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A Celebration of Public Education  (continued)

Myth 5: Vouchers Will Improve Education by Increasing Choice
The claim that vouchers are a "fix" for failing public education has been reiterated for well over fifty years. The concept of vouchers is that the government would give a "voucher" to parents which they could use as their direct payment to a private school. The dollar value of a voucher has varied from one proposal to another. The voucher, it is claimed, would economically enable parents to withdraw their child from a public school and place the child into a school of their choice. That is the idea in a nutshell. In 22 referenda on vouchers over fifty years, voters have rejected the idea,23 because it rests on false assumptions.
   First, vouchers are not the solution for public schools with declining median SAT scores because, as I have already explained, those declines do not indicate a decline in the academic success of public schools. Public schools overall are doing as well as public schools in the past and often a great deal better.
   Second, those who complain about the cost of public education fail to explain how taking money from public schools and giving it to private schools is going to save money. Furthermore, public school costs are not out of line in comparison to the costs of education in other countries when comparisons are made fairly. Admittedly, there is a problem with how taxes are spent on public schools, and that is the unfair distribution of funds between urban, rural, and suburban schools. I address this issue in the last section of this paper.
   Third, as a public relations move, some politicians now are calling their voucher proposals "school choice." However, vouchers are not about parental choice, but about choice for the administrators of private academic and religious schools. They are the ones who decide whether or not to accept or reject a child. Private schools have the option of expelling children without having to take responsibility for what happens to a child after she or he is gone. Where does that leave those children with serious learning disabilities or behavioral problems who do not have the support of functional families? Furthermore, very few rural parents, whose children already travel an hour or more on school busses, have the choice of an alternative school even if they are interested.
   Fourth, perhaps one of the most disingenuous claims of pro-voucher advocates is that, " . . . economic theory supports the notion that vouchers would deliver higher quality services, more customer satisfaction, and lower prices."24 Let's examine this idea that free-market competition will improve education to see how wrong it is.
   A common survival strategy for companies under intense competition is to downsize, lay off employees, and jump on the next consumer trend. By analogy, can under-funded public schools in our city centers be expected to close classes, kick children out, and start yoga classes for affluent young professionals? Is the business strategy of an adult, risk-taking entrepreneur, who is willing to bet his house and children's college education on a business venture really similar to the risk that the board of directors of a private religious school takes when it opens its school with church donations or, if vouchers were law, with taxpayer's money? I don't think so. Private companies are required to conform to equal opportunity laws and cannot dismiss employees without using documented performance evaluation procedures. In contrast, private academic and religious schools use a strategy of discrimination to meet their goals. These schools discriminate among children to decide which they will enroll and which they will reject. Their rationale is the same as the one used by the Boy Scouts of America, which has chosen to discriminate against gays. The right to discriminate was so important to the Boy Scouts of America that it went to the Supreme Court in 2000 to defend its right to ban gays. After all, what is the point of establishing a private club or a religious school if its board of directors can't discriminate based on its religious beliefs or academic standards?
   Will vouchers increase the choices you have for educating your child? Consider these scenarios. Suppose Governor Ridge of Pennsylvania finally passes voucher legislation, and as a result five new private religious schools are founded by churches in your community because your taxes now can be used to fund these schools. Concurrently, tax support for your local public school is reduced.25 As a result, this public school drops art, music, and foreign language to meet its budget. Finally, none of these religious schools will accept your child because you profess the wrong religion, you are from the wrong side of the tracks, or you once wrote a letter-to-the-editor criticizing school prayer and offended the religious leaders of these schools. Do vouchers still sound like anyone's idea of a free-market economy?
   Fifth, anyone who is spending citizens' taxes for schools, or for any other purpose, has a fiduciary responsibility to be accountable to the public for those expenditures. Yet private religious schools do not want to have public representatives on their boards of directors. However, audits of the existing voucher experiments in Milwaukee have shown economic fraud.26
   Sixth, voucher proponents claim that there will be more parental involvement in private schools when parents pay directly.27 Yet direct payment is not linked to parental involvement. Historically, there is little to no parental involvement in the most costly, elite private schools such as Andover, Hotchkiss, Trinity, Choate, or in most private day schools such as Dalton. Where parents are actively involved, it is because of specific administrative strategies implemented to include parents in various aspects of the school's programs. These strategies have no relationship to direct payments. Furthermore, more and more public schools are actively involving parents.
