Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Vouching for Choice Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 11:27:24 EST Message-ID: \HD Vouching for Choice \BY Evan Gahr \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: As state legislatures continue to balk at adopting school choice plans, some corporations and activists in the private sector have begun to act on their own. Voucher programs that help low- and moderate-income families afford better schools for their children are taking hold around the nation. Their success could lead to public school reform. TEXT: School choice is debated endlessly these days. But it has become a reality for Little Rock, Ark., resident Maggie Jackson, even though no government "choice" program exists in her state. Jackson and 15 other Arkansas families received vouchers this fall for private school tuition from a foundation established by local businessman Blant Hurt. The Free to Choose Trust pays half their children's tuition; the parents pay the rest. Jackson, who works as a teacher's assistant, says she sees firsthand the problems in public schools. Teachers spend so much time trying to keep order that there is little time for education. She had long wanted to send her two sons to private school, and with the help provided by the trust, $1,380 for the two boys this year, she was able to enroll them in a Christian school, Word of Outreach Academy. Jackson, who makes about $9,000 a year, is ecstatic about the assistance. Her sons, ages 9 and 10, are better behaved now, she says, thanks to the discipline at the academy. Her 9-year-old, DeShawn, especially is learning more. "I would not say it is a blessing in disguise," she says. "It is not in disguise. It is a blessing." A year ago, Deardra Gaines enrolled her daughter in the $3,000-per-year Atlanta Preparatory School, which had just opened . The school emphasizes black culture along with traditional academics, including instruction in Latin, plus such subjects as Japanese. Gaines says she was willing to pay because the public school her daughter had attended was not challenging. But this August she lost her job when the deli she worked at shut down. Gaines dropped by the school to tell its founder, Fred Hampton, that she couldn't afford to reenroll her daughter. Hampton urged her to apply to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation's Children's Education Foundation, which had just been set up to administer a voucher program, funded by an anonymous donation of $1 million. She was able to qualify for the full $3,000 the same day. These programs are only two of a growing number of private efforts to provide tuition vouchers for children in low-income families. There are similar programs in San Antonio, Milwaukee and Indianapolis. In New York, the Student/Sponsor Partnership pays for inner-city youths to attend Catholic and Lutheran high schools. Other programs are being established in Maryland and Michigan. What all the private voucher initiatives share, besides grateful parents, is a mix of charitable and political motivations. Some have been established by think tanks eager to enliven the debate over education reform with a real world demonstration of school choice. Frustrated by the fact that proposals for publicly funded vouchers have a history of getting bottled up in state legislatures, these backers decided to put their money where their mouths were. Other efforts have been set up by businesses concerned that the public schools are unable to graduate enough well-educated young people to fill the demand for skilled workers. Most parents who have received the vouchers cite three reasons for wanting their kids in private school: values, discipline and academics. The schools they choose are diverse, ranging from Christian academies and traditional Catholic parochial schools to Afrocentric prep schools. But the programs are deluged with applications from far more parents than they can assist. They generally work on a first-come, first-served basis, but anywhere from a third to half the spots may be reserved for kids switching from public to private schools. Students who receive vouchers must live in the metro area where the program operates. Matt Glavin of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, which has awarded about 200 vouchers, says the aim is twofold: to "allow children equal access to the best education possible and at the same time encourage the public schools to make the changes necessary to provide a [good] education." Still, Glavin sees his program as an interim step. "We're doing what we have to do. My dream would be to close the program down because the legislature has implemented choice." Dream is probably the right word. A school choice bill introduced in the Georgia General Assembly earlier this year went nowhere, repeating a common pattern across the country. A well-publicized choice proposition in California failed to qualify for the ballot this fall after a fierce - some say unseemly - battle against the petition drive by public school teachers and administrators. The only school choice initiative on the ballot this year is in Colorado, says Mike Schwartz of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington . The initiative would require the state to provide to