Not much reform
in ed-reform bill

WASHINGTON – President Bush's vow to sign Congress' version of his education-reform bill, even though it excludes private-school vouchers, follows a rash of
setbacks for the school-choice movement.

Voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland are laboring under a barrage of lawsuits and legislative challenges. They also suffer from a lack of funding.

Ohio's program has been declared unconstitutional, though the U.S. Supreme Court will review the
decision.

Other states have recently defeated voucher proposals at the polls.

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Even charter schools are under attack in the courts.

Some of the nation's leading school-choice proponents were uncharacteristically gloomy about the outlook for reform at a recent Hoover Institution conference on K-12 education.

"I'm really struck by the degree of push-back," said Chester Finn, a former Education Department official.

"There's a pretty important bit of back-pedaling under way."

He cited recent lawsuits against Ohio and Pennsylvania charter schools as "an effort to put charter schools into a little box" and make them act more like regular
public schools, which have to answer to teachers' unions and school boards.

Paul Peterson, a Hoover senior fellow who edits the journal "Education Next," argues that teachers' unions
have won the vouchers battle, and are now trying to roll back charter schools. He says that as long as vouchers were on the table, unions capitulated to charter schools. But no more.

Hoover senior fellow Terry Moe admitted that vouchers have "hit a few bumps in the road."

But he blames teachers' unions and their well-funded, anti-reform lobbying efforts, and not any "public-opinion problem," judging from surveys showing
continuing strong support for choice, even among inner-city parents.

"The reason vouchers have gone down (in recent referendum votes) is because of teachers' unions" and
their get-out-the-vote campaigns, Moe said. "They have almost single-handedly prevented this from happening."

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Though he asserts that vouchers are not "receding in importance at all," he predicts "it will take 40 or 50 years to bring about these changes," thanks in large part to the teachers' unions blocking such reforms. He says the National Educational Association and American Federation of Teachers are "elite interest groups" that have an iron grip on a lucrative "monopoly," and
resist the competition that private and
religious-school vouchers would bring.

Moe says it's hard to get any voucher bill passed in Washington because of the separation of powers, and he urged patience.

Finn agreed, adding that the choice movement has grown "no deep roots yet."

2000 charter schools

Others on the panel, however, see progress.

"Just look at the 2,000 charter schools" that have popped up across the country in recent years, noted former Education official Diane Ravitch.

She and others see a ray of hope in the right-leaning high court's decision in September to review the lower court ruling that declared unconstitutional
Cleveland's program of granting scholarships worth $2,250 to 3,761 Ohio students enrolled in 56 private schools. More than half of them are poor.

Up to 15,000 pupils are eligible for Milwaukee's voucher program, by comparison.

The Supreme Court's decision will also determine the future of voucher programs in Wisconsin and Florida. A
favorable ruling could pave the way for proposed voucher legislation in 21 other states, including Maryland, as well as for federal legislation.

John Chubb, one of the founders of Edison Schools, a private manager of public schools, also finds it encouraging that more people – including those among
the media elite, who tend to side with the teachers' unions – are more open to the idea of choice now.

He says that in the mid-1980s, when the Reagan administration broached reforms, choice was viewed as
an outlandish idea, and people were considered "crazy" to even think about it. He says he's glad to see that at least the intellectual dialogue has matured.

70 percent can't read

Though the "No Child Left Behind Act" passed this week by the Senate is not sweeping in its reforms, it is the biggest education-spending bill since 1965, when
President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The new bill authorizes up to $26.5 billion in spending from kindergarten through high school, and devotes much of the aid to poor students.

That Bush would sign the costly bill strikes some as odd, given what his education secretary has said about
wasteful education spending.

Education Secretary Rod Paige – the first school superintendent, interestingly enough, to head the department – has made a point to mention that since
Johnson, Washington has spent $147 billion on public-education programs to help disadvantaged kids catch up.

Yet some 70 percent of inner-city and rural 4th-graders cannot read, he says.

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