A Flamboyant Revival for School Voucher Campaign
He’s notorious for coming to work in outrageous costumes, skiing in boxer shorts and having caught the attention of fellow Harvard Business School students by launching a classroom discussion with two words: raw sex.
But he made millions on daring investments in Silicon Valley Internet firms and now Timothy C. Draper is ready for his first major state political role: as the “V-man,” champion of the controversial school voucher movement.
Draper is the primary force behind a voucher initiative that qualified Tuesday for the November ballot. Thanks to him, Californians will vote again on one of the most controversial issues in American education: whether to grant cash vouchers to parents who want to enroll their children in private schools.
His version would allow $4,000 per year in public money to pay for any student’s private school education--far less per student, he points out, than a public education costs now.
Previous voucher attempts have failed. But Draper’s may have a better chance.
For one thing, because of his own deep pockets, it promises to be much better financed. The 1993 pro-voucher campaign was outspent 10 to 1 by its opponents, principally the California Teachers Assn.
And disenchantment with public education is at an all-time high--partly because rankings established by Gov. Gray Davis have provided many parents with detailed evidence of failure in their local schools. Davis is a fierce voucher opponent. But some of the most recent polls show that a majority of Californians support vouchers.
Perhaps most important are the personality and drive of Draper himself. Seldom has such a contentious cause had such a charismatic advocate.
Draper, 42, is one of a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are using their fortunes to play political roles. But unlike others, he’s more matinee idol than computer nerd. Tall, dark, handsome and theatrical, he even had a cameo role on the television show “thirtysomething,” in which one of his sisters, Polly Draper, starred as Ellyn.
Cool Reception From Teachers Union
Draper’s uninhibited nature has led him to deliver his message in person to some unusual audiences, including top representatives of the state’s largest teachers union.
“Once a parent can move from school to school,” he told them, “we’ll have real accountability.”
His reception often has been cool. The CTA ran through all its objections to vouchers, including the lack of state oversight of private schools. “We told him we didn’t think it was a very good idea,” said Bob Cherry, the CTA’s associate executive director.
Draper is characteristically undeterred. He wanted to hear the CTA’s objections, he said, because “those guys are bright; they know the system a lot better than I do.” But in the end, he said, “The thing in their best interest is to keep the existing [education] system, and that’s not the best thing for kids.”
He knows it could cost $40 million to keep the voucher issue from being walloped again. He doesn’t care. He knows that two top business lobbies, the California Business Roundtable and Silicon Valley’s TechNet, already have decided to oppose his initiative. He doesn’t buy it.
“You will see the Silicon Valley move to vouchers in a minute,” Draper said. “They understand freedom and opportunity.”
Critics accuse him of naivete. Friends and associates say he’s just used to bucking the odds.
After all, this is the man who invested $300,000 in a free e-mail service called Hotmail when it was no more than an inkling, only to see the company sold to Microsoft less than two years later for $400 million in stock.
“Tim has been enormously successful in venture capital by backing things everyone said wouldn’t work, so he believes in his instinct,” said Reed Hastings, a fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur, founding member of TechNet and charter school champion.
Draper, a registered Republican with Libertarian tendencies, says he came to vouchers through a personal rather than a political epiphany.
The two oldest of his four children started public school in the same Silicon Valley neighborhood where he was educated--and with some of the same books and instructors.
When Draper donated classroom supplies to the Atherton school, the teacher told him it upset her colleagues. When he offered to teach a class on venture capital, he was asked to fill out a substitute teacher form.
Frustrated, he chose to move his children to a nearby parochial school. As he thought about his choice, he said he realized that poor parents don’t have such an easy out. Enter vouchers.
Draper’s concerns were heightened by his brief tenure last year on the state Board of Education as one of former Gov. Pete Wilson’s final--and ultimately unconfirmed--appointees. (Draper had donated $5,200 to Wilson over the years and hosted a fund-raiser for him.)
On the board, Draper said, he was appalled by the drawn-out nature of every decision. “I knew there was a problem,” he said. “Seeing it up close helped me recognize what the problem was.”
