THE REVOLUTIONARY (via Tom Morin):

Yes, the Education President (Sol Stern, Summer 2004, City Journal)

For NCLB’s reading initiative alone, Bush richly deserves the title “education president.” But in addition, NCLB, though not perfect, is a powerful instrument of reform in other ways. What’s more, a new Bush-promoted school voucher program for Washington, D.C., may point the way toward further education reform in a second Bush term. [...]

When President Bush signed NCLB without private school vouchers, many education reformers feared that the bill was a big setback for the school choice cause. Yet a major advance for school choice did make it into the act: Supplemental Educational Services (SES). Largely unnoticed by most commentators at the time of NCLB’s signing, the SES provision has turned out to be the new law’s school choice sleeper.

In effect, SES gives disadvantaged students in schools that have failed for three straight years a voucher—worth up to $1,700 in some states—to buy tutoring services from licensed providers, both public and private, including religious institutions. The tutoring money comes out of the federal funds allocated to the failing school’s district. Providers must win approval from state education departments and must sign contracts with the relevant school districts.

Some public school systems, feeling threatened by outside competition and wanting to hold on to the federal money, have balked at implementing SES services—delaying the signing of contracts or not informing parents of the tutoring options open to them. Last year, for example, the Buffalo, New York, public schools spent only $1 million in federal funds to tutor 800 kids, even though there were 9,000 eligible students and up to $14 million available for tutoring. In the Albany school district, where all the schools made the failing list, only one student is receiving SES tutoring so far, prompting Albany’s mayor to call school officials on the carpet publicly. Still, more than 110,000 children across the nation received SES tutoring in 2002–03.

And that number will surely climb as reform organizations rush to get the word out. National school choice organizations like the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Education Options are leading the way, having received federal grants to run SES information campaigns. At the same time, more and more providers are signing on, including, in New York State, the Boys and Girls Club, the Urban League, Sylvan Learning, Kaplan, Princeton Review, and even the Youth and Families Department of the City of Albany. And they are starting to get results. “I think we are beginning to see improvement with children who are way behind in reading skills,” says Angel Staples, a third-grade teacher from the Buffalo public schools, about her moonlighting job as a tutor in an SES program. “It’s partly because we use a very scripted phonics program and partly because we can give the children a lot of individual attention in our small classes.”

Tom Carroll, a seasoned school choice activist in upstate New York, thinks that over time SES will whet parents’ appetite for more reforms. “What parents are willing to accept from their public school districts will change when they see that there are private groups and churches that may be doing a better job of raising their kids’ academic performance,” Carroll says. Further, though the Bush administration makes no such predictions, Carroll argues that parents will eventually start asking why the local church school that tutors their kids after school can’t teach them during the day, increasing support for publicly funded vouchers. Teachers College professor Henry Levin agrees, albeit ruefully. SES, he thinks, could be a Trojan horse, ultimately leading to vouchers. “By 2014,” he predicted, “we’re going to hear that public schools can’t do the job, but that private schools can.” [...]

So we’ve now come full circle since congressional Democrats forced President Bush to drop the private school choice option in NCLB. A majority of Congress now perceives that choice limited to the public schools is not a sufficient remedy for kids trapped in dysfunctional school systems like Washington’s. Therefore, the top education reform goal of a second Bush administration should be to revisit NCLB’s accountability and choice provisions when the act’s reauthorization comes due in 2006. Since the branding of so many schools as “failing” has vexed public school officials around the country, President Bush, along with his education reform allies in Congress, could offer Democrats this deal: “Let’s agree to limit the number of schools considered failing, but if we can’t find room in successful public schools for the kids from the really bad schools, then at least let’s give those children a chance at private schools.”

Even a limited number of vouchers financed with federal money would be a huge prize worth aiming for. But meanwhile, our education president is now in a position to change the national discourse about the nation’s public education system, explaining why it achieves so little, despite spending so much. Instead of merely rebutting his liberal foes’ charge that his administration has “underfunded” NCLB, the president needs to go on the offensive and teach the country the real lesson of American public education—that, if anything, we are overspending on the public schools and are not even close to getting our money’s worth.

Nothing would be a better classroom exhibit for the president’s lecture to the American people than a successful Washington, D.C., voucher program. As Bush education official Rees notes, it will be “rigorously studied” by supporters and critics of choice alike—which is why, she says, “I am spending 75 percent of my time on the D.C. program, making sure it is implemented well and sold to parents.” The Census Bureau has just released figures showing that the D.C. public school district spends a mind-boggling $13,400 per pupil—higher than any state in the union. Yet as everyone now knows, Washington has the worst schools in the country. When, as is likely, thousands of D.C. voucher recipients manage to find perfectly decent schools for $7,500 or less, even the most mathematically challenged taxpayers will comprehend just how much the public education system that President Bush has valiantly worked to reform has been ripping them off. And then, perhaps, the idea of school choice will begin to seem as sensible and commonplace as compulsory schooling itself.

It has only taken conservatives two years longer than Ted Kennedy to figure out that George W. Bush duped the Democrats in the NCLB tussle. Ultimately the cost effectiveness of a market driven solution to the education program dooms the current mandatory public schools system. And once the State loses control of kids minds everything the Left has achieved over the last seventy years is up for grabs.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2004 10:32 PM