Voucher Concept Has Come a Long Way : Education: Although promoted by Republicans, Prop. 174 is largely the handiwork of libertarians. Anti-government donors with deep pockets helped boost the idea into the mainstream.

In 1971, Robert Poole penned a little-noticed article entitled “The Case for Education Vouchers,” which appeared in an obscure libertarian magazine he ran out of his Santa Barbara garage.

“The imperative is to break the state’s educational monopoly,” Poole wrote, “and the voucher plan is the only politically feasible way of doing this.”

Twenty-two years later, his view of public schools is still sour. But Poole has come a long way from the scruffy Santa Barbara days, and so has his movement to dismantle government.

Reason magazine is flourishing, and the Reason Foundation, which he heads, has a $2.5-million budget and a spacious Westside office.

With Proposition 174 on the November ballot, the school vouchers concept has vaulted from obscurity to become one of the hottest issues of the day.

“I feel a certain degree of pride,” Poole said in the Reason Foundation’s office. “I wasn’t sure there would ever come a day when this idea would get as far as to be on the statewide ballot in the largest state in the nation.”

Under Proposition 174, parents of school-age children would receive tax-funded tuition vouchers, worth about $2,600, to redeem at a private or parochial school. The measure also would allow public schools to accept vouchers, and children could attend public campuses outside their home districts.

Proposition 174’s backers include parents frustrated by bad public schools or hoping for state help with private school tuition, Christian fundamentalists, a smattering of liberals and conservative Republicans. But more than any other group, the initiative is the handiwork of libertarians.

Although the Yes on 174 campaign is being waged by veteran Republican political managers, libertarians helped write it, and free market theorists provide much of its intellectual rationale. Through mid-September, half of the $2.48 million raised by the campaign came from business people who call themselves libertarians or are benefactors of the Reason Foundation and another free market think tank, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco.

These proponents say a voucher system will help break powerful public school unions and curb the state’s power at a most basic level--education. Public schools would improve, they contend, or lose pupils to educational entrepreneurs who would capitalize on a voucher system by opening private schools.

Critics say the measure would cost hundreds of millions in tax money in initial years, and gives the state no authority to oversee private schools’ use of the voucher money. They note that it does not require private schoolteachers to have credentials, and would give tax money to schools that exclude children based on gender or religion.

With less than a month before the election, the voucher initiative lags in the polls, and its supporters have raised a fraction of the $10 million amassed by the opposition, which is led by unions representing public schoolteachers and other employees.

But many supporters have deep pockets. One is David Koch, a New York billionaire who has no children, but believes California’s public schools are such a “miserable failure” that he donated $50,000 to the pro-voucher campaign.

With his brother, Charles, David Koch runs Koch Industries, a Wichita-based oil and gas company that is the nation’s second-largest privately held corporation.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, Koch and his brother were leading financiers of the Libertarian Party. David was the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential candidate in 1980 on a ticket that garnered 921,188 votes.

The Kochs broke from the Libertarian Party in 1983. David called it “too radical.” But he adheres to its goal of reducing government, and its utopian philosophy that people should be able to do as they please as long as they do not harm others.

The Koch-funded Citizens for Congressional Reform gave $280,000 to Proposition 140 in 1990 to limit legislative terms in California. The measure’s passage boosted the nationwide term limitation movement, with 14 states including California approving congressional term limits last year.

“I was very delighted with the results,” Koch said in an interview from New York. “I see the same kind of phenomenon if the California voucher system is approved.

“If you can win the voucher initiative in California, it can win elsewhere. It is such a highly visible state,” he said, calling the proposal a “terrific step” toward reducing government.

Proposition 174 is not the Kochs’ first involvement in the fight over school choice. In 1990, Citizens for a Sound Economy, a Washington political action group they founded, gave $178,000 to an unsuccessful 1990 ballot measure in Oregon to give parents of private schoolchildren tuition tax credits.

David Koch also is a director of the Reason Foundation and its largest donor, giving $715,000 since 1987. During that time, he gave another $125,000 to the Pacific Research Institute, records filed with the attorney general show.

The Kochs also provided the seed money for the Institute for Justice, a tax-exempt Washington law firm with a libertarian view of property rights, personal expression and free enterprise.

The institute filed a splashy lawsuit in Los Angeles last year, seeking to force the state to give $5,000 vouchers to children in inner-city public schools. That case and a twin suit in Chicago were dismissed, but both are on appeal.

The Reason Foundation and the Pacific Research Institute have been more directly involved in the debate over Proposition 174. Because they are nonprofit, tax-exempt corporations, they cannot legally endorse campaigns. But each pushes the idea of school vouchers by providing speakers for debates, and by producing pieces for newspapers opining that public schools have failed and vouchers are the wave of the future.

