Offering Hope to Children in School : Vouchers would offer less bureacracy and better education.

In our lifetime, the strength of the political left has been the power of its Big Idea--equality. In opposition, the right was often made to look small. Conservatives never looked tinier than they did in 1963, when they watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington from the sidelines. “I have a dream” was a message--racial equality--with universal appeal.

Today, a great role reversal is taking place. The left is abandoning King’s optimism and retreating into pessimism and separatism. At the same time, a new generation on the right is updating King’s message, powered by the new realization that the bureaucratic system has become the enemy of equal opportunity as well as upward mobility.

The weakness of the left is clear. Last week’s 30th anniversary march on Washington was a fizzle. No coherent vision was offered, as forgettable speakers railed about everything from the North American Free Trade Agreement to Angola.

Once it was the right that emphasized racial categories and theories of inferiority and difference. Now the left seems determined to segregate itself. Author Toni Morrison sneers that Clarence Thomas “bleached” himself when he became a conservative. Lani Guinier agrees, arguing that only liberalism can represent black interests. Her race-based ideology is an affront to the American political tradition--which explains why Thomas is on the Supreme Court and Guinier is back teaching.

With no message to sell to the voters, the left has been exiled to the campus. The ivory tower cranks out books with gloomy titles like “Race Matters,” “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism” and “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.” The multicultural elite has dedicated itself to promoting separateness based on race, sex and sexual orientation.

Few would dispute that racism, sexism and homophobia are problems. The question is, what do we do about it? The answer is certainly not to create “homelands” for minority groups, voluntary or not.

The immediate issue is education. Next week, kids will be going back to school, most of them to public schools that cost much more and produce less, in terms of skilled and employable graduates, than they did a decade ago. Proposition 174, on the ballot this November, offers hope, in the form of a voucher, to every school-age child in California, regardless of race, creed or national origin. Opponents of choice offer nothing but more of the same: an upward march of inputs, a downward slide in outcomes.

Glenn Delk has a better idea. He is the president of Georgia Parents for Better Education, and he is something new: a conservative Freedom Rider. He found a 1961 Georgia law that entitles public-school children to vouchers to attend private schools. The law was enacted three decades ago to let white children flee the public schools. Today, in a sweet irony, Delk wants to use it to let poor children, many of them black, enjoy the same freedom of choice as suburban whites.

The education Establishment opposes Delk and the school choice movement. The institutional left has a substantial investment in the status quo. Some must welcome social decay; the worse things get, the more credence for their basic line that American society will never get better unless they are recalled from their academic exile and put in charge.

The right still has its “we are America” nativists, such as Pat Buchanan. But as the political wheel turns, Buchanan finds himself joined on the anti-NAFTA front by Ross Perot. And they are joined by such liberals as Reps. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.)

To counter these reactionaries, a new alliance of opportunity-oriented optimists is waiting to be born. Jack Kemp-style conservatives and non-bureaucratic Democrats like Polly Williams, the black Wisconsin legislator who spearheaded inner-city Milwaukee’s school-choice plan, await a leader who can appeal to the innate can-do spirit of America.

Americans, aware that even “good” schools are turning out minimally skilled Beavises and Buttheads, demand better education for the globally competitive ‘90s. Proposition 174 may fail in a hail of misinformation and scare-mongering. But choice will be back, because nothing else will break the stranglehold of bureaucratic monopoly. Californians will see that if the structure of the schools doesn’t change, the end product won’t. Voters will ultimately reward the person or party that offers the best plan with the most hope--for all.