Lonely Voice Backs Vouchers at Summit : Education: Terry M. Moe gets chilly response at two-day meeting. But he says most reforms urged at the conference would get watered down by politics.

Acting a little like the wicked fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, the foremost proponent of private-school choice told the California Education Summit on Wednesday that efforts to reform public education will fail unless they also allow parents to use tax money to send their children to private or parochial schools.

“I regret I’m going to have to play the role of troublemaker (at this) love-in,” Stanford University economics professor Terry M. Moe said on the final day of the gathering convened by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

Unlike the wicked fairy, at least Moe was invited to this party, which was called to talk about making public schools better. But he got a stony reception from an audience dominated by the public education Establishment, including many teachers, administrators and parents who had helped defeat Proposition 174, the voucher initiative on last November’s ballot.

“I think we can choose to make all schools excellent before we choose which schools to leave,” said Inglewood School Supt. George McKenna, the first of several panelists to rebut Moe, the self-described “token choice guy” at the summit.

Proposition 174 would have provided tax money vouchers to parents to redeem at public or private schools. Critics predicted that it would siphon state money from public schools already struggling with tight budgets and increasingly needy students.

Moe said none of the ideas proposed at the summit, like scores of reform efforts in the nation over the last decade, will go far enough because they get watered down in a political and bureaucratic environment that stifles innovation in public schools.

Some of the hurdles to improving California schools were in evidence at the two-day summit. Even while panelists voiced agreement on many of the general ideas, rifts quickly surfaced on the specifics.

Take the issue of ending school violence, which got a lot of attention during the summit. Gov. Pete Wilson said he found consensus for “no more tolerance for drugs and guns” on campus and a need to find ways to keep troublemaking youngsters in school while separating them from other students.

But Ronald Prescott, a lobbyist with the Los Angeles Unified School District, said there is already competition in Sacramento over how to do it--disagreement, for instance, over whether money should go for such measures as metal detectors to catch armed students or for such prevention programs as early childhood education.

Several participants complained that promising reform programs were too limited. The state’s recent charter schools law, for example, gives campuses nearly absolute freedom to reinvent themselves to improve student achievement, but is limited to 100 of the state’s 7,600 public schools. That is because some in the education Establishment and legislators would support only a slow approach.

Other programs, such as Los Angeles’ ambitious, communitywide effort to improve student achievement in the nation’s second-largest school district, cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.

Mike Roos, head of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), told summit participants that the program, designed for the highly diverse student body of 640,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District, took two years to get off the ground.

“The approach that works for L.A. cannot and should not and will not be shoved down the throats of Fresno, Carlsbad and Marin,” Roos said.

The summit generally got high marks from participants as a way to focus attention on education reform, but many said it only scratched the surface, and they called for additional sessions.

Mark Slavkin, a Los Angeles Board of Education member, said he fears the summit’s “cover the waterfront” approach might hinder its effectiveness. He said he would have preferred an intensive look at one or two key issues.

“I hope (legislators) don’t go back to Sacramento and start writing laws based on just these two days,” said Donna Buland, a Sacramento parent who is active in school issues.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in an address Wednesday, said that improving the schools is the key to a better economic future for California. But he acknowledged that is “easy to talk about, very hard to do.”

Reich also announced that the federal government will provide the state with $750,000 to help prepare high school students for the job market. Such school-to-work programs are a key part of the Clinton Administration’s education agenda.

Stanford’s Moe, also a Hoover Institution senior fellow and co-author of a book calling for parents to have maximum choice in schools, said he was disappointed that the summit “swept choice under the carpet.” He said the lack of attention to the issue reinforced his view that public school officials quash proposals that threaten their position of prominence in fashioning education policy.

Although voters soundly rejected Proposition 174, polls show that a majority of Californians support the concept of vouchers for private schools. He said last fall’s ballot measure lost because it had several flaws, including lack of protection for public school funding and lack of accountability for private schools, which are lightly regulated in California.

But if the state’s public schools do not show marked improvement soon, he said, “in 1996, we’ll all be voting on a new voucher initiative” that will not have the same flaws.