KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SCHOOL CHOICE GAINING IN SOME STATES

Stop talking about letting the kids escape.

-- Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, speaking against school choice on "The Larry King Show" in 1992.

Against fierce resistance from an educational establishment that fights this reform as it does no other, a breach in the Berlin Wall of American education -- school choice -- is widening. Under this model it is parents -- not bureaucrats nor the double monopolists of the teachers' unions -- who are about to find themselves being empowered.

"Cleveland to experiment with school vouchers/Joins Milwaukee as pioneer in choice" reads the headline over a story in one national news publication last week. The article begins: "Cleveland, following Milwaukee's lead, has become the second U.S. city to provide state-funded vouchers to low-income children for public, private or religious schools of their choosing."

Parental choice in education, given up for dead when California voters defeated it by a 70-30 percent margin in 1993 and, until recently, the subject of only a timid experiment in Milwaukee, is spreading. Momentum is building as bipartisan efforts are mounted in more than a score of states, including Missouri. A sweeping school choice program fell just short of enactment last month in Pennsylvania. That leaves Wisconsin and Ohio where pilot programs in school choice have actually made it into law. It is no coincidence that in both these two breakthrough states, Republicans control everything: the governor's mansion as well as both houses of the legislature. But in both states, victory in the school choice battle came after the GOP majority reached out to make common cause with urban black Democrats.

"When a system is as bad as it is here in Cleveland, we need to have a choice," said Fannie Lewis, a black Democratic lawmaker from inner-city Cleveland. "Monopolies are not good," Lewis continued. "I don't have a problem with religious schools." Rep. Lewis crossed party lines to collaborate with Ohio Gov. George Voinovich, a former Republican mayor of Cleveland who was re-elected last fall by a smashing 72 percent margin.

School choice is emerging as the most important civil rights issue of the 1990s. This is true for a simple reason: 50 percent of America's minority school children attend inner-city schools in the nation's 12 largest cities. It is these schools that are failing, and failing catastrophically. Clearly it is in these troubled, mostly declining cities that the new model of school choice has the most to offer.

Two weeks ago, the Wisconsin legislature passed Gov. Tommy Thompson's budget, which includes $14.7 million to expand Milwaukee's five-year-old voucher program to include religious schools this fall. In Ohio on June 30, Gov. Voinovich signed a two-year state budget that includes $5.25 million to launch a school choice program in Cleveland beginning in the 1996-97 school year.

Shellshocked teachers union officials are trying to sort it all out. "I think the union was surprised," said Alice Gill, a 24-year veteran of the Cleveland school system and former vice president of the Cleveland Teachers Union, which led the fight against vouchers. "At one point, it appeared it had been stopped."

Lewis, the Cleveland legislator, says she doesn't care about the teachers union. "My concern is children. The union will take care of itself and its jobs. I can't be concerned about jobs when kids' lives are at stake. I don't owe them [unions] anything. I'm a registered Democrat. But when Voinovich was mayor he helped me rebuild my neighborhood." Improving education, she stresses, is an important piece of that rebuilding effort.

Speaking of one of liberalism's worst failures, Lewis said: "Busing never should have been. The only people who made money out of busing were the lawyers and the bus company. We're back to busing black kids to be with black kids. We've got all-black classrooms again. We prostituted classrooms in the name of poor people."

Here's hoping those words, and the fruits of Lewis' efforts for school choice, will resonate in Missouri, home to overburdened taxpayers, hard-pressed outstate schools and the two most expensive desegregation cases in America.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.