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Proposition 38, School vouchers
by John A. Jackson
For many, many reasons, Proposition 38, the school voucher initiative on this November's ballot, is just an awful idea.
First, to say a child is trapped in the public schools is the same thing exactly as to say he or she is trapped in American citizenship.
Second, it seems unlikely that whole new schools can achieve better results for even less money by hiring persons who are not teachers, probably have never taught and have no professional training to teach -- and that the new schools will make money in the process.
Third, it also seems all wrong to entrust educational reform to persons who dislike, distrust and want to degrade the nation's corps of teachers because those teachers want unions to plead their case.
Fourth, as practical politics, if private schools receive major public subsidies, the society's present, shamefully inadequate support for the public schools will disintegrate. Unready to spend enough money for one system, California voters will not support two.
Fifth, there is no reason to think competition among schools systems will produce better-educated students, especially since present private and parochial schools show no pattern in standard tests of superiority to their public counterparts, when social advantages are discounted.
And last, schools based on religion simply cannot legally receive voucher funds no matter what subterfuge is used as justification: church-run schools are most definitely "establishment(s) of religion"; giving them tax money is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
These are good points, I think, and unanswerable. But the first is the most important to me and I have not heard it addressed during the campaign.
American citizenship, not the technical legal status but the tremendous fact of being part of our nation's common enterprise, is a precious privilege. It confers great benefits-and considerable burdens.
The public schools are incomparably the most important agencies for creating our sense of citizenship in childhood and exercising it as adults. Cities, counties, states-all pale by comparison. The public schools transmit our civic values.
Indeed, at no time in a person's life is he or she more likely than as a public school student to live and work in the company of persons from economic, social and ethnic groups so varied and so different from his or her own. If respect for diversity is a democratic value, and it is, then we Americans have made the public schools its repository.
I feel great compassion for and even anger about the plight of parents who must send their children to under-funded, inadequate and even unsafe public schools.
Those schools certainly exist. One does not need test scores to identify them. But the cause of their failures is pretty clear, and it is not because they get too much money or because the children receive too much parental time and support. The cure is not to give up on the public schools.
One does not abandon vital democratic institutions, developed over centuries, because they need correction and help. Good citizens correct and help them.
John Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com.