New Group Aids State Voucher Effort : Education: As the campaign for Proposition 174 struggles, a national organization contributes $25,000.

An array of national and state politicians Thursday announced the formation of a national organization to advocate the use of public money to educate children in private schools. In its first act of largess, the group sent $25,000 to California to support the state’s school voucher initiative.

The organization, Americans for School Choice, will raise money, provide information and serve as a network for local groups working to give public school students the right to attend private schools at state expense.

“This idea is inevitable,” said Lamar Alexander, secretary of education under former President George Bush and a former governor of Tennessee. “Our objective is to help make that inevitability come sooner.”

The formidable education Establishment, including teachers unions, is the strongest opponent of the concept, the group said, adding that its goal will be to develop an equally organized and well-financed force.

The National Education Assn. has spent $300,000 to defeat Proposition 174 in California and is willing to pitch in another $700,000, according to spokesman Eddy Gattis. The anti-voucher campaign plans to spend as much as $10 million to defeat the initiative, which is lagging in the polls.

Alexander, a member of the choice group’s board of directors, emphasized that affluent parents can already choose to send their children to private schools. The new organization will work to give that choice to middle- and low-income families, he said.

Formation of the group indicates that proponents of giving parents the option of using public money to pay for private schooling for their children are not in retreat, even though the Bush Administration, which strongly supported the concept, is out of office and initiatives in several states have been defeated.

Leaders of the group criticized a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, which concluded that programs to put public school students in private schools do not improve academic performance, arguing that drawing legitimate conclusions is impossible because no full-fledged program exists.

A 3-year-old program in Milwaukee is limited to children from low-income families and to non-sectarian schools.

During the Bush Administration, Alexander and Bush repeatedly praised the benefits of opening education to the competition of the marketplace by giving parents vouchers that would allow them to use public tax money to send their children to private schools.

The Clinton Administration opposes the concept, and Bush and President Clinton sparred on the issue during the campaign.

Attempts to introduce it at the state level have failed in legislatures and public referendums.

Californians will vote next month on a measure that would give parents vouchers worth about $2,600 to enroll their children in private schools or in public schools outside their neighborhood or home district.

Although the largest teachers unions have put their money and energy into defeating such voucher measures, one teacher, Polly Broussard of Louisiana, said that her 20 years in public schools have proved to her that traditional school reform is incapable of reinvigorating them.