School Vouchers a Start, but More Is Needed

Can private schooling for poor children help the U.S. economy? Prominent business people, public officials and leading residents of 38 cities across the land said they could, as the group launched a scholarship program last week that will award $140 million to the parents of 35,000 elementary schoolchildren.

The aim of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, an effort led by New York financier Ted Forstmann and John Walton of the Wal-Mart founding family--who together pledged $100 million of their own money--is to give poor parents a choice of schools for their kids. On that score alone, it is bound to do some good.

But the Fund has larger ambitions. It is being set up, as have similar but smaller funds in the last decade, to remedy serious long-term economic problems.

If poor children can get a good education, they will acquire the skills they need for good jobs. But even more important, better education can reduce the worrisome income gap that threatens to make America a less democratic class society.

“Today education is the determinant of doing well,” writes economist Frank Levy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his forthcoming book, “The New Dollars and Dreams.” The book is a follow-up to his 1987 “Dollars and Dreams,” in which he pointed out that incomes of workers who had only a high school education were declining on average while those of college-educated people were rising.

Those divisive trends continue. Levy’s new book finds a growing danger that “a fifth of the population will fall behind the rest of the country, excluded from the economy’s growth,” and that a majority of the population “will reject pro-growth policies and turn the nation toward renewed stagnation.”

Farfetched? Maybe not. Congress recently has voted repeatedly against foreign trade bills that are favored by business, and a general suspicion of global organizations is rising in Washington.

Central to those ominous trends are the failures of elementary and secondary education to prepare U.S. youngsters for work. Once the lament was “Johnny can’t read.” Now he can’t do math and doesn’t know geography or even U.S. history.

Into this national quandary steps Forstmann, who made a fortune in the 1980s through his leveraged-buyout firm, Forstmann Little. Through his voucher funds, he wants to give competition to the public schools, which he calls a monopoly. The vouchers give poor parents $600 to $1,600 a year for four years, helping them pay for private or parochial schooling. “Inner-city parochial schools graduate 90% of their students,” Forstmann says approvingly.

Businesspeople are enthusiastic. Local partnerships in the Fund effort are headed by such prominent figures as entertainment executive Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles, Amway founder Richard DeVos in Michigan, Microsoft’s technology officer Nathan Myhrvold in Washington state, businessman and former Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach in Dallas.

And the people’s response to such programs has been impressive. Earlier efforts by Forstmann and Walton attracted 20,000 applicants for 1,000 scholarships in New York and 7,600 applications for 1,000 scholarships in Washington, D.C.

But not everybody is cheering.

“These so-called school choice programs are a scam,” says economist James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas.

“They are not organized by poor people but by wealthy opponents of public schools. There are large risks of abuses, sham schools, subsidies for parochial schools,” says Galbraith, who also tackles the income gap in a new book, “Created Unequal.”

Ovitz counters that the effort is not about politics or ideology but about “giving poor parents the chance to choose schools for their children--the kind of choice better-off parents have all the time.”

And Ovitz’s point and the aim of the voucher effort are correct. There is something seriously wrong with the public schools. With more than $300 billion a year of public money spent on primary and secondary education, U.S. students should rank better than dismal in comparison with students of other countries, and U.S. companies should not be crying out for competent employees.

It is ridiculous that our shortage of high-tech engineers is such that Congress had to pass a law to import them from overseas. Millions of poor American kids could qualify for those good jobs if only they got a decent education.

Education authorities and teachers unions make lots of excuses, a frequent one being that it’s difficult to teach immigrant populations.

But the United States had higher proportions of immigrants in times past and educated those children.

That said, schools are not the only institutions facing bewildering circumstances. Industries have changed. Public schools today are actually graduating far higher percentages of their students than they did years ago--more than 80% compared with only 52% as recently as 1970. But work is more demanding and requires greater skills. A majority of the good jobs demand at least two years of community college training. And there are fewer good jobs in laboring, and virtually none for the unskilled. A poor education is a lifelong affliction.

Also, society has changed, Levy reports. Fifty years ago, there was an income gap, as there is today. But then the elderly made up the majority of the poor population. Today the elderly are doing relatively well, but the young, especially children in single-parent households, are most likely to be poor.

And those are the very children the Scholarship Fund is trying to help.

But such funds can only be a small part of the solution. U.S. public schools educate almost 50 million students from kindergarten through high school; private schools educate roughly 14 million.

The public schools are the real battleground. They must be improved, and improvement will take more than economic remedies. It will take political will--plain guts--because the schools and the incipient two-tier society are political problems.

The state of Illinois is demonstrating such political will. Three years ago, a Republican-led state Legislature, determined to fix the urban schools, handed authority over schools to a Democratic mayor, Richard Daley of Chicago. Ever since, that city’s desperately ailing school system has been undergoing repair and seeing steady improvement by encouraging children and testing them more rigorously, testing teachers, and spending budgets more effectively.

There are no miracle cures; Chicago’s reading scores have inched up, dropout rates have fallen, but the problem has not disappeared. But other cities--notably Los Angeles and New York, where cowardly or incompetent educational and political authorities have refused to tackle reform--look on enviously at Chicago’s ability to get things done.

Still, change is coming nationally. The voucher program’s support from a broad cross-section of political and economic leaders and its popularity with parents are evidence of rising political impatience with failure--and recognition of the issue’s importance.

Ted Mitchell, former dean of the UCLA School of Education and a man involved in reform efforts nationwide, states the issue succinctly: “Without a good educational base, we can’t sustain our economy. We can’t sustain our democracy.”

James Flanigan can be reached by e-mail at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.