   Seventh, voters do not want government-funded religious schools. Most citizens consider the First Amendment of the United States Constitution a bedrock of our democracy, and the First Amendment's establishment clause calls for church-state separation.
   Finally, voucher proponents make the very odd claim that most citizens would send their child to a private school if they could afford to.28 The fact is that there have been more referenda on vouchers than on any other public issue. For over fifty years voters have rejected vouchers at the polls by large margins, generally in the range of 2:1. Most recently, in November 2000, voters in the states of Washington, California, and Wisconsin voted down voucher referenda. Furthermore, enrollment in the largest system of private schools in the country, Catholic parochial schools, declined by 42% between 1970 and 1990,29 because so many parents decided not to send their children to these schools.
 
   The public has spoken. We understand that public schools as an institution are not failing. We understand that those schools that are in trouble are often resource poor and have a larger than average number of students who need special help academically, behaviorally, or both.
 
Myth 6: Charter Schools Will Improve Education for Children
Another approach that has received a great deal of media attention is charter schools. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate under special laws exempting the school from many of the regulations controlling regular public schools. For example, charter schools could be run by private corporations. Unfortunately, the hype for charter schools advanced by their promoters is not reflected in the performance of charter schools. Although some charter schools have performed well, most have not. For example, Texas authorized the creation of 188 charter schools, of which 164 are still in operation. As of 1998-99, the Texas charter schools are performing worse, on average, than public schools on the academic measures of reading, writing, and mathematics for African-Americans, Hispanics, Anglos, and others, and for the economically disadvantaged. In summary, only 53.2% of students in charter schools passed the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, compared to 80% of students in all other public schools in Texas.30
   Furthermore, some religious schools were awarded charter school status, given public tax dollars, but then violated the First Amendment's requirement for the separation of church and state.31 Studies of charter schools in Michigan and California also show disturbing trends of poor performance and mismanagement.32
   As of February 2001, 65 charter schools have been authorized in Pennsylvania. Of these, 11% are in violation of the law, as reported by Auditor General Robert Casey Jr.33 Supervision of charter schools in Pennsylvania is the responsibility of local school districts, but few if any districts have the resources to properly monitor the legal compliance of charter schools within their jurisdiction. The 17 Pennsylvania charter schools surveyed in 1998-99 had an average dropout rate that was twice as high as the rate for all Pennsylvania school districts.34 There is an entire for-profit educational industry just waiting to run charter schools. The question is how are these companies going to make a profit in school districts which are already underfunded? The money is to be made by focusing on the children who are the easiest to educate and who are not behavioral problems. This group of children does not include those who would need special education, those with physical, emotional, or mental handicaps, or those who should be involved in expensive enrichment programs.
   Charter schools should not be considered a blank check to waste public money or an excuse to violate the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
 
Myth 7: Public Education Undermines Religion
A question remains. If the system of public education is as good as I have claimed, why all the demagoguery? The answer may be money. Certainly it is one source of motivation.
   The Catholic school system in Pennsylvania has been getting deeper and deeper into financial trouble. Although there are more students attending Catholic schools in Pennsylvania than in any other state, their enrollment has decreased about 25.6% between 1970 and 1990. Nationally, student enrollment in Catholic schools declined 42.5%, from about 4.7 million students to 2.7 million during the same period.35
   This trend has continued.36 Concurrently, the number of nuns available to teach in these schools has also declined,37 so Catholic schools have had to pay more competitive salaries to attract teachers. Meanwhile, their school buildings are aging and becoming more and more expensive to maintain. As a result, the cost per Catholic school student has shot through the roof. This is the sagging parochial school system Governor Ridge wanted to subsidize with our taxes through his voucher program. To justify taking tax money away from public schools and giving it to parochial schools, he falsely claimed public schools were failing. The Catholic school system had an enormous financial interest in Governor Ridge's voucher program and invested substantial time, money, and lobbying into promoting vouchers in Pennsylvania.
