Businesses Pushing School Voucher Plan

California businesses have been trying to improve education for years. They’ve adopted schools, donated equipment and used mentor as a verb. Nothing seemed to help.

Now a group of California executives is proposing more fundamental reform. Led by Joseph F. Alibrandi, chief executive of Whittaker Corp., they’re backing a program of parental choice to bring the discipline of the marketplace to schools.

Appropriately enough, they plan to put their case to voters. A committee is raising money for a statewide ballot initiative next November, when the presidential election will ensure a big turnout--and might even make the initiative a campaign issue.

Huckaby Rodriguez Inc., a well-known Sacramento political consultant, is already running the initiative campaign. The text has been filed with state officials, and a signature-gathering firm will hit the streets in January in search of 720,000 names.

What Alibrandi and company want is a voucher system. Every student in the state would get a credit worth 50% of what we spend per public-school pupil in California--about $5,200, organizers say. The $2,600 voucher would be good at any school, public or private, that meets basic standards. Current public school spending would more than cover the cost.

The idea is for the marketplace to take it from there. Bad schools, like bad restaurants, may fail for want of business. Good ones should thrive. And, moved by the chance to teach unfettered by bureaucracy and disorder, teachers will start new schools.

The Excellence Through Choice in Education League, which is behind the initiative, looks at first like just the usual conservatives. Its advisory board includes economist Milton Friedman and former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett. Dan Quayle appeared at a fund-raiser.

But the league’s plan isn’t born of ideology, and not all supporters of choice are doctrinaire. The league’s advisory board includes former U.S. Sen. John Tunney, a Democrat; Wisconsin Assemblywoman Annette Williams, a black former welfare recipient who says vouchers can help minorities and the poor; Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean of the USC School of Education, and J. Clayburn La Force, dean of UCLA’s graduate school of management.

Most of all, though, the plan is being pushed by California business people who recognize that the state’s future depends on its intellectual capital.

“Our guys aren’t coming from conservative Reaganite ideology,” says Andrew D. Paterson, a director of the Technology Leadership Council, an industry group. “Our guys are coming from high-tech companies, and they’re worried about a shortage of engineers and other technically trained people.”

Alibrandi, whose Los Angeles-based firm makes aerospace equipment, may be typical of the executives involved. They tend to be self-made men, close to the immigrant experience, who attended public schools and run knowledge-intensive businesses.

Alibrandi grew up poor in Boston’s South End and is a former part-time teacher. He’s now paying private school tuition for a poor black child in Oakland. Once a problem student, the boy is on the honor roll.

“I tried to do all the things businesses are asked to do,” Alibrandi says of the public schools. “Then it suddenly dawned on me. We weren’t getting anywhere.”

Business disaffection with California’s schools runs deep. Joseph Jacobs, chairman of Pasadena-based Jacobs Engineering, says the quality of students from public schools who go on to study engineering in college is “miserably poor.”

The son of Syrian immigrants, Jacobs got a doctorate in chemical engineering and built a one-man consultancy into one of America’s 10 biggest engineering firms. He backs the initiative.

So does Mike Gibson, president of Kavlico, a Moorpark maker of high-tech sensors for jet aircraft, cars and industry. Gibson complains of a severe educational deficit in entry-level workers and worries about a shortage of Ph.D. scientists as well.

Also backing the initiative is Safi Qureshey. The Pakistani immigrant is co-founder and chief executive of AST Research Inc., the fast-growing Irvine-based personal computer maker.

A California school-choice initiative is hardly a shoo-in. Teachers’ unions will fight it, and success at the polls would probably bring challenges in court.

But choice experiments have shown promise in New York City, Wisconsin and elsewhere. And choice would open up the private schools, which generally outperform public ones.

Choice can help revitalize cities, since middle-class parents might not feel so compelled to flee, and choice might also save money, since good schools typically lack costly bureaucracies. Vouchers are egalitarian too.

The future of California doesn’t depend on aerospace or Hollywood or tourism or sunshine. Nor does it hinge on self-esteem. In the future, education alone will make or break us.

Business people like Joe Alibrandi know that, and their proposal, for all its sweep, is really quite modest. They simply suggest that parents will tend to choose good schools for their kids, forcing bad schools to change or die.

It’s not just a matter of assuring a prosperous future for California. More than ever, in the years ahead, what we know will determine the kind of society we’ll have as well.