When I asked Bush that question last week, he ducked. It reminded me of the way Al Gore ducks when he’s asked why he would deprive poor parents of the school-choice prerogatives that he and other affluent parents have. Both know their positions have gaping logical holes, but they are trapped by their parties in old thinking that flunks logic. What’s making this year’s education debate interesting is that each is trying to escape a bit from party orthodoxy.
In the meantime, each guy aces the other’s weakest subject. Gore better understands the need for more resources so schools don’t cram 30 students in one classroom; he’d make $25 billion in bonds available for construction and renovation, and hire more teachers. Bush better understands the need for accountability and local control; he’d move faster to stop subsidizing failure. If you’re in thrall to neither the teachers unions nor Gingrichite ideology, it’s obvious that the best education plan for the country is some combination of the two. With any luck, the nominees will spend the next seven months cribbing off each other’s notes. Gore is already talking more about identifying poor performers; Bush added $8 billion in new spending last week alone, including a Clintonlike federal reading program. Let’s hope they keep morphing their positions.
But for the most part, each of these blind men can feel only part of the elephant. Gore grasps that the current federal aid to public schools (only 7 percent of their budgets) is just too puny when education is so central to the whole future of the country. His federal investment totals $115 billion (much of it devoted to universal pre-K), while Bush’s is only $13 billion. At the same time, Bush grasps that it’s time to stop sending the money down the same rat holes; we need to be much tougher minded about enforcing high standards for teachers, students and schools.
I like Bush’s most controversial proposal, which would give the federal Title I funding that goes to poor schools directly to parents if failing schools showed no improvement three years in a row. Under Bush’s plan, the $1,500 per student could be used by the parents for private school, tutoring or transportation to a better public school. Bush is afraid to use the V word–“vouchers”–to describe this plan. Too scary politically, even for a Republican.
But the scarier the better. The threat of vouchers is the only way to convince lousy schools that they have to improve–or else. In Camden, N.J., this year, 10 out of 22 elementary schools found that not one of their fourth graders passed the state’s reading-proficiency test. Not one student. Up the turnpike, Cory Booker, a dynamic city councilor from Newark’s poorest ward, says 97 percent of the eighth graders in his area flunked the standardized tests: “You could put 100 kids in a room with just books and get the same passing rate. It’s just abject failure.”
Booker admires charter schools (new, less regulated public schools chartered by states instead of controlled by school districts), like the one Bush visited in Newark last week. At North Star Academy, an inspiring middle school where all of the 144 students are black or Hispanic, serious learning is going on. It starts first thing in the morning when each student must enthusiastically shake the principal’s hand on entering school and ends with remarkably dedicated teachers working long past dark. The payoff lies in surging test scores and parents, mostly single mothers, who feel as if their prayers have been answered. (Admission is by lottery not test scores). When Bush asked which students plan to go to college, every hand shot up.
Vouchers are useful for frightening public schools into better performance, but they may not prove practical. Already, judges in Ohio and Florida have ruled vouchers violated the separation of church and state; and they risk polarizing public debate to the point of paralysis. By contrast, charter schools, which come in hundreds of publicly funded flavors, represent a promising and politically palatable compromise between the status quo and vouchers. From a tiny handful in 1992, there are now 1,700 of them chartered by 36 states and the District of Columbia, mostly in poor areas. A few are already closing, but that in itself is some proof of the greater accountability of the charter concept.
Bush has set aside $3 billion to help build more charter schools. Gore, influenced by unions and school boards that often find them threatening, has supported charter schools rhetorically but committed nothing to making the movement grow. Until he does–until the Democrats march more proudly under the banner of public-school choice–give a slight edge on education to Bush.