   A second motive for demagogues attacking public education is the recognition that public education supports our democratic form of government. There are many people on the extreme right who do not believe in democracy; their actual goal is to do away with democracy – they want a theocracy. For example, Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, said in one of his sermons, "I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"38 According to the National Council of Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, "The owner's manual for the U.S. Constitution is the Bible." A small but vocal fourteen percent of Americans agree, according to a Gallup poll in 1996.39
   These demagogues rail against the evils of "godless public schools" and encourage parents to homeschool their children to avoid the "sins of this secular system." They have also tried to gain control of local school boards by using "stealth candidates" and have sought to influence the curricula of public schools. One such effort is the "parental rights" legislative initiatives which argue that any parent should have the right to prevent the use of any curriculum or school project he or she doesn't want his or her child exposed to, thus interfering with the education of all children. The practical effect of parental rights initiatives would be to create chaos in schools. Parallel efforts have included removing books from the libraries of public schools and seeking control of State Boards of Education that select textbooks for the entire state. For example, the fundamentalist members of the State Board of Education in Kansas decided in 1999 that evolution would not be taught in their public schools. This decision was later reversed.
   In Congress, these discontents have been channeled into efforts to eliminate the separation of church-state clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution through bills such as the Istook Amendment. If this amendment had been adopted, it would have made public school-sponsored prayer legal. In Pennsylvania, HR 1726 was introduced in 1999 aimed at giving local school boards a choice to have school-sponsored prayer in public school. Both bills failed.
   Unfortunately, these right-wing religious folks are biting the hand that feeds them. We are one of the most religious nations on earth. For example, since 1776, the number of different religious denominations in the United States has grown from 17 to over 2000.40 The growth of the secular public school system has contributed to keeping the religious peace in this country. This peace is the product of our democratic tradition which depends on tolerance and not promoting one religion over another in our public schools. The First Amendment has kept elected officials, such as school directors, from forcing their preferred religion or prayer on our children. This has helped protect the religious liberty of all children.
   Public schools in the United States do not indoctrinate children in the beliefs of others, but rather expose them to the intellectual riches of mankind without bias. In our secular educational system, each philosophy is subjected to the same intellectual scrutiny, and therefore none is favored. Thus, children who come from the homes of Fundamental Christians, Muslims, or Jews can expect to be treated equally. And the same must hold for the children of Catholics, humanists, agnostics, and atheists. In the end, every denomination is a minority, and their coexistence is made possible by our system.
   It is easy to see why public schools are a threat to those who want to turn the United States into a theocracy. Democracy depends on citizens who are tolerant of each other and express mutual respect. It requires resolving differences through discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise.41 Our public schools teach skills to promote these values by supporting student councils, student courts, forensic teams, debate teams, and student-led mediation.
   Furthermore, our public schools are teaching many values that are consistent with the religious beliefs of many people. For example, commitments to nonviolence and the peace testimony are important values in many religious communities in our country. Consistent with these values, many public schools in Pennsylvania are bringing in speakers to teach children about the risks of joining hate groups and about the long-term effects of hate crimes.
   In addition, most of our public schools have been taking important steps to change the culture of violence in our communities that undermines our capacity for self-government. In 1960, for example, only two states had outlawed hitting children in public school. As of 2001, corporal punishment is not permitted in 27 states and in nine more states, including Pennsylvania, more than half the school districts within these states have ended corporal punishment by school board policy.42 The educational professionals who have led the way for this change know that creating a school environment where each child can feel safe from fear creates a better learning environment. As a result, far fewer public school administrators are modeling violence as a way to resolve problems. Nationally, the number of children paddled in school has declined 67% in 21 years, from 1.4 million in 1978, to 457,754 in 1998.43
   Of the 23 states that still permit corporal punishment in public schools, the teachers and administrators in Texas, with a state population of almost 20 million, were responsible for a reported 81,373 incidents of paddling students in 1997, one quarter of all incidents in the United States. In Pennsylvania, with a population of almost 12 million, there were 90 reported incidents of paddling in public schools in 1997.44 Most children in Pennsylvania now go to public schools in districts that have formally done away with hitting children.
   As a result of public school efforts today to teach religious tolerance, to teach skills important in a democracy, and to eliminate corporal punishment, most of our children are now graduating with better democratic values than those held by students who graduated from our schools when school segregation was common, when school-sponsored prayer imposed the religious rituals of the majority on minority students, when athletics were emphasized only for boys, and when teacher violence was used to control children.
   It is quite possible that this decline in teacher- modeled violence, which is what paddling is, has influenced the decline in school violence. Between 1993 and 1997, school-related crimes against students declined overall from 155 to 102 incidents per thousand students, theft declined from 96 to 63, and violent acts declined 59 to 40 incidents per thousand students.45 These declines are the facts. It has been the horrendous killing at Columbine High School and similar incidents, and the saturation coverage of these by the media, that have created the false impression that school violence has been increasing. As terrible as these incidents were, school violence is still less than it used to be.