parents vouchers worth at least half of the state's per-pupil expenditure on public education in their district. Vouchers would amount to roughly $2,000 per student. Parents could use the vouchers for private school tuition or leave their kids in public schools, which would then receive the voucher funds. The measure may be more carrot than stick. Tom Tancredo of the U.S. Education Department's regional office, who wrote the initiative, says even if it passes, public schools may not lose funds for kids who transfer. Legislators could decide to fund the vouchers in a way that would preserve current funding for public schools. Supporters of the privately funded school choice programs say their efforts will make the issue more difficult for lawmakers to ignore. Schwartz, whose group has long pushed for state-sponsored school choice, says "the strong response [to private programs] from low-income parents has helped raise the visibility of the issue." It has certainly done so with critics of vouchers. Michael Casserly, interim executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 44 school districts nationwide, says, "I consider it an underhanded, cynical and destructive effort on the part of these corporations [that fund vouchers]. They are clearly aiding the demise of public education. There is no evidence that the presence of private school vouchers is producing a higher peformance by public schools." In Indianapolis, where the first privately funded school choice program was established in August 1991, public schools spokesman Mark Goff charges that businesses, rather than boosting or investing in the system, are "basically pulling our students out" of it. Parents are largely indifferent to this larger debate. Win Head, a San Antonio insurance worker, says that last year he and his wife, Trina, were "trying to figure out how to get our son out of public school." The clincher came after his son clashed with another fourth-grader. The boy forced him to take a pill, Head says. Meanwhile, the Heads's church was setting up a school, the Alamo City Christian Academy. And the Texas Public Policy Foundation was launching its Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation. The Heads applied for a tuition voucher, as did more than 2,000 other families, and received one. Head says he would have made any sacrifice to enroll his son in the academy, but the tuition assistance means "I do not need . . . to take an additional job." He hopes to send his younger sons, ages 3 and 4, to private school as well. Robert Aguirre, managing director of the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation, says 918 students received vouchers this year. They attend 74 schools. Another 1,000 students are on a waiting list. The value of the vouchers, which pay for half the tuition, averaged $546. As with most voucher programs, recipients had to prove their financial need by showing that they met the federal income guidelines for free or reduced-price school lunch programs. (The cutoff for a family of four is just under $25,000.) The foundation has raised more than $1.5 million from local businesses and a charitable foundation. Like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation was quickly deluged with thousands of requests for applications when it set up its program in August. "This should be a wake-up call," says Glavin. Students in the program were given vouchers, generally for half the tuition, up to $3,000. Unlike the other programs, which tend to have business and foundation executives on their boards, Georgia's Children's Education Foundation requires that the members of its board be parents who meet the eligibility requirements for vouchers. Indeed, the board awarded vouchers to several of its own members, according to board member Louise Watley, a low-income housing activist whose grandchildren have received vouchers. Watley is concerned that the program has not "reached the low-income masses." But she says the board is composed of members sensitive to the community's needs. They are working to arrange a car pool for parents who can't afford bus fare for their kids and have distributed voucher applications in public housing projects. Children with CEF vouchers are attending a diverse group of private schools, including Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Afrocentric academies. Watley points this out because opponents of vouchers like to dismiss the concept as elitist. But since parents are paying part of the tuition in most cases, the schools they choose are far from the priciest. To give just one example, 12 of the youngsters with CEF vouchers are attending the $2,500-a-year Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. The predominantly black school sees faith in God as the basis for all learning. The school hopes its curriculum and atmosphere will enable students to resist worldly temptations. With that in mind, says Headmaster Bill Christian, the school aims to create "functional families" during mealtimes, making sure a man and a woman are in the room when kids sit down to eat. Christian says tuition is a struggle for most of his parents, and many make monthly payments . Christian is pleased with the vouchers, which eased "some of the financial restraints" on parents. Indeed, the