enjoy uncontested control over our public school system. The National
Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers
use the significant economic power of their members' dues to exert
a stranglehold on Democrats in Congress and to swat down state
referendums around the country. Currently, teachers unions are
spending tens of millions of dollars to defeat Proposition 38,
a ballot initiative in California that proposes a $4,000 tuition
voucher to students statewide. As Amity Shlaes of the Hoover Institution
observed, the NEA and AFT have "stopped thinking of schools as
places where kids learn and started thinking of them as jobs programs
for teachers."
Even more
disturbing than undue union influence is the utter hypocrisy with
which some Democrats conduct the debate on school choice. A survey
of Congress conducted by the Heritage Foundation in June of this
year found that 30.4% of Democrats in the House and 33.3% of Democrats
in the Senate who have school age children responded that they
send them to private school.
Ask yourself
why one out of every four members of the Congressional Black Caucus,
who are unwavering in their opposition of school choice, exercise
the option of sending their children to private school.
Ask yourself
why Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore's paint such an apocalyptic picture
of school choice in America and yet casually dismiss questions
asking why lower income families should be denied the opportunity
to attend private institutions as their children have done.
It's true
that more than 90% of American children attend public school and
that we should focus on finding new, innovative ways - other than
gratuitous new spending programs - to make the public schools
work better. But if the real goal is to make sure that every child
has access to the best possible education, then it is beyond negligent
not to investigate and implement programs that allow parents the
freedom to seek out educational options and make decisions about
their child's future.
Tom Bevan writes for RealClearPolitics
