TIME IS NOW TO DEBATE CHOICE IN EDUCATION

This Tuesday, November 2, voters in California face a crucial school funding issue that has national implications. I believe the California debate bears directly on why Cape Girardeau voters have twice this year rejected school bond issues for constructing badly needed new buildings.

Shall the state of California grant to parents a voucher in the amount of $2,600 for each parent to use in educating his or her child in the school of the parents' choice, whether public or private, including even parochial schools? This is the question Proposition 174 raises for Golden State voters.

Polls suggest that this specific ballot issue will fail. This despite stated support, in California, of up to 70 percent for the concept of school choice as distinguished from this specific measure.

California spends approximately $5,200 per pupil in state funding. Thus, the $2,600 voucher is exactly half of that amount. For every student who leaves the public for private schools, half the $5,200 statewide average remains in the public system, so that per pupil expenditures on those remaining will actually rise.

Critics say such a scheme will mean the end of the public schools as we have known them. Many Californians, yearning to inject competition into government monopoly schooling, are saying, "Fine." Californians have just learned this year that their fourth graders are dead last in reading skills among all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They are entitled to ask, with parents in many other locales, is this how we prepare students to enter an increasingly competitive world economy?

Desperate to maintain their stifling monopoly position in public education, the teachers' unions have fought Proposition 174 with single-minded fury. (Here's a fact the teachers' unions will not tell you: Nationwide, public school teachers are two to three times more likely to have their children in private schools than are other parents of similar economic circumstances. In urban areas, this portion of public school teachers with children in private schools is between 40 and 50 percent.) Drawing on tax-paid salaries, the California Teachers Association (NEA) assessed its members a special fee to amass its warchest of $14 million, to pay for ads opposing the measure. They are prepared to outspend backers of parental choice by more than 10-1.

Many of the teachers' union's arguments have the ring of hysteria, even desperation. Opponents warn that witches' covens, American Nazis and the KKK will open private schools and receive voucher money. But we've long had public assistance for students attending private institutions of higher learning. I've yet to hear of Warlock University, or Pagan Polytech.

I believe we need a debate in Missouri over the concept of full parental choice in education, both public and private, including parochial schools. Some older (wiser?) and more experienced of my colleagues, veterans of past battles to enact tuition tax credits for private schools, caution me that this cannot be accomplished. To them I say: The last five years have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall; the collapse of international Communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and American victory in the Cold War; the decimation of long-time blue chips such as IBM at the hands of upstart Microsoft; and the arrival, for peacemaking on the White House lawn, of ancient blood enemies Yasser Arafat and the leaders of Israel. The first-ever black mayor of St. Louis is saying we need to end busing and return to the neighborhood school, or we're not going to have neighborhoods at all. We do indeed live in a new world.

Why does school choice bear on voter support for school bond issues? Facing double payment, parents and grandparents with children in private schools are voting heavily against these issues. They inform me that they will continue doing so until some help is provided to them. The tax burden on families with children is crushing, vastly heavier than 40 years ago. The end game for traditional school finance is upon us.

No matter what the outcome in California Tuesday, I predict the growing national movement for choice in education will continue gathering momentum. The teachers' unions must defeat choice everywhere; to start the tide running, parental choice backers need break through the education establishment's Berlin Wall only once. There's no stopping an idea whose time has come. I believe we need to test full parental choice in education and see whether its revolutionary promise is fact or fiction. At the least, we could test a pilot program in St. Louis and Kansas City, to see how it works. Could this be an escape from the desegregation money pit?

Former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander may just be correct. He says at a moment not too far off, perhaps the turn of the century or not long thereafter, we will look back and be amazed that there was ever a time when poor and middle class Americans were denied the simple choice of deciding where to send their children to school, along with the resources to make the choice that wealthy Americans have always enjoyed.