The Voucher Initiative: Savior or Fatal Blow?

Proposition 174 on Tuesday’s ballot proposes one of the most revolutionary changes ever offered by initiative to California voters.

The Education Vouchers Initiative would amend the California Constitution and make this the only state in the nation to provide parents with tax-funded vouchers--worth about $2,600 per child--for private school education.

Proponents believe it will expand parents’ choice of schools for their children and force public schools to improve or risk losing their pupils to private academies. They contend that vouchers will break the “monopoly” on schooling held by the government and public schools unions, especially the California Teachers Assn., which represents 230,000 teachers and has spent $12.3 million to defeat Proposition 174.

Opponents decry the measure as devastating to the underpinnings of democracy--the public school system. They argue that it will allow unregulated private schools to proliferate and that it is an elitist measure that will benefit the rich and take money from underfunded public campuses.

For the last two years, Joseph Alibrandi, 65, chief executive officer of Whittaker Corp., a Los Angeles defense contractor and electronics company, has been the leading proponent of the initiative. He began pushing it after becoming frustrated with the Legislature’s inability to overhaul the public education system.

Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Fremont), 45, is a leading opponent of the measure, along with the California Teachers Assn. and other public school employee unions. A former community college instructor, she chairs the Assembly Education Committee and is an unannounced candidate for state schools superintendent.

Eastin and Alibrandi were interviewed last week by Times staff writers Sandy Banks and Dan Morain:

Question: Why should people vote for this initiative?

Alibrandi: Look at Sputnik. We were sitting back fat, dumb and happy, and all of a sudden up loomed a competitor. All of a sudden there is competition. And we reacted and we did a phenomenal job. . . . You’re going to be amazed at how this public system reacts to improve itself to meet that competition. Without competition, we’ve got a complacent bureaucracy that operates in a monopoly with no accountability.

The reason that the (education) Establishment is opposed to having vouchers is that they’re afraid of competition. Here’s this great big monolithic gorilla as a competitor concerned that small, tiny private schools can do a better job. What’s wrong with giving parents a choice about where their kids go to school? If public schools are better than private schools, then you have nothing to worry about.

Q: Do you believe there would be an exodus to private schools?

Eastin: In a few instances, there would be, but I don’t believe there would be a mass exodus. . . . If we do not change the public system, then people will leave. We’re saying there ought to be competition among the public schools. That’s why we passed intra- and inter-district choice (two bills signed into law by Gov. Pete Wilson this year allowing students to transfer to other districts or schools outside their neighborhoods).

Alibrandi: Choice within the public school system is like saying you can go to any restaurant so long as it’s McDonald’s. That doesn’t threaten the McDonald’s Corp. . . . The choice programs are really aimed at preventing any competition to the basic system. The monopoly would stay intact. All the ground rules stay in place--tenure, teacher certification, the unwillingness to have merit pay.

Eastin: These are not all McDonald’s schools. You do have a bell-shaped distribution of schools. Some are not very good. Some are quite excellent. Many in the middle are just so-so. We have to move that whole range of schools up to a higher level. But nothing in this initiative does that. It gets away from this whole notion of the common good and the common school for all of our kids. It becomes a very elitist approach to education. . . .

If you don’t like the public police system and you want to hire a private security guard for your home, that is your choice. But when you ask me to subsidize your private security guard, you’re asking a very different kind of question. So in fact we have a responsibility to restructure these common schools, but we don’t have a responsibility to give a blank check to every kind of private school, including private religious schools.

Q: Polls have shown that while this initiative is trailing by almost 2 to 1, almost no one who is planning to vote against it believes that public school reforms are adequate now. Hasn’t the Legislature fallen down on its obligation to do something about the schools?

Eastin: What we’ve been doing is tinkering at the edges. We did some good work in the last decade which has shown us what we need to do. . . . This year, intra- and inter-district choice passed the Legislature. . . . Some of the changes--a longer school year, higher graduation standards--are beginning to have an effect. Dropouts are down in California.

Q: It seems curious that reforms, such as inter-district choice, come to pass only when the voucher initiative is looming. Is that what it takes?

Eastin: The system is responding to several things, one of which may be the threat of vouchers. One is clearly some of the real failures of public education.

If you control for the socioeconomic status of parents, the private schools are not doing any better than public schools. The dirty little secret is that this (vouchers) is not a panacea. In fact, there are many shortcomings of private education. . . .

In 1991, the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the first time published the data comparing the performance of students in private education with those in public schools. There was no difference. . . . Joe’s characterization that somehow there is this incredible success story out there in the private sector and there is horrible failure in the public sector is not really fair.

