KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SCHOOL CHOICE IS WORTH AN EXPERIMENT

I find curious the furor over a tentative, small, pilot program of a school choice measure such as House Bill 1037, a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Mary Kasten of Cape Girardeau. Mary Kasten is a former 20-year member of the Cape Girardeau School Board and officer of the state school board association. A selfless and tireless public servant, her motives can hardly be questioned, any more than can her commitment to public education. Like this writer, she is exclusively a product of public education, up to the bachelor's degree level.

Nonetheless, secure in their monopoly, all the pillars of the public school establishment have weighed in against HB 1037, as one would expect. Thus the Missouri School Board Association's Brent Ghan announces his organization's opposition in drearily familiar terms. What they're really saying is something like this: We've always done it this way, so we can't change. Ever. Any experimentation with school choice, or parental freedom in education as I prefer to call it, would be "giving tax money to private and parochial schools, and would violate the separation of church and state." So there.

Funny, I don't recall church-state arguments being raised against the GI Bill, which offered benefits to returning veterans to attend the institution of higher learning of their choice -- public, private or parochial. A GI could take the scholarship money to Southeast Missouri State University, or the University of Missouri, or St. Louis University, or Southwest Baptist University, or to Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Nobody that I know of raised the church-state issue. The GI BIll remains one of the few bona fide, identifiable success stories among all the government social programs ever tried. It opened the doors of higher education for millions of returning vets who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity. Is it an evil thing to attempt the same feat, giving to parents the same choices at the level of K-12?

Nor is higher education the sole successful experiment with parental freedom in education. If you qualify you can, today, get government money to fund your child in a privately run pre-school or day care center, and this includes religious institutions. The upshot, then, is this: The GI Bill allows freedom of choice in higher ed, while parents of toddlers have freedom of choice in selecting their day care or pre-school. That leaves K-12 as the sole field of government monopoly-funded American education. Why?

Now, it must be said that so large a change in established patterns as full parental freedom in education, K-12, has major implications, not all of which can be fully planned or foreseen. Legitimate arguments can and are raised against it. Valid questions remain to be fully answered.

This is why proponents of parental freedom, such as this writer, support limited experimentation with school choice through pilot programs such as HB 1037. This measure would permit a limited experiment in parental freedom by giving scholarships to low-income parents in our state's two largest urban centers -- home to failing public schools, stagnant test scores, scandalous dropout rates and the two most expensive desegregation cases in America. It is here where our public school monopoly is failing the worst. Can't we experiment with a new path, to see whether it might offer a way out of this dreadful trap? (To test the proposal in an outstate area, Cape would also be included in the pilot. No reduction in state funding would result.)

No, say the proponents of the status quo. We can't change. Ever. Not even an experiment. We've always done it this way, so there.

To them I say, some day this wall will fall.

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