Force Behind School Vouchers Won’t Give Up His Fight : Education: When Californians rejected the plan, Joe Alibrandi took it as a sign to start the next campaign.

It is the morning after a long night--a night spent working a sparse crowd at what was to be a hotel “victory party” but instead was the place where he watched his dream of bringing radical change to California’s schools end.

On Wednesday morning, Joe Alibrandi was on an airplane, winging east to Chicago and a series of business meetings. But his mind was still in California, stuck on what went wrong--and what is to come--in the campaign to make school vouchers a reality.

For two years, Alibrandi, president of a Westwood aerospace firm, has devoted most of his free time--and more than $350,000 of his own money--to promote Proposition 174, the initiative that would have allowed parents to use tax-funded vouchers to pay private school tuition.

The measure--fought by politicians and the public school lobby--was resoundingly rejected by voters Tuesday. But for Alibrandi, the end of that campaign signals only the beginning of the next one.

“I’m a lousy loser,” Alibrandi said wryly. “If I believe in something--and there’s nothing I believe in more than giving kids a fair shot at an education--I won’t quit.”

From the very beginning, when education officials were dismissing vouchers as a crackpot idea floated by government-hating libertarians and the Christian right, Alibrandi brought respectability to a campaign that many now say has changed the state’s education landscape.

He had helped form LEARN, the Los Angeles school reform group, and had shepherded a landmark school restructuring bill through the state Legislature as head of the California Business Roundtable’s education committee.

Even now, his detractors may criticize his politics, but few question his motives.

“He had a reputation . . . of being a passionate and caring advocate for better educational results,” said Mike Roos, president of LEARN, which Alibrandi resigned from to push for vouchers. “I have never doubted his sincerity of purpose, but on this one I think he’s wrong.”

The son of Italian immigrants--his seamstress mother had only a second-grade education; his father, a laundry worker, went as far as fifth grade--Alibrandi grew up in a South Boston slum, went to public schools, then studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, courtesy of the GI bill.

A wiry, intense man with sartorial flair--he has a fondness for splashy ties and monogrammed shirts with French cuffs--he approached the voucher campaign with an almost religious fervor.

“I guess we’re all entitled to do one thing based on pure emotion in our life, and this is mine,” he said, explaining why a man with no political aspirations would lead such a high-stakes campaign.

He has little patience with the kind of consensus-building approach that has characterized most education reform efforts.

“At best, that becomes the least common denominator,” he said. “The unions will accept this, but they won’t accept that. The administrators want this but they don’t want that. So you get to the end and everybody feels good, but nothing changes.”

And change is what Alibrandi wants. He believes that the same competitive market forces that have allowed his Whittaker Corp. to thrive can ensure that schools improve enough to educate even the poorest children.

At Northern Lights--an Oakland private school that operates on a shoestring budget--Alibrandi got the proof he needed that private schools can do the job when public schools fail.

In 1989, at the request of a business colleague, Alibrandi “adopted” a student named Shandon there, paying his tuition, praising his schoolwork and ultimately inviting the child to his Malibu home for a weekend that friends say changed both their lives.

“I’ve had a good life, but I had a lot of luck and without that, it could have gone the other way,” Alibrandi said. “If people like me don’t reach out to people like Shandon--who are clearly going down the drain--then our country doesn’t stand a chance.”