The widening gap
Steve Williams, Daily Press
The Center for Education Reform is by no means the only privately funded organization devoted to broadening school choice for parents and their children, but it’s one of the most effective. It was founded in 1993, at the beginning of the voucher and charter school movement, and was, according to its website, “founded to bridge policy and practice and restore excellence in education, through promoting choice and accountability in schools.”
In a recent report, CER noted that some 13 states and the District of Columbia now have voucher programs, which is 13 more than there were 21 years ago. But of course, since these states don’t kowtow to either the federal government or formal public education, programs vary widely. Which means those states are hothouses for seeking the best way to achieve excellence in education. As it should be in a free market economy.
That melting pot of reform thus opposes one of the most pernicious of our government directed education system’s dictates, that ZIP codes determine what schools students attend. That very fact damages the whole idea of school choice, and education suffers accordingly.
So those 13 states have embarked on their own reforms by passing laws circumventing the system. Some of those laws allow voucher programs A new study from CER now ranks the laws of such reforming states according to the level of choice being provided. In Wisconsin, the statewide voucher program has a cap of 1,000 new vouchers that can be awarded every year. This is in a state with over 850,000 students enrolled in elementary and secondary schools. Colorado has also launched a voucher program in one county, but it offers only 500 vouchers to a school-aged population of around 62,000.
That contrasts with Indiana, where Republicans have ensured that here are no limits on the number of vouchers.
California — no surprise here — is among those states where no voucher programs are allowed, and even our charter schools struggle in the face of virulent hostility from the teachers’ unions.
If this hostility prevails, our public education system — already producing pathetic results despite continuing assaults on taxpayers for ever greater funding — will remain mired in bureaucracy, while the Indianas will be producing hundreds of thousands of graduates prepared for higher education and the work force. And California’s badly educated graduates will still be joining the growing ranks of the country’s dependents.
Is that what we want? No, but that’s where we’re headed. So give us no grief about the widening gap between the wealthy and the poverty stricken, because the gap is a direct result of a public school system incapable of reform.