“I’m an ideas broker,” said Sally Pipes, Pacific Research’s president. “We give ideas to the politicians. They’re the ones making the bullets.”

Rick Manter, campaign manager for the organized opponents of Proposition 174, said that if voters knew the intentions of the initiative’s backers, they would vote the measure down cold. He cited Libertarian Party goals of abolishing much of government, and turning functions ranging from firefighting to education over to free enterprise.

“They can’t sell their philosophy through their candidates so they sugarcoat it in think tanks,” Manter said. “What they really want to do is take public funds from schools.”

The Libertarian Party, which embraces laissez-faire economics and a liberal social agenda including legalization of drugs, supports the voucher measure, although some purists oppose any government involvement in private schools and want no part of Proposition 174.

More pragmatic free marketeers, such as Poole and economist Milton Friedman, a guru to libertarians, see Proposition 174 as a step along the way.

At a news conference in Sacramento last week, Nobel laureate Friedman, who helped draft Proposition 174, said he opposes government-run schools, compulsory education and tax support for education, except for children of indigent parents. He believes parents should take over full responsibility for schooling their children.

“If you let your imagination run,” Friedman said, envisioning education under a voucher system, “we’re going to have all sorts of experiments in private schools. . . . Maybe we will have chains of McDonald’s schools. Maybe we’ll have schools that specialize in mathematics and other schools that specialize in humanistic studies. Why should everyone have the same menu?”

Friedman, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, said he would prefer such a freemarket educational system. “But I have a responsibility to try to discuss the intermediate steps. Not everybody agrees with me. So I want to move to a position where I can get a wide measure of agreement, but which is moving in the right direction,” he said.

Friedman proposed the idea of school vouchers almost 40 years ago. Back then “it was viewed as nuts,” said Stanford University education professor Michael Kirst. “The idea that you would turn the schools over to business was so radical that everybody took notice of it.”

President Ronald Reagan, whose advisers included Friedman, propelled the discussion beyond graduate classes and libertarian discussion groups in the 1980s when he proposed that private school parents receive tuition tax credits.

In early 1991, the Reason Foundation generated more interest. Before the initiative was written or campaign managers hired, Poole and Kevin Teasley, then Reason’s public affairs director, organized a series of seminars on the idea. To lend credibility, Poole asked Joe Alibrandi, chief executive officer of Whittaker Corp., an aerospace firm in Los Angeles, to participate.

Alibrandi, although not a libertarian, agreed to help. He had been active in education reform efforts, and had considered organizing a voucher initiative drive. He since has become chairman of the Proposition 174 campaign committee and one of its biggest contributors. Teasley is its finance director.

Today, most California voters support the school voucher concept, according to a poll by researchers at Policy Analysis for California Education. But when asked specifically about Proposition 174, other polls show, voters narrowly oppose it, partly because it fails to impose standards on voucher-accepting private schools.

Los Angeles lawyer Manuel Klausner, who ran for Congress as a libertarian in 1972, takes credit for the section of the initiative that frees voucher schools from new regulations. The initiative says the Legislature can impose restrictions on private schools only by a three-fourths vote. In the highly partisan Legislature, that super-majority requirement amounts to a fire wall.

Klausner explains that he wanted to ensure private schools’ independence. Although critics complain that this feature could allow bad schools to flourish, Klausner contends that private schools will be accountable because parents can pull their children out if the schools fail to meet expectations.

“Public schools have many standards, but aren’t accountable,” Klausner said. “They get paid tax dollars regardless of whether they perform.”

Whether enough voters will be swayed by such arguments over the next three weeks is unclear. But even if Proposition 174 fails, many predict that the voucher debate will go on. “The issue has been growing in its momentum, not dying,” Kirst said.

Proponents already are laying plans to continue the fight. Bay Area entrepreneur Everett Berg, a past chairman of Pacific Research Institute who has given $225,000 to help pass Proposition 174, helped found Americans for School Choice to push voucher initiatives nationwide, with former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander as the point man. Berg said efforts are under way for measures next year in Arizona, Oregon and Colorado.

Berg, 69, decries government intrusion in people’s lives, and believes that public schools, with their state-mandated curricula, stifle free thinking and “indoctrinate” children by teaching that “government is benign.” He says a voucher system would allow private schools with more varied teaching styles and viewpoints to flourish, expanding parents’ choice.

“Some schools will teach about the Founding Fathers. Some schools will teach that government is great. That’s great,” Berg said. “I just don’t want education to have one voice.”