State Voters Reject School Vouchers 2-1 : Education: Initiative to provide tax funds for private education is soundly beaten. Teachers say they’ll propose own reforms. Proponents say they’ll be back in 1994.

An initiative that would have brought radical change to California’s schools was defeated by a large margin Tuesday, as voters weighed in against a plan to let parents use tax-funded vouchers to pay their children’s tuition at private schools.

With a broad coalition of political, union and business interests allied against it, Proposition 174, the Education Vouchers Initiative, lost by a margin of more than 2 to 1. In Orange County, the measure was trailing by a slightly smaller margin with more than half of the precincts reporting.

“We learned something from all this. . . . Maybe it was a wake-up call for public education,” said Karen Russell, a Westminster teacher who sits on the California Teachers’ Assn. board.

“This is a time of celebration for all the teachers in California, but we also realize we have a job to do,” Russell said as she celebrated with about 100 voucher opponents at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers. “We will be working on our own reform package.”

The fledgling national movement to privatize education had hoped that a win in the nation’s most populous state would fuel efforts to expand “school choice” to include private and parochial schools. Similar voucher initiatives are slated for the 1994 ballot in at least three other states, and legislative efforts to introduce vouchers are under way in several more.

In California, Proposition 174 supporters say they will be back--maybe as soon as next year--with a new initiative, building on lessons they learned in this campaign, which was crippled from the start by lack of money and never really got on track.

“It’s a matter of how and when, not if” vouchers will be back, said Joseph Alibrandi, chairman of the Yes on 174 campaign. “The other side may be celebrating, but tomorrow they will wake up and realize that they cannot maintain the status quo. . . . This is spreading across the nation and it is only a matter of time before there is choice in the schools.”

Acting Supt. of Public Instruction Dave Dawson, a voucher opponent, agreed that “we need to be very careful that we don’t interpret this as a victory for the status quo. It’s just not.” But, he added, “I think this reflects the wisdom of voters who did not buy into a magic bullet solution.”

The results reflected the lopsided money war: Proponents were outspent by more than 4 to 1. Opponents raked in more than $17 million to defeat Proposition 174. Proponents raised $4.1 million, much of it in 1991 and early 1992 to get the measure on the ballot. That left them with about $2.5 million to mount their campaign.

A large chunk of that money came from one Newport Beach couple. Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, philanthropists who have long supported conservative Christian causes and Republican candidates, gave more than $400,000 to the pro-voucher camp before Sept. 18.

“It’s a learning experience. We learned an awful lot about what matters to people,” said Roberta Ahmanson, who monitored the election results from San Francisco.

“It’s started people talking to each other, it’s started people thinking. I think that alone was worth the effort.”

Supporters hoped to tap into anger over declining public school performance, high dropout rates and campus crime.

In the end, however, voters across the state concluded that Proposition 174 was simply too great a gamble--both with the state’s pocketbook and with California’s 5.2 million public school children.

Proposition 174 was backed by the California Republican Party and financed largely by conservative Christians, wealthy libertarians and the state GOP. But suburban parents feared it would hurt their local public schools, and many fiscal conservatives and business leaders worried that it would cost too much.

The state’s legislative analyst predicted that the initiative would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars to provide vouchers--worth about $2,600 annually--to 540,000 students already in private school. Gov. Pete Wilson’s Finance Department placed the cost at $1.3 billion over three years, with the money coming from public school budgets.

Many Orange County school administrators made stark predictions about how the measure would devastate district budgets, forcing them to increase class size and cut extracurricular programs.

To win, the Proposition 174 backers had to draw support from more than just disillusioned parents. Parents of public school children account for only about 20% of the voting population. They had to score big among “white people over 50--a group with a very high voter turnout,” said Stanford University professor Mike Kirst, a director of Policy Analysis for California Education, an education think tank.

But older voters were against the initiative--primarily because of concern over its fiscal consequences. Many also had fond memories of public schools. The campaign never did anything to woo them, Kirst said.

The No on 174 forces built a bandwagon that few politicians could ignore. Two-thirds of the Legislature, Gov. Wilson, President Clinton and scores of local officials, along with the League of Women Voters, the American Assn. of Retired Persons and the state Parent Teacher Assn., joined the opposition.