   A third factor affecting the critics of public education is sheer ignorance. In my school district, the biggest detractors of the public schools have no children in the local school. They speak about problems that do not exist. They are echoing what they've heard from the Typhoid Marys in the media.
   Finally, there are those demagogues who are against government and public institutions in general and are gullible enough to swallow almost any criticism of public schools and to spread these myths. For example, former Vice President Dan Quayle said, "the public schools are failing," in a talk in August 1999 at the National Press Club. He is wrong, and the other carriers infected with that disinformation, like Governor Ridge, President George H. Bush, William Bennett, and James Dobson, are also wrong. Overall, history of the public schools has been a story of phenomenal success.
 
The Challenge Ahead
The story of our public education system is one of enormous challenge and achievement. In 1917, only 15% of our students graduated from high school. By 2000, 82% were graduating. During the same period, the United States population increased from 52 million to 281 million. Even with this increase in student population, today's public schools are graduating students who perform academically at least as well as their parents and in many cases better.46
   One of the most well-known critics of public schools has conceded his criticism of public schools was unwarranted. Terrel Bell was Secretary of Education in the Reagan years and the author of A Nation at Risk, published in 1983. Ten years later, in 1993, Mr. Bell said, "In the face of many negative influences on our children that come from outside the school, we have done well to maintain our high school completion rate and our level of performance on achievement measures. . . . We have foolishly concluded that any problems with the levels of academic achievement have been caused by faulty schools staffed with inept teachers."47
   One of the most significant "negative influences" on our children has been the dramatic decline of social capital or civil involvement in community life in America, according to Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Social capital is measured by the extent to which citizens "trust other people, join organizations, volunteer, vote, and socialize with friends."48 For example, between 1973-74 and 1993-94, notes Professor Putnam, "the number of Americans who attended even one public meeting on town or school affairs in the previous year was cut by 35 percent."49 Parent-teacher associations (PTAs) used to have more members than any other secular organization in the early 1960's, according to one survey, but PTA membership has plummeted, losing 60% between 1960 and 1997.50
   "Between 1990 and 1997, the PTA lost half a million members, even though the number of families with children under eighteen grew by over 2 million and public school enrollment grew by over 5 million," writes Putnam.51
   "The correlation between community infrastructure [social capital], on the one hand, and student and parental engagement in schools, on the other hand, is very substantial," claims Putnam, "even after taking into account other economic, social, and educational factors, like poverty, racial composition, family structure, educational spending, class size, and so forth."52 "States that score high on the social capital index . . . are the same states where children flourish: where babies are born healthy, and where teenagers tend not to become parents, drop out of school, get involved in violent crimes, or die prematurely due to suicide, or homicide."53
   Professor Putnam continues, "In fact, our analysis suggests that for some outcomes – particularly SAT scores – the impact of race, poverty, and adult education levels is only indirect. These factors seem to influence the level of social capital in a state, and social capital – not poverty or demographic characteristics per se – drives test scores."54 "This state-by-state analysis reconfirms decades of research showing that community involvement is crucial to schools' success."55 According to this analysis, Pennsylvania is slightly below the median among states on the social capital index. States high on the social capital index are North Dakota, Minnesota, and Vermont. At the bottom are Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.56
   So President Reagan's Secretary of Education Terrel Bell was right when he said, "We have foolishly concluded that any problems with the levels of academic achievement have been caused by faulty schools staffed with inept teachers." The teachers and public schools are not the problem, even if they are convenient targets for some politicians and right-wing media pundits who are promoting vouchers or charter schools. Certainly, the teachers and administrators of a public school can only do so much in terms of encouraging parents to become involved in their children's education. Similarly, there is only so much community leaders can do to encourage citizens to become more involved in civic activities which strengthen the community social context within which schools function. We have met the enemy, as Pogo might have said, and he is us if we are not engaged in our community. In short, successful schools are everyone's civil responsibility.
   Moreover, there is a connection between parental involvement and the biggest issue facing public education today - adequate and equitable funding for all schools and students. Pennsylvania's School Code - the laws that govern public education - contains many references to "home and school visitors." More often called "attendance officers" these days, these are school employees whose job it is to ensure attendance and thereby ensure the opportunity for success in school.
