State School Board Votes to Oppose Voucher Initiative

Citing concerns about cost and accountability, the State Board of Education voted 8 to 0 Friday to oppose the school choice, or voucher, initiative on the November ballot.

The vote puts the board--whose members are conservative to moderate Republicans appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson or his predecessor, George Deukmejian--firmly in line with leaders of the public school Establishment, which is leading the campaign against the initiative.

Leaders of the coalition formed to oppose the ballot measure, including the California Teachers Assn., said they considered the board vote an important early test of Republican sentiment.

“Clearly whether you are a conservative, a moderate or a liberal, you will find good reasons to oppose this initiative,” said Rick Manter, director of the Committee to Educate Against Vouchers. He urged Wilson, who has remained neutral, to oppose the initiative.

The board vote surprised and angered the initiative’s sponsors, Excellence Through Choice Education League.

Ken Khachigian, a former Deukmejian adviser and the principal strategist for ExCEL, said the board’s vote “revealed it is as opposed to education reform, as are the powerful teachers unions and the entrenched, overpaid educational bureaucracy of California.”

“This tragic action by the board will merely fuel the parents’ revolt that has only just begun,” Khachigian added.

Using tax money, the initiative would give parents a “scholarship” or voucher to redeem at any school that would accept their children--public, private or parochial. The amount provided for private or parochial schools would be about $2,500, or half the amount now spent on a child in public school.

In addition, the initiative would enable parents to choose among public schools within their district and would provide for public schools to convert to voucher-redeeming schools if they wished. The measure would limit new rules for private schools, which are largely unregulated in California.

While appearing to support the concept of giving parents “a wide range of choices when deciding where students should be enrolled in school,” the board’s resolution came out firmly against “using public education funds to pay for private school education.”

Among the nine points the board cited in its resolution, adopted after two public hearings, were concerns that it would undermine public school funding, which is provided largely by the state, and the board’s estimation that “over $2 billion will be taken . . . for students currently enrolled in private schools.”

Initiative proponents said the state would save money and noted that most current private school students could not receive vouchers until the 1995-96 school year.