In Orange County, a dozen school boards passed resolutions against the initiative, PTA leaders distributed anti-voucher flyers in newsletters and at Back to School nights, and many of the county’s 17,000 teachers wore No on 174 buttons and put matching bumper stickers on their cars.

Many supporters lauded the concept of education vouchers but were troubled by the specifics of Proposition 174. The initiative would have amended the state Constitution to provide parents with tax-funded vouchers to pay private and parochial school tuition, but allowed virtually no new regulation of private schools.

Political consultants said voters are inclined to vote against initiatives, and that the No on 174 campaign reinforced that with three months of radio and television ads and the slogan: “It’s a risk we can’t afford.” Meanwhile, analysts said, voucher proponents failed to give voters positive reasons to support the measure, instead turning their campaign into an attack on the public school system.

The Yes on 174 campaign was managed by professional Republican insiders, but much of the financial and volunteer support came from outsiders--libertarians who oppose government involvement in education and conservative Christians, including Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition in Anaheim and television evangelist Pat Robertson.

More than 700 Orange County residents volunteered in the pro-voucher campaign, whose local headquarters took over the Tustin office of Mark Bucher’s construction company. Tuesday night, they munched on calamari, chicken stuffed with prosciutto and mozzarella and pasta salads at the Villa Nova restaurant in initiative die.

“We’ll be back,” Bucher said. “They were hoping for a resounding defeat. This is not enough for them to claim they can put this to bed. . . . The movement is alive and well.”

The initiative ended up capturing neither the imagination nor the money of mainstream politicos or big business donors. Several chambers of commerce, including those in Los Angeles, San Diego, South Orange County and Newport-Harbor, opposed the measure. Only one statewide elected official--Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren--endorsed it.

At the start of the drive this summer, campaign chief Ken Khachigian said his campaign had a budget of $5 million to $6 million. He ended up trying to organize a campaign and buy television time on only $2.5 million.

“Their attempt to get the large businesses and the prestige businesses to support the initiative failed totally,” said Stanford’s Kirst. “The business community just took a walk on this initiative and that obviously hurt them fiscally.”

Proposition 174 had been scheduled to appear on the June, 1994, ballot. But when Gov. Wilson convened Tuesday’s special election to decide the fate of his half-cent sales tax surcharge, the voucher initiative automatically went onto the November ballot, catching proponents by surprise. They had almost no money or organization.

“We were planning our fund-raising and political organization for 1994, not 1993,” said Sam Hardage, a San Diego hotel operator and fund-raiser for Proposition 174. “We had to create an entire campaign in just a few weeks.”

The opponents, by contrast, had a war chest filled by assessments from the paychecks of nearly every public school teacher and employee, plus an organization of more than 1,000 union field representatives across the state. Public employee unions provided $16 million--$12.5 million of which came from the California Teachers Assn.

The CTA emerged from the campaign as perhaps the most powerful special interest in California, proving it can quickly raise millions of dollars and mobilize thousands of savvy union representatives and teachers for a grass-roots campaign.

CTA President Del Weber opened the campaign by declaring the voucher initiative “evil,” and the union attempted to crush it before it reached the ballot with a strident campaign to persuade people not to sign the petitions needed to qualify it.

CTA leaders said the future of public education was at stake. As students left public schools for private schools, they said, those who remained would be the hardest to educate. If the public system began shrinking, teachers’ jobs could be lost and salaries cut, threatening the union itself.

Although the initiative failed, officials, academics and educators say they are taking note of public opinion polls showing that almost no one believes public schools are doing an adequate job educating the state’s children.

“I have to take to heart the many comments I heard throughout this campaign that say we must turn the L.A. public schools around and people have to see the evidence,” said Leticia Quezada, Los Angeles school board president. “That is our challenge now.”

Any attempt to overhaul the state’s public schools will be driven by the knowledge that proponents of Proposition 174 intend to return with a new voucher initiative, perhaps as early as next year.

“We will attempt to place ourselves on the ballot in 1994,” said Everett Berg, who donated $225,000 to Proposition 174. “It is a serious intention.”