   Given the critical role of parents in creating the attitudes and expectations necessary for successful learning, home and school visitors could play a vital role in meeting with parents, particularly the parents of students who are not doing well, to enlist their aid in their child's success. But as schools have faced tighter and tighter budgets, primarily because of inadequate state funding, such programs of parental involvement have become a luxury, even where they are most needed. When it comes time to balance the budget against the latest taxpayer demands and state shortfalls, having a teacher in front of the class always is a higher priority.
   Pennsylvania's school funding system is nationally recognized as one of the five or six most unfair systems in the nation. It is unfair because the quality of a child's education depends primarily on where the child's parents happen to live, not on the child's innate talents and abilities. This is because the state does not provide enough money - only about a third of the total cost - to overcome the vast differences in wealth between affluent and poor communities. It is not uncommon for a suburban school to spend $13,000 - 14,000 per student while a nearby rural or urban school can spend only $5,000 - 6,000 per student. And when total spending is adjusted to factor out busing costs and transportation subsidies for transporting parochial school students, or security costs - which are far lower in suburban districts - the numbers look worse. It is simply a fact that children in rural and urban areas are getting the short end of the stick.57
   One bright spot exists. In June 2001, the state House of Representatives passed House Resolution 42 by a margin of 195-1. HR 42 created a Select Committee on Basic Education Funding with a mandate to recommend a new funding system based on nine principles of equity and adequacy. At this writing, the Select Committee has begun its work with the expectation that a comprehensive and revolutionary change will be considered as part of the state's 2002 budget debate.
   Meanwhile, the inequity continues. Yet despite this financial resource disparity, many of the urban public schools that are being called failures often do wonders. Unfortunately, their successes are almost impossible to document because of urban migration. Many children who enter first grade in center city as non-English speaking students, or who are not ready for school at that time, become more successful students as they get older. However, by that time, their upwardly mobile families often have moved into suburban communities. The low test scores of those youngsters remain as a record of the urban school. Several years later, those same students' higher test scores become a measure of the suburban school's performance. Meanwhile, the urban school has enrolled another group of immigrant children whose low test scores seem to show that their urban teacher can't teach. Obviously, this assessment of teachers' and schools' performance is not fair. The urban teacher is faced with a much greater teaching challenge and has fewer resources available than most of his or her suburban counterparts.
   We still face serious challenges in education. In our post-industrial economy, which is now being called a knowledge economy, the demand and expectation for education is higher than it has ever been. Our graduates now are in competition with very well educated computer programmers in India, for example, who are doing computer programming for American industries via telecommunications from their places of work in India.
   Most of our students will compete successfully in this new environment. But not all, and that is America's Achilles' heel. This is not just a matter of international competition; it is a matter of being true to ourselves as a people. Our goal as a nation is to educate all the children, not just an elite. So we still have a problem, one that is more serious than a 6.2% dropout rate might suggest.
   In addition to the challenge of those who drop out, we face the challenge of educating children who arrive at school in kindergarten or first grade unprepared to learn, who have serious behavioral problems because of neglect or abuse at home, who have psychologically dropped out even though they sit in class, or who are chronically absent from school because their parents or guardians don't care or don't pay attention. Thirty and forty years ago many of these children dropped out of school to take unskilled jobs in factories or on farms. Very few such jobs exist today.
   The children who are not ready for school, who behave poorly, or who drop out need to be educated. That has been our historic promise to ourselves. This challenge is not more difficult than those our system of public education has successfully met in the past. It is a challenge that few private academic and religious schools have ever tried to address, and there is no indication that they will in the future – with or without vouchers or tax credits.
   Pennsylvania has 501 public school districts. In each of these public school districts are teachers and administrators working to find ways to educate these children. Our teachers need more support because the challenge we face in educating our children will not be overcome with quick, cheap fixes, or with legislative gimmicks such as tax credits.
   I have great hope for our future despite the failure so far of the Pennsylvania legislature to enact a fair system of taxation to support public schools. Such a system would allocate equal tax support for each child in public school regardless of where he or she lives. Even with this legislative failure, the merits of the public education system and its sustained, overall success are reasons for my confidence in America's future. Parents, teachers, and taxpayers should have confidence in our public system of education because the facts warrant that confidence.

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