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The School Choice Debacle
Last week, I suggested that defeat of the voucher
initiatives in California and Michigan would likely result
in a defeatist attitude among voucher proponents. The huge
margins by which initiatives were defeated underscores this
possibility. Certainly, it will be more difficult to raise
funds for another voucher initiative in the near future. In
my mind, however, the crucial issue is whether voucher
proponents will draw the right conclusions from the debacles
in California and Michigan. If the voucher initiatives had
lost by narrow margins, their proponents and the media would
have treated the outcome as encouraging. As in sports, when
you lose by a narrow margin, the tendency is to assume that
victory requires only some tactical tweaking. Obviously,
this attitude is not appropriate under the circumstances; if
it is reasonably possible to enact voucher plans, basic
changes are needed in the strategy and tactics utilized by
the pro-voucher forces.
Preliminarily, we should note that voucher campaigns do
not have a readily identifiable large constituency. In
California, entrepreneur Tim Draper announced that he would
contribute $20 million to a voucher initiative and the
initiative was thereafter characterized in the media as "the
Draper initiative." Thus, the initiative was labeled in a
way that weakened its chances; that is, it was easily
perceived as an initiative that would help affluent families
pay for the private education of their children. More
importantly, it did not grow out of a position adopted by a
broad-based interest group, nor did the initiative pick-up
such support after it was placed on the table.
In Michigan, the initiative was the culmination of years
of planning and efforts to enlist the support of various
interest groups, but success along this line was not
impressive. The Catholic church in Michigan was supportive,
but lay deviation from church positions is commonplace. The
Michigan initiative was means tested, a mistake for two
reasons. Middle class parents did not have a personal stake
in the outcome; by reducing the number of families eligible
for the voucher the initiative simultaneously weakened the
political support for it. Second, the putative beneficiaries
(supposedly, inner city minorities "trapped in failing
public schools"), are the largest and most faithful
Democratic constituency; it appears now that the
Gore/Lieberman ticket received 90 percent of the black vote
-- a higher percentage than the Clinton/Gore ticket did in
1992 and 1996. It was one thing to ask black parents if they
would support vouchers when such support did not require a
tradeoff with other concerns of black voters. When it did,
vouchers were subordinated to these other concerns.
Third, it is questionable whether a voucher initiative
should depend so much on the parental stake in the outcome.
Parents are a declining percentage of the population, and
many no longer have or will no longer have children in
school. Parents whose children will graduate in a few years
expect their children to be out of school by the time they
can use the assistance provided by the initiative.
These considerations reinforce the fact that vouchers do
not have the kind of support among minorities envisaged by
its supporters. This is not to say that a broad based
constituency is not potentially available; it is that black
parents are not as supportive when political pressures are
present as when the parents are responding to poll
questions.
In my opinion, the California strategy was also
questionable in the way it tried to counter arguments that
the initiative would "drain funds from the public schools."
The initiative sought to counter this criticism by mandating
a level of financial support for public education generally.
Unfortunately, this effort was oriented to countering
anti-union arguments, not to appealing to specific groups of
teachers. To illustrate, suppose the voucher had included a
provision that provided liberal service credit for teachers
who retired within five years with specified levels of
service. The service credit would have been an immediate
tangible benefit to senior teachers in the unions, and these
are the teachers with the most influence over union policies
and programs.
The November 7 election results also raise questions
about the operations of the political consultants employed
to direct voucher campaigns. Not being especially
knowledgeable about public education, the consultants are
not likely to be aware of the vulnerabilities of the
opposition, hence the voucher campaigns are less likely to
be effective as a result.
Most emphatically, I am not arguing that the initiatives
would have been successful if the foregoing suggestions had
been followed. My concern is that insofar as I know, these
and other plausible suggestions made by pro-voucher
supporters were never seriously considered, if considered at
all. In any case, the most useful thing the California and
Michigan initiative sponsors can do at this point is to tell
us their strategy and where it went off the rails. Who
advised them and what was their advice? Michigan Governor
John Engler refused to endorse the initiative, because he
feared that its presence on the ballot would energize the
teacher unions, posing a major danger to the entire
Republican ticket. No voucher initiative in states with
powerful teacher unions can afford this kind of division; we
need to know why Engler's argument was not heeded, since he
was obviously sympathetic to the voucher idea.
The voucher proponents in California and Michigan deserve
our utmost respect and appreciation for their sacrifices,
but the hard questions must be raised and answered. My
questions are not raised to scapegoat or to blame, but if we
are to learn from our failures, we have to know what was
done and why -- and what was not done and why. Otherwise, we
can add the California and Michigan initiatives to a long
succession of defeats from which nothing has been learned.
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