GOP GOVERNORS TACKLE EDUCATION ISSUES

Republican governors and governors-elect, who number 31 and who either govern or soon will govern nine of the 10 largest states, met last weekend in New Orleans for their annual confab. With the congressional wing of their party widely viewed to be going through its problems, it is to these chief executives that many Americans are looking for leadership. In the main, they aren't disappointing, and the chief arena for cutting-edge reform is in education, the top-of-the-mind concern for most voters.

The first thing to note about their approach is that they aren't reforming education in the Mel Carnahan-Bob Bartman manner imposed on Missouri these last five years. That is to say, they aren't imposing huge tax increases together with a dubious set of trendy reforms that empower educrats and shrink local control in favor of a distant state bureaucracy.

No, these GOP chief executives are more often found among the ranks of tax cutters. Michigan's John Engler (three terms) and Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson (four) have gained fame and have just won landslide re-elections on reputations for cutting taxes literally dozens of times. The winners are not only their state's taxpayers, but their workers, their entrepreneurs and business climates. Both these Great Lake states are booming, with job creation leading the nation.

One overriding characteristic most of these governors share is a preference for greater parental choice in education. Thompson, especially, is a champion of his state's pathbreaking parental choice program: the Milwaukee Parental Choice Plan. In this program, just approved by that state's supreme court, low-income parents may take a voucher for their child's education to any school, public, private or parochial. Other winners this year, notably Florida's Jeb Bush, are champions of school choice. Even before he was elected, Bush-the-private-citizen led the effort to establish Florida's first charter school in inner-city Miami, in an effort to save kids whom the public system is clearly failing. It was here his now-famous "compassionate conservatism" was most notably on display.

In education as in other fields, the states are now operating as the laboratories of democracy the Founders intended them to be. This is all to the good.