Georgia program has been widely popular since it was kicked off amid a flurry of media attention. An early skeptic, Denton Harris, chairman of Metro Bank , has been won over. At first concerned that the program would harm the public schools, Harris now says meetings with CEF officials convinced him the program could help improve the public schools by making them feel the need to compete for parents' loyalty. Glavin hopes legislators will be more attentive if the school choice bill is duced. He doubts such a measure would again be stalled in committee. "I could not have taken that million dollars and hired a public relations firm to influence debate on school choice" as effectively as the voucher program is doing, he says. Glavin's program was inspired by the Educational CHOICE Charitable Trust, established in Indianapolis last year with a $1.2 million donation from the Golden Rule Insurance Co. and the backing of the company's chairman, J. Patrick Rooney. The trust has enabled more than 900 students to attend 71 private and parochial schools with vouchers that pay half of their tuition, up to $800 per year. Rooney says he established the program to help low-income students from minority groups and eventually to increase the number of qualified employees entering the work force. "We've got to do something for kids not getting a quality education," he says. "We are not doing this to give an electric shock to public schools. We are doing it to give choice to low-income children." With vouchers from CHOICE, Deborah Jefferson, a part-time clerk at an area newspaper, enrolled her son and daughter in the Holy Angels Catholic School. She likes the values and discipline at Holy Angels. In the public schools, she says, "discipline is not as strict" as when she attended in the 1950s. "If it was up to me, every child would get a whopping ." Best of all, she says, since attending Holy Angels, her kids "seem to be choosy about who they run with." Voucher advocates may well exaggerate the benefits to parents, and the critics probably overstate the threat the private programs pose to public schools. Many of the parents who receive vouchers were already sending their children to private schools. What the programs do in these cases is ease worries about meeting payments (vouchers are usually promised for several years) and perhaps free up a comparable portion of the family income. Where a significant impact is felt is probably at struggling private schools. Sister Gerry O'Laughlin, principal of Holy Angels, says the CHOICE program accounts for about 30 of the school's 175 children. In Milwaukee, a group providing vouchers grew out of the Milwaukee Archdiocese's desire to strengthen Catholic schools, says Dan McKinley, executive director of Partners Advancing Values in Education. PAVE was created to shore up Catholic schools but also won broad corporate support. "If we were just a Catholic foundation in sheep's clothing we wouldn't get any money," says McKinley. So the emphasis has shifted from helping Catholic schools to helping families. PAVE this summer created Partnership for Educational Choice. Grants equal to half tuition, up to $1,000, are given to students, who can attend any private school. At this point the impact of such programs is difficult to assess. The only limitation on their growth would seem to be the depth of their donors' pockets. Demand is certainly outstripping the supply of funds wherever the private vouchers have been made available. Indeed, the rationing of available vouchers is the one cloud on the horizon. Because the distribution of the vouchers is usually first-come, first-served, the beneficiaries have been the first people to hear about the programs, which have included employees of companies that support the programs, employees at participating schools and, in the case of the Children's Education Foundation in Georgia, members of the board. Greg Barnard of the Council on Foundations says voucher programs need to be careful about how grants are awarded. Especially since there are waiting lists, it's easy to create an appearance of impropriety or favoritism. Officials of the various programs defend the distribution to all comers. Patsy O'Neill of the Children's Educational Opportunity Foundation in Texas says the group doesn't exclude employees of donor companies nor does it favor them, because parents do not list their employers on the application. Watley of the Georgia foundation says board members who received vouchers did not vote on whether they would be eligible. But she defends their participation. Parents with vouchers are the ideal people to administer the program, she says. Glavin says board members' relatives were "not treated differently." Watley's grandchildren live in public housing and got vouchers that were meant for such residents, he says. The unanswered question is whether the political impact will measure up to organizers' expectations. An Education Department official who follows the school choice issue says that despite the small number of families so far affected, the fallout may be considerable: "The growth and intense interest in these programs tell us that choice is becoming increasingly difficult for the education establishment to ignore." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM