DIFFERNING VIEWS FROM THE CANDIDATES FOR THE MISSOURI SENATE, DISTRICT 27: REPUBLICAN PETER KINDER

Earlier this year, I responded to a questionnaire that asked for my position on proposals to enact a form of vouchers to effect full parental choice in education. I responded with these words:

"I generally look with favor on parental choice and voucher proposals as a promising reform in education. I realize that many in public education are alarmed at such proposals. Opponents advance persuasive arguments, and I am no expert.

"Insofar as I understand President Bush's proposal America 2000: A GI Bill for Kids he is proposing to experiment with choice and vouchers in selected school districts that would agree to participate in a trial program. I favor such an experiment, so that we can determine whether this proposal's promise is real or illusory. If it's promising, we can expand the program; if opponents are right, and the whole thing is destructive of the public schools, then we can halt the program without having willy-nilly enacted the latest fad."

Precisely what is it that opponents fear in experimentation? Don't we owe it to our children to determine if school choice is effective? Or do opponents blindly oppose any reform, however promising?

The story of Polly Williams

In assessing the importance of experimenting with school choice, I believe it is instructive to keep in mind how the world looks to many who live in today's inner cities. To do this, let me focus on one Polly Williams of inner city Milwaukee, Wis.

Polly Williams is a remarkable human being. A state representative in her native Wisconsin. A Democrat. A liberal Democrat, she chaired the 1988 Wisconsin primary campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

A former welfare mother, a single welfare mother, Rep. Williams reared five children on her own. And she not only favors full parental choice; she pushed choice with vouchers through a reluctant Wisconsin legislature and got it signed into law by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.

In most of this battle, Polly Williams found herself pitted against her usual liberal allies and against Wisconsin's powerful public education bureaucrats, who took her to court (after a long battle, she prevailed).

Why has Polly Williams fought so hard to enact parental choice in education?

Big Government's war on the poor

Let's consider how the world looks to Polly Williams and many others like her. She lives in a dirty, crime-infested, drug-ridden, high-rise public housing project. Few readers of the Southeast Missourian would even consider living there. Here in this miserable trap, Polly William's own government has imprisoned her and made desperate the lives of her family and friends.

Where does Polly Williams send her children out to play? Into crime-ridden streets. There, they are not safe from becoming innocent, unintended victims of drive-by shootings. Each month, we read of new horror stories of the deaths of children in our inner cities. In pursuit of a misguided notion of liberal "compassion", Big Government has taken on a million tasks no government was ever well-suited to perform. In the process, Big Government has failed its first and most fundamental responsibility: the maintenance of civil peace and the protection of the lives, safety and property of the people.

And where, until school choice, was Polly Williams forced to send her children to school? Into crime-ridden, drug-infested public schools, where beepers in the hallway signify the common place event of drug deals being turned: by sixth-graders. There, children walk through metal detectors to classrooms where little learning occurs, because teachers cannot teach and enforce discipline at the same time. Or, not enforcing discipline, the atmosphere does not allow them to teach. Few of us in Southeast Missouri would sit still while their children were forced into such a school.

Polly William's impassioned cry

Caught in this desperate trap, and fed up with Big Government's multi-billion dollar "compassion" industry, Polly Williams decided to do something about it. She pushed through choice, so that her children could be able to attend the schools that she chose for them not the schools, no matter now bad, that the government had told her previously she must send them.

Polly Williams has choice in Milwaukee. And she has witnessed the positive results it has had on her children and family. Now she is traveling the country, pleading with parents in other inner-cities to work for it, pleading with state government to allow it. Millions like her are crying out as well.

Their anguished and impassioned cry is to have the same choice that wealthy people have always had: to send their children to the school they feel will best serve them. They know, school choice is the one way out of the trap in which Big Government has ensnared them.

The empowerment of choice

Seen in this light, choice can be a powerful device to empower the poor (especially the minority poor) and middle class. And we already know that by definition it serves to empower all parents.

How about it? Will we stay with business as usual, and throw more money at the same old system? Or will we empower Polly Williams and millions of poor and middle class Americans for whom she speaks, who want to reclaim the right and the responsibility to take care of their own children? And break out of the Big Government compassion/control game they have been entrapped in generation after generation?

Peter Kinder is the Republican candidate for Missouri Senate, District 27.

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