Some would say Draper was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, and that is likely the image his foes will present of him during the campaign.
Indeed, he’s a third-generation venture capitalist from the Silicon Valley, and his father fronted him money to start his firm. He drives a gold Mercedes S500, which he says he chose for its navigation system; he gets lost a lot.
And he didn’t have to bother with the messy business of fund-raising when it cost nearly $2 million to deliver 1.2 million signatures supporting his initiative to the secretary of state by early May.
Trying to preempt accusations of elitism, the voucher campaign has spent the past few months quietly making connections with leaders of minority communities in low-income areas.
“This has to be taken to communities before all the demagoguing begins,” said Draper’s communications director, Barry Hutchison.
Wooing minorities is strategic for other reasons, political consultants say. Last year, the Times Poll showed that 51% of California voters support vouchers, but support among white voters reached just 50%; among minorities it hit 52%.
To bolster the campaign’s financial support, Draper hosted a dinner several weeks ago at his home for a group of mostly wealthy, mostly voucher supporters, including economist Milton Friedman, considered the father of the movement in this country.
Soon, Draper will unveil his campaign’s mascot, a jester-like character named “V-man”--for vouchers, victory, vote (and, he says, laughing, venture capital).
Some Problems With Details
Though humor will be central to the campaign, consultants know they must balance levity with the need for Draper to be taken seriously. There, challenges abound, in part because Draper is stronger on ideas than details.
“Vouchers in Wisconsin are knocking the cover off the ball,” he says. In fact, results from Milwaukee’s 10-year-old voucher experiment are mixed and are considered statistically suspect by many noted education researchers.
Accommodating special education needs should not be a problem under vouchers, Draper says, because the majority of this state’s disabled students are “subbed out to private schools already.” In fact, only 12,000 of California’s 630,000 special education students attend private schools at public expense.
“He’s a magical thinker: Anything he wants to be true will be true,” says one detractor.
Draper likes to be the jolt that alters the paradigm. He once got an auditorium of New York executives to sing the praises of venture capital, literally, to the tune of “New York, New York.” His college exclamation of “raw sex” set off a discussion of why marketing has to give people what they really want.
“He hasn’t really changed at all,” says Harvard classmate Richard Whitmore, who became one of California’s top public education officials. “He wants to toss out big concepts and move conversations in a different direction.”
Vouchers, Whitmore said, are part of that continuum.
At this spring’s annual bash for Draper’s company, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, he wore buffalo horns and an antelope-skin cloak over his oxford cloth button-down shirt. He joined the band in an off-key rendition of “Wild Thing,” which he sang as “Web King.”
Jim Hornthal stood at the dance floor’s edge, grinning. Draper invested in Hornthal’s online travel firm nine years ago--the two closed the deal in a swimming pool--and this spring Preview Travel merged with Web giant Travelocity.
“He’s never the one to say, ‘That won’t work,’ ” Hornthal said.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Thoughts on School Vouchers
The Times Poll asked California voters if they favored a school voucher program that would allow parents to use tax money to send their children to the school of their choice, even a private school. The answers:
*
ALL VOTERS
YES: 51%
NO: 41%
DON’T KNOW: 8%
*
REPUBLICANS
YES: 65%
NO: 26%
DON’T KNOW: 9%
*
DEMOCRATS
YES: 40%
NO: 53%
DON’T KNOW: 7%
*
INDEPENDENTS
YES: 53%
NO: 36%
DON’T KNOW: 11%
*
Voters making less than $20,000/year
YES: 58%
NO: 35%
DON’T KNOW: 7%
*
Voters making more than $60,000/year
YES: 50%
NO: 43%
DON’T KNOW: 7%
*
High school diploma or less
YES: 55%
NO: 37%
DON’T KNOW: 8%
*
College degree or more
YES: 46%
NO: 45%
DON’T KNOW: 9%
*
Source: Los Angeles Times poll of 1,179 California registered voters, June 1999
