There has been a lot of discussion about George Bush's reversals on various issues. One of his biggest flip-flops is in regard to using public money to pay tuition for kids in private and parochial schools. Now, Mr. Bush is a big supporter of the idea -- in fact, it is the centerpiece of his education program. Not so long ago, he strongly opposed it.
In March 1989, when a youngster asked him whether parents who were sending a child to private school should get a tax break, the President said the budget deficit would not allow it:
[We] can't afford to do that .... Everybody should support the public school system and then, if on top of that your parents think that they want to shell out in addition to the tax money, that's their right .... But I don't think they should get a break for that .. . . It is the obligation of all taxpayers to support a public education system. ( Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1989)
The President's answer didn't make the headlines because it was consistent with everything he had said and done. Soon after he was elected, Mr. Bush held a White House conference on choice; only public school choice came up. And when he met with the governors at the Education Summit, there is no evidence that he even mentioned the issue of using public money to send kids to private school.
How can we explain, Mr. Bush's change of mind? If we could not "afford" to help pay the tuition of kids going to private and parochial schools in 1989 when the annual budge deficit was $133.5 billion, how can we afford it in 1992 when the deficit will be over $300 billion?
We probably don't have to look for any profound explanation of Mr. Bush's about-face. He needs votes, and he undoubtedly hopes that, by talking up vouchers, he'll attract a bloc of private-school parents. If he succeeds, the rest of us, including the majority of Americans who have no children in school, could be paying a heavy price for those votes.
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The President recently sent his so-called GI bill for children to Congress, and the actual bill is even more cynical than the original publicity made it look.
It proposes giving $1000 vouchers to 500,000 students. After the first year, money is supposed to be available to all students involved in choice programs whose family income is below the national median. Since there are about 22 million of these students, the program could end up costing $22 billion a year. Students would have to be taking part in a choice program to be eligible for a voucher, so we'd see all kinds of programs: choice within public school systems; choice between urban and suburban systems; choice programs that would include non-sectarian private schools only; and some that would include religious schools.
The bill raises two big questions. First, how can we afford a big, new education program when we are denying services to large numbers of children covered under existing federal education programs, like Chapter 1, Head Start and the education for handicapped children act, because we don't have enough money? How can we afford it when kids are going to schools so decrepit and filthy that we wouldn't want to keep animals in them? In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol describes schools where the toilets overflow, stairwells become waterfalls when it rains and 13 00 kids are crammed into a space for 900.
Second, how would the districts whose students were eligible for vouchers be chosen? Who would decide whether funds went to students in New York City or Dallas or Peoria?
The GI bill says that one man would be the czar -- the Secretary of Education. He would be able to hand out the money wherever he chose and for whatever reasons. So the awards could be used to encourage districts where the choice plans looked promising. They could also be used to reward people whose views squared with the Secretary's or the President's or even as payoffs to cities and towns that voted for Mr. Bush. And given the fact that Mr. Bush and Secretary Alexander have gone all over the country championing private school vouchers, you don't have to be paranoid to assume that private school choice programs would get the lion's share of the taxpayer's money.
All this is why we seldom see a government program where a single individual has discretion over massive sums of money -- why, in fact, the U.S. and every other country interested in good government eliminated such programs a hundred years ago. In the schools, we'd call it lack of accountability. In politics, they'd call it a mountain of pork.
Although the GI bill for children has been introduced in Congress, none of the Republican leaders is pushing it. And there are reasons. The money involved is foolish, given our budget deficits and our other commitments. As Mr. Bush himself used to say, we "can't afford to do that." Furthermore, not only the Democrats but also many Republicans are unwilling to support something so open to abuse.
But the President and the Secretary are not pushing for passage of the bill, either. And since they have not told us how they would pay for it - what taxes they would raise or what programs they would cut -- it's reasonable to assume that Mr. Bush's GI bill for children is just another election-year gambit.