IBD (Investor’s Business Daily) Article
Article Title: "Class Warfare "
Section: Issues & Insights  
Date: 7/7/2005  
 
 
Education Reform: The success of Ohio's voucher program will give more parents the same opportunity to choose their children's school that public school teachers enjoy for themselves.

In 2002, in what may yet be the most important school court case since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Cleveland's school voucher program, which includes religious schools, did not violate the separation of church and state.

Based on its success, Ohio will more than triple the size of its school voucher program, making it the largest such program in the nation. The state budget signed by Republican Gov. Robert Taft will expand the tuition aid available in Cleveland since 1996 and allow up to 14,000 additional children statewide to leave public schools that have persistently failed academic tests and move to private schools.

Cleveland's choice program was created after Ohio's government declared the city's schools an "academic emergency" in which they flunked 27 out of 27 state standards for educational performance. Cleveland's graduation rate was only 28%, one of the worst in the nation.

After just two years of this program, students in Cleveland's participating private schools scored 7 percentile points higher than the national average in reading and 15 points higher in math.

Only Florida and Wisconsin currently offer voucher programs similar to Ohio's. In Florida, the usual suspects - the teachers unions, the ACLU and People for the American Way - have filed suit in a case in which the infamous Florida Supreme Court may decide the programs for minority children.

Florida's Opportunity Scholarship Program, begun under Republican Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999, now serves only 750 students.

But it has demonstrated what a little competition introduced into the public school monopoly can accomplish.

Under threat of school vouchers, nearly half of Florida's public schools now earn A grades under tougher state standards than when a similar percentage was earning C grades when the program began. Hispanic third-graders reading at or above grade level has climbed to 61% from 46%. Blacks have jumped to 52% from 36%.

Perhaps the best indicator that public schools need a healthy dose of competition is where teachers, whose unions oppose vouchers and school choice, send their children. An analysis of 2000 Census data by the Fordham Institute showed that 21.5% of public school teachers nationwide choose private schooling for their children vs. 17.5% for other families.

The percentage goes up in major urban school systems such as Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Chicago.

"Public school teachers are savvy education consumers," observes Chester Finn, president of the Fordham Institute, an Ohio-based non-profit organization devoted to K-12 education reform. "They know which schools do a good job and which ones don't."

Rodney Paige, former U.S. secretary of education and superintendent in the Houston public school system, recognized that competition, not just money, breeds excellence. "What motivation do public school administrators have for improvement without competition?" he once asked. "But if parents can take their children somewhere else to learn, now administrators are going to get off their butts and make sure things are done right."

Those who argue that vouchers drain needed resources from public schools miss the point. If a child is doing well in a school, no responsible parent will take that child out. The child trapped in a failing school is already being left behind.

We need to be less concerned with saving the public schools and more concerned with saving the children in them.   

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