President Bush didn't have much luck selling the Japanese on the idea that American cars are just as good as theirs. Now, he's back trying to sell the American public on an equally dubious proposition -- that spending public money on private schools is the way to fix public education.
This position represents a flip-flop by the President - he used to think that public money for private schools was a bad idea, not a good one. When asked about this early in his presidency, Bush said it was "the obligation of all taxpayers to support a public education system." What about people who wanted to send their kids to private schools? That was "their right," Bush said. "But I don't think they should get a break for that." How come he's changed his mind?
The rationale that the President offers for private school choice is that public schools are failing to educate children, but most private schools do very well. So parents should be able to choose private schools for their children -- and send them there at taxpayers' expense.
The trouble is, though we hear lots of anecdotes about the supposed superiority of private schools, there's no hard evidence. When you look at similar students in public and private schools -- ones with similar family backgrounds, similar coursework, and so forth -- there is little or no difference in their achievement. They perform at the same low levels.
Private school choice supporters contend that, even if private schools are not superior to public schools, choice is still a good idea because it will encourage "healthy competition" among schools. As public and private schools compete to attract students, both will improve. That's a great theory, but there's no evidence to support it. And none of our competitor nations, all of whom are much more successful in educating their students, uses competition to improve schools.
What competition of this kind will do is encourage schools to learn how to attract customers. Some students and their parents will, indeed, be attracted by schools offering an excellent education. And some will be attracted by glitzy, false advertising or by other things that have nothing to do with educational excellence, like a day-care program or a convenient location or a student body made up of kids whose parents share certain beliefs. But attracting students is not the same as educating them, and it is not a prescription for bringing the achievement of our students up to world-class levels.
As President Bush tries to sell the idea of using public money to support private schools, he puts a lot of emphasis on the concept of choice. This is smart because choice is a value Americans cherish. But we should be clear on who does the choosing. Families don't choose private schools; the schools choose the students. The schools decide on the basis of children's backgrounds or records whether the kids will "fit in" and whether they should be admitted.
The private school choice the President is pushing also disenfranchises the majority of the U.S. population -- I mean taxpayers, most of whom have no school-age children. Public dollars are their dollars, but giving them to private schools means taxpayers will have no choice about how their money is spent. Only the boards of directors at private schools and individual parents (if they are lucky) will have any say in what the tax money that goes to private schools will be used for.
President Bush started out his term on the road to being the "Education President." He acknowledged the importance of federal leadership in reforming American education, and he led the governors in formulating broad national education goals. But now the President's education program has been narrowed to ramming public aid to private education down the throats of the American public. How this is supposed to help all American children meet the national education goals beats me. What does private school choice have to do with ensuring that children come to school ready to learn? How will it advance the good citizenship goal or make us first in math and science by the year 2000?
Within the next few weeks, Congress will be debating education bills. The President is insisting on the inclusion of some choice proposal, and it will probably involve offering federal money as an incentive for states and districts to mount programs that will pay for a certain number of kids to go to private schools. But there is already too little state and local money for education. We're seeing teachers being laid off and whole programs disappearing, and we're seeing schools that can't afford books -- or even toilet paper -- for their students. It's outrageous to propose shifting public money to private schools, where people who can afford to pay send their kids.
And vouchers won't stop with sending a few thousand new students to private schools. There's already pressure to pay for the kids who are now in private schools; that adds up to five million kids and billions of dollars. The President's choice program will end up either taking billions of dollars from public schools or requiring billions in new taxes -- and that's fiscal irresponsibility.
It's disgusting that all the intelligence and energy we have been using to reform public education -- and could be using to meet the national education goals -- are being drained by a fight over a proposal that won't do either. We need to defeat private school choice and get on with the job of improving public schools for the 40 million American youngsters who attend them.