Every presidential election is crucial, but the stakes this Tuesday are enormous. The man we elect will probably name three or four new Supreme Court justices. These appointments will determine the composition of the Court over the next quarter century and shape the society in which our children and grandchildren live in important ways. But most of us are also worrying about the decisions that will affect our immediate future.

The policies our next president pursues will determine whether or not our real wages continue to slump and
our standard of living continues its downward slide. They will determine what kind of health care system we have. Will it be a system in which escalating medical costs make people frantic with worry about how much longer they -- or their employees -- will be able to afford their health insurance? Or will it be one that controls costs and extends coverage to the 3 5 million Americans who still have none? 

Our next president's policies will determine whether we stay with the present system of financing higher
education, which compels many families to make huge sacrifices in order to send their children to college, or go with a system that allows students to pay for their college education through income tax deductions and national service. 

Fortunately, the candidates offer us a real choice in these issues. They also offer us a real choice when it comes to education.

The centerpiece of George Bush's education program is a voucher plan that would spend public money to send children to private and parochial schools. He says it would allow parents to exercise choice and help poor children to escape poor schools. And he says that when public schools were forced to compete with private schools for students, they would be forced to improve.

Where do the other candidates stand on this issue? According to the Washington Post, though Ross Perot "has offered few specifics about how he would overhaul the nation's education system," he favors experimenting with private school "choice" (October 23, 1992) - this would presumably be something like Mr. Bush's voucher plan. Bill Clinton thinks parents should be able to choose the public school their children attend, but he is opposed to using public money to pay for students to go to private or parochial school. He has instituted a public-school choice program in Arkansas.

A recent poll sponsored by the Catholic Education Association found that the majority of people favor vouchers. But the way a question is worded influences the answer. Here's how the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which just completed a study on school choice, posed the question. People were to imagine two men having a discussion on improving public schools:

Mr. Smith says: the best way to improve education is to focus directly on supporting neighborhood schools, giving every school the resources needed to achieve excellence. Mr. Jones says: the best way to improve education is to let schools compete with each other for students. Quality schools would be further strengthened and weak schools would improve or close.

Who are you more likely to agree with, Mr. Smith who would support every neighborhood school or Mr. Jones who would let schools compete for students?

A big majority (82 percent) of those questioned agreed with Mr. Smith, so most people still value neighborhood schools and understand that you don't improve something by taking resources away from it.

But what about the right of parents to choose their children's schools? Should it extend, as Mr. Bush says, to giving parents public money to spend on private schools. Choice is an article of faith for Americans, but the real question with a voucher plan is "Will parents be able to choose where they want their children to go to school or will the schools do the choosing?" The way it works now, private and parochial schools can accept the kids they want and exclude the others. There's no reason to think things will change under vouchers. Here's what John Chubb and Terry, Moe, authors of Politics, Markets and America's Schools, the Administration's Bible on vouchers, say about how a voucher system should work:

[Schools] must be free to admit as many or as few students as they want, based on whatever criteria they think relevant -- intelligence, interest, motivation, behavior, special needs -- and they must be free to exercise their own informal judgments about individual applicants.

Mr. Bush's voucher system won't guarantee that parents can choose the schools they want and it won't help improve America's schools. Vouchers may provide a better education for a select few but at the cost of poorer education for everyone else. The future of our country depends on having all children become well-educated citizens and workers. We'll get these citizens by improving our public schools, not be abandoning them.