KINDER'S COMMENTARY: SCHOOL VOUCHERS FIND SUPPORT IN NEW REPUBLIC ARTICLE

The grass-roots campaign to enact school choice -- full parental freedom to choose any school, public, private or parochial -- gets more interesting all the time. This is the voucher system, or nothing more than a GI Bill for kids, as some have characterized it. Under it, parents would get a voucher (or, as I prefer to call it, a scholarship,) -- say, $2,500-$4,000 or so -- that parents could use to choose the school they prefer, rather than having their children trapped inside a government school with no choice in the matter. It is getting more and more difficult for the forces favoring blind adherence to the status quo to contain the prairie fire for school choice, what with outbreaks in nearly every state and the District of Columbia too.

There are converts on the Democratic side, such as U.S. Rep. Floyd Flake, D-New York, the African-American pastor of a Harlem church. Flake lambastes the public school bureaucracy in his state -- New York has more school bureaucrats than all of Western Europe combined -- for being more concerned with their jobs than with what goes on in the classroom. Over the last two years, Flake has emerged as a passionate advocate of allowing parents to choose their own schools.

Now, comes a remarkable article favoring school choice published in the Nov. 10 issue of the liberal New Republic magazine. When the New Republic latches onto an idea long identified with and championed by conservatives such as yours truly, you may be assured that irresistible momentum is building for that idea. School choice -- championed in this space for nearly a decade and once regarded as a fringe idea of the libertarian right -- is going mainstream. Shop stewards of the teachers unions: Call your office.

Jonathon Rauch is the author of the arresting New Republic piece, entitled "Choose or Lose." Rauch argues that Democrats have been wrong to give the school choice to Republicans. As with so many others of us school choice advocates, he focuses on the miserably failing schools of America's inner city. Rauch the moral as well as the educational imperative for choice:

"For poor children, trapped in execrable schools, the case is moral rather than merely educational. These kids attend schools that can't protect their physical safety, much less teach them. For the poor people to go to dangerous, dysfunctional schools that better-off people fled years ago, and that better-off people would never tolerate for their own children -- all the time intoning pieties about `saving' public education -- is worse than unsound public policy. It's repugnant policy."

Sounding themes voiced here for years, Rauch confronts what he calls the "flimsy" arguments against school choice: "Will choice destroy the public school system? Competing with Toyota didn't destroy GM, and it certainty didn't do GM's customers any harm. Our higher education system is voucherized, inasmuch as you can take your federal loans and scholarships anywhere, and our public universities are none the worse for that. Interestingly, we have no gun-ridden, dysfunctional state universities -- not one. Imagine that.

"... What baffles me most about vouchers is the liberals' resistance to them, a fact that reflects more poorly on liberalism than any other fact I know. The case for school vouchers is the classic case for consumers against monopolies ... Vouchers are also a classic opportunity to equalize opportunity. Why should the poor be denied more control over their most important means of social advancement, when soccer moms and latte drinkers take for granted that they can buy their way out of a school (or a district) that abuses or annoys them?" Amen to that.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communication and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.