Progressives Drop the Ball on Vouchers : Schools: The old concept is still valid but its current incarnation is fatally flawed. Too bad.

To date, the school-choice agenda has been dominated by the right side of the political spectrum. Little has come from progressives who fervently believe that women should have the right to control their bodies if there is an unwanted pregnancy. Why then would they be opposed to the notion of allowing parents to choose the schools their children attend? After all, conservative politicians like to argue, wealthy parents have that right.

The first and last progressive scholars who argued that “public schools have a captive clientele” and that “parents should not be forced to send their children to the school around the corner simply because it was around the corner” were Christopher Jencks and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Public Policy at Cambridge, Mass., 23 years ago. In 1969, the now-defunct Office of Economic Opportunity at the Department of Education issued a grant to the center to study and write a detailed report on education vouchers.

Jencks, now a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and most recently the author of “Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass,” recalls that the center was established to apply for government and private grants on behalf of the liberal-to-radical academic types in Cambridge in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. All of the early members of the staff at the center, including Jencks, were leftist faculty members from Harvard’s School of Education.

The center’s plan, released in 1970, would have worked in the following manner:

1) An educational voucher agency would be established to administer the vouchers.

2) The voucher would cover the full operating cost of a child’s education.

3) The vouchers for disadvantaged children would be worth more than those for children from upper-class families.

4) The school would accept each voucher as full payment for a child’s education.

5) A school accepting vouchers would be required to admit all students who listed it as a first choice so long as it had vacant places available.

6) The voucher agency would provide parents all the information they requested about schools of their choice.

It should come as no surprise that none of these requirements are part of Proposition 174, the Parental Choice in Education Act on California’s Nov. 2 ballot. In fact, there is a specific provision in the initiative limiting the ability of the state government to further regulate private schools.

So the question arises: Why have we not heard from progressives on the school-choice issue? (Immediately after its release in 1970, the Jencks report was met with a deafening silence by the education Establishment and liberal politicians, who disdain school choice outside the public-school setting.)

The short answer is that Democratic officeholders have their own interest groups that they are beholden to under the current campaign-finance system. One such group is the education Establishment, which is a major contributor to Democratic campaigns at all levels. As Jencks puts it, “Liberal politicians can’t run a serious campaign without their financial support.”

The National Education Assn. and the American Federation of Teachers, along with their state affiliates, are adamantly opposed to school choice because part of their jobs is to protect all their members--good and bad teachers alike. Tenure and seniority might fall by the wayside if school choice were to take hold around the country. But what the shortsighted leadership of the NEA and the AFT fails to tell their members is that good teachers would be likely to see their salaries rise substantially under a progressive school-choice plan. Good teachers would be in demand and would attract higher salaries from schools hoping, in turn, to attract students. Some enterprising administrators and teachers might even decide to open up their own schools. It is true that bad teachers would have to look for new jobs. On the whole, that is a good thing.

But alas, California voters will not be voting for a progressive choice plan in November. They will be faced with a measure that should be defeated at the polls for the reason best explained by Jencks and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Public Policy 23 years ago: “A voucher system which does not include adequate and effective safeguards would be worse than no voucher system at all. Indeed, an unregulated voucher system could be the most serious setback for the education of disadvantaged children in the history of the United States.”

The imminent defeat of the voucher plan next month is likely to set back the school-choice forces in California for decades to come. And that will be too bad.