with the overwhelming defeat of California’s ambitious school-voucher initiative in November 1993, it became clear that progress toward school choice would have to occur incrementally. Middle-class parents who had scraped and saved to move to neighborhoods with good public schools were unwilling to throw everything up for grabs with some sort of across-the-board choice program. But the case for choice for parents whose kids are in miserable public schools has always been a winner, and Governors Thompson of Wisconsin and Voinovich of Ohio were able to move ahead with targeted choice programs for low-income students in Milwaukee and Cleveland. (Both are, needless to say, under legal attack from the teachers” unions and the ACLU.)
Now California governor Pete Wilson has ioined the parade. In his annual State of the State speech last week, he proposed a school-voucher program that would pay tuition in public, private, and religious schools for pupils currently enrlled in the state’s worst performing schools. Wilson argued that ” no child should “be trapped in these failing schools because their parents can’t afford an alternative.”
Wilson’s plan would make students eligible if they attend schools that score in the bottom 5 percent of public schools on national standardized tests. State aid would simply be transferred from one public school to another if parents wished to have their child switch schools and remain in the public education system. Parents who wished to transfer their children to private nonsectarian or religious schools would be eligible for as much as $ 4,500 for each pupil.
Now we can look forward to the imaginative arguments of the education establishment defending the proposition that parents shouldn’t be helped to liberate their kids from schools that are manifestly failing — just because it might inconvenience those whose incompetence and cynicism have made these reforms necessary.