Alibrandi: I completely disagree. . . . We know what needs to be done. We’ve known this for 30 years--30 years! It doesn’t take rocket scientists to know what it takes to educate children in English, math, physics, chemistry and all the rest. There are a lot of private schools that are doing it.

The reality is, this massive fear, the dedication of all these resources to anti-174, comes out of the fact that in the light of day, in a direct comparison, the public schools are afraid that if they gave the freedom to make a choice, (students) would leave: the Berlin Wall syndrome. If you tear down the Berlin Wall, everybody is going to leave. What we ought to be asking ourselves is, why would they leave?

Q: In 1988, Californians passed Proposition 98, which guaranteed a minimum funding level for California schools. Californians have shown their commitment to fund public schools. When you say public schools need more money, isn’t that a bit tired? There isn’t more money, is there?

Eastin: I am not talking about throwing money at the public schools. Parental involvement is not a high-cost item. It doesn’t cost you anything. De-bureaucratizing the system saves you a substantial amount of money. If you said more of the money has to follow the child to the school and classroom, seems to me you have a real potential to use that money differently. . . . You absolutely must spend a little bit of money on safety and modernization.

Alibrandi: Here is an organization that consistently has not performed, by its own admission, and yet the blame always comes down to money, and we don’t have enough parental involvement. In other words, it’s society’s fault; it’s the parents’ fault; it’s the taxpayers’ fault. Why are they worried about a school that’s prepared to educate kids at half the cost? If they find that they cannot educate kids at $5,200 per year, why don’t they (the state) give it to somebody who can do it at $2,600 and do it better?

Q: Why in Proposition 174 is there no provision for the state to audit how voucher schools spend this money?

Alibrandi: The last thing we wanted was to wind up a year after the election having brought the private schools down to the same morass of problems (that public schools have). A lot of (private schools had) the firm conviction that if they fell under control of this massive education bureaucracy, we were going to lose the benefit of private schools having the freedom to innovate.

Q: But we’re not talking about innovation. We’re talking about nuts-and-bolts money. Why not allow government audit oversight of how hundreds of millions of dollars a year are going to be spent?

Alibrandi: In a marketplace, where parents are spending money to get their kids an education, you have a much greater degree of accountability than you have in the public system.

Q: Much has been made of all the money the California Teachers Assn. has poured into the campaign to defeat 174. A lot of parents are asking why some of this money can’t go to staff development, to teacher training, to things teachers could do to push reforms.

Eastin: Teachers do make a profound contribution in the classroom. . . . You do find individual leaders and members of unions that are interested in educational change. Their primary function, though, as a union, is to protect their employees.

If you change the engagement level of teachers and their unions at school sites, you turn teachers more into managers in their classrooms, and school sites as more the focus of attention of districts, you can fundamentally transform education in this state.

Q: What do you say to parents who have one child and cannot wait for however many years it will take to retrain, collaborate and restructure?

Eastin: First, the best predictor of whether that child will be successful in school is whether the parent becomes involved. You as an individual parent must help. The second thing is, we need to force local school boards to make changes. Parents do have the ability to do that now. We may have to show them what it looks like. But you can make the changes.

Q: There’s nothing in this initiative to stop any so-called religion or cult from opening a tax-supported voucher school. Would you really want your tax money to go to a People’s Temple school?

Alibrandi: We have millions of kids incarcerated in inner-city schools all up and down the state of California who are being cheated out of an education. Who’s worrying about them? You talk about witches’ schools. Some of these schools are worse than that. The kids are not getting an education. They are being pushed in the direction of being an underclass. Their safety is jeopardized. That is the reality.

Eastin: We have always had a bright line between church and state. When you begin to cross that line and suggest that there ought to be public subsidies to the private religious schools, you raise problems.

Q: Are there changes in Proposition 174 you would make if you could write it over again?

Alibrandi: My answer would be no. . . . Maybe if this were to not pass, maybe (compromises are) something that would be considered. But it would, in fact, be a compromise.

Eastin: It’s hard for me to envision a voucher for private schools I would support. I support fundamental restructuring of public education along certain thematic lines: greater parental involvement, greater local control, de-bureaucratization, clean, well-lighted, safe schools full of technology, a lot more attention to the non-college-bound kids.

Q: If the measure fails, what will that mean nationally?

Alibrandi: If we lose, I look at it as though we have lost the battle of politics, but there is no question in my mind that we have won the war of ideas. If we lose, all that means is, that was one battle.