Teeing Off on the School Voucher Issue
This conversation started one morning a few weeks back on the fifth tee of the municipal course at Hansen Dam. It’s a tough par four: 420 yards, downhill then uphill, with a dogleg left.
We weren’t talking about club selection. Joe and I were talking about school choice.
Joe is that rare breed--a San Fernando Valley parent who has something nice to say about the public schools. He raves about the magnet school that his 13-year-old daughter attends. Magnet schools are one thing the Los Angeles Unified School District does right, he says. Joe and Jane have a 5-year-old son who’s in a private kindergarten because of child-care needs. Next year, Joe says, his boy will be in the public elementary school across the street.
But Joe surprised me. He said he’ll probably vote yes on the school voucher initiative Nov. 2. Even though his kids are OK, Joe says, he’s convinced that the LAUSD is letting down most of its students.
Joe is intrigued by the idea that more competition might help public schools. Besides, he added, Proposition 174 is probably going to fail, but it would be nice just to give the LAUSD a scare.
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Now Joe, allow me to introduce you to Jose. Like you, he lives in the East Valley. Like you, he’s a parent who would like to scare the LAUSD. Actually, he’d like to do more than that.
But Jose Bonilla says he’ll vote no on 174.
This might seem surprising, especially since Jose and his wife, Nellie, have twin 8-year-old daughters in a private school. Instead of sending them to the elementary school three blocks away, the girls are driven to Pinecrest School in Van Nuys three miles away. Jose says that, because both he and his wife work full time, this was their best option for education and child care.
Private school tuition runs the Bonillas about $8,000 per year. If Proposition 174 passes, they would theoretically save about $5,200.
It must be tempting. The Bonillas aren’t rich. Jose is a 41-year-old native son of Los Angeles who expresses love for his hometown. Grew up in Lincoln Heights, did his share of gangbanging, straightened himself out in the Army. He got a degree at UCLA and now he works as a sales administrator for IBM. He’s the past president of the Arleta Chamber of Commerce.
And rather than vote his pocketbook, he’ll vote his conscience.
The way he figures it, taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to subsidize private schools. Jose Bonilla thinks the gamble is too great.
If you think L.A. has problems now, Jose can imagine worse. The quality of life in Los Angeles, not to mention student test scores, has declined right alongside per-student funding for public education, now among the nation’s lowest. This isn’t coincidence. We’ve given the schools less money and piled on extra responsibilities--child care, nutrition, law enforcement, social safety net. Vouchers, Jose says, would just erode the public system more.
“It will hurt the majority of children who are poor,” Jose predicts. “I think there’s too much to lose. They’re really going to drop out of society and there will be chaos. . . . They are going to be preying on the rest of us.”
Jose thinks there’s a better way. The Bonillas don’t want to keep paying $8,000 a year for private school. They want to put their kids in the neighborhood school. Instead of abandoning the public system, Jose says, there needs to be a recommitment to public education. That’s why he’s against the vouchers but all for plans to break the LAUSD into smaller districts.
Moderate reforms aren’t enough, he says. The district is too big and bureaucratic. The board is too distant from the community. The teachers’ union, the district bureaucracy, the school board--all are too powerful in the current system, too far removed from the neighborhoods and parents, he says. Jose, who majored in political science at UCLA, argues that smaller districts would diminish the influence of these “power centers” and increase the involvement of parents.
What’s needed, Jose says, are the kind of school districts where parents might run into a board member or two at the local high school football game.
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Just as Joe predicted at Hansen Dam a few weeks back, it looks like the voucher initiative will lose Nov. 2. The polls show it trailing badly. Even many people who like vouchers in concept don’t like the details of this measure.
Perhaps people share my worry about their tax dollars possibly subsidizing little cult schools run by neo-Nazis, would-be David Koreshes or Original Gangsters. Joe thinks such arguments are an insult to parents everywhere, but I don’t know. We’ve got some pretty whacked-out parents out there.
To hear Jose Bonilla talk, 174 is really just a prelim. The main event, he hopes, is yet to come.
