School Vouchers: No End in Sight.

As I am writing this column in September, the outcomes of the November elections can't be predicted. The next occupant of the White House will be in a position to shape the Supreme Court, and thus the Constitution and Bill of Rights, for possibly generations to come. And it is no exaggeration to say that the future of freedom of (and from) religion, church-state separation, reproductive rights, public education, and civil liberties hangs in the balance.

Whether or not California and Michigan voters reject school voucher ballot initiatives, the well-funded campaign to use vouchers to wreck public education and church-state separation will go on--and on and on. The California voucher constitutional amendment proposal, promoted by multimillionaire Timothy Draper, would divert over $2.6 billion annually in public funds to sectarian and other private schools, according to a September 2000 report by the Policy Analysis for California Education group. The Michigan plan, promoted by ultraconservative foundations and Catholic church officials, would not only lock the state into a goofy voucher plan but also allow the legislature to create a tuition tax credit plan that could devastate the state's finances and public schools.

Ignored in the media reportage on these initiatives is the fact that vouchers or their analogs have been voted on and decisively rejected by statewide electorates twenty-two times in referenda from coast to coast since 1967, most recently in the 1990s in California, Oregon, Washington State, and twice in Colorado.

Also largely ignored are the results of the thirty-second annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public's attitudes toward public schools, released in August and well worth noting.

While only 24 percent of respondents give an A or B rating to public schools nationally (46 percent give a C), 60 percent of public school parents give their local public school an A or B (21 percent give a C). What this shows is that most people give a favorable rating to the public schools they are familiar with, while, apparently influenced by adverse publicity from school critics, they give a lower rating to schools they aren't personally familiar with.

Poll respondents prefer "improving existing public schools" to "providing vouchers" by 75 percent to 22 percent. By 69 percent to 19 percent they prefer having competent teachers in every classroom and rigorous academic standards to so-called parental choice plans. "Allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense" is opposed 56 percent to 39 percent.

Using a question that inextricably intertwined public school choice and private school vouchers, which clearly mixes apples and oranges (or, as statisticians would say, aggregates disparate entities), the poll found opposition running 52 percent to 45 percent. Furthermore, by better than three to one respondents said that nonpublic schools receiving public funds "should be required to accept students from a wider range of backgrounds and academic ability levels than is now generally the case" and "should be accountable to the state in the way public schools are accountable"--conditions few, if any, nonpublic schools would accept, as was clearly shown in the U.S. Department of Education's 1998 report, Barriers, Benefits, and Costs of Using Private Schools to Alleviate Overcrowding in Public Schools.

A curious finding of the poll is that, while respondents indicate by 41 percent to 29 percent that Democrats are more interested than Republicans in improving public education and believe by 64 percent to 25 percent that Republican control of the White House and Congress is likely to "favor private schools over public schools," they are dead even as to whether they believe Gore or Bush would be better for public education. Go figure.

The PDK/Gallup report is accessible on the Internet at www.pdkintl.org.

Meanwhile, a host of well-funded ultraconservative groups and foundations are pouring money into ad campaigns and ballot initiatives in a massive effort to wreck public education and undermine church-state separation.

In their recent book Devolution and Choice in Education: The School, the State and the Market, British researchers Geoff Whitty, Sally Power, and David Halpin study voucher, school choice, and other school privatization schemes in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden, finding benefits ascribed to these programs attributable to "cream skimming." They conclude that these plans "enhance the advantaged at the expense of the least well off" and that choice plans "are doing little to alleviate existing inequalities in access and participation and in many cases, may be exacerbating them."

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty.