Armageddon (27 page)

The most important educational reform is to allow school choice, to permit parents to decide to which public, private, or church school they wish to send their children. Most school choice plans include variants of the “voucher system,” where the money the state spends on education follows the child to the school of the parents' choice. In Indiana, the state with the most fully developed statewide school choice plan, the state spends $7,000 per student with an additional $4,000 coming from local sources. The voucher plan sends that $7,000 of state money to whichever public or nonpublic school the parents choose.

The resulting competition is intense, and schools have to measure up to get the money. In some states, parents can choose to which public school they send their child rather than have him or her assigned to a school based on where they live.

Hillary Clinton has endorsed public school choice, but has drawn the line against allowing state funds to go to nonpublic schools. She recently said, “I want parents to be able to exercise choice within the public school system—not outside of it.” She attacked charter schools, parroting the teachers' union line that “they don't take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don't keep them. And so the public schools are often in a no-win situation, because they do, thankfully, take everybody, and then they don't get the resources or the help and support that they need to be able to take care of every child's situation.”
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Hillary is wrong. The differences between the proportion of students in traditional public schools and charter schools who receive special education funding is very small. In traditional public schools, 12.5% of the students are in special education programs while in charter schools it is 10.4%, hardly a huge difference. And when it comes to the most disabled, those who get services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, there is virtually no difference at all: 1.53% in traditional public schools and 1.52% in charter schools.

Hillary's refusal to consider subsidizing parents who choose to send their children to nonpublic schools stands in glaring contrast to the decision she and Bill made about their daughter's education. When time came to enroll Chelsea in a DC public school, they sent her to the private Sidwell Friends School rather than to a public one. Of course, she, like President Obama, was able to afford private school tuition. Those who aren't so endowed financially have to leave their children in bad schools and settle for a bad education. Hillary will have a hard time explaining to young parents why they should be bound—shackled really—to the poorly performing public schools.

About one-fifth of charter school students are nonwhite. All over America, parents are voting with their feet to send their children to charter schools both in and outside of the public system. In Philadelphia, for example, 30% of all students go to charter schools and
the system has a waiting list of tens of thousands more.
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Nationally, 6.2% of all students in America are in charter schools, up from 1.7 percent in 2000. In all, about 2.8 million children attend them.
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Another 12% of students are in private or church schools—a total of 5.3 million children.
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And 3%, or 1.5 million, were home schooled. So even though parents pay taxes to support public schools, about one child in five goes to some other kind of school (even though some of the charter schools are public).

If white parents will object fiercely to Hillary's refusal to allow school choice, minority parents will react even more strongly. As a result of decades of housing discrimination, school choice has become the integration issue of our time. Faced with low performing schools in poor neighborhoods, parents have banded together to establish charter schools outside of the control of the teachers' union. Some charter schools are still public, owned by the government and subsidized by state spending, while others are private schools, which may or may not receive state funding.

By insisting that parents send their children only to the public school designated for their zip code, the Democrats are consigning minority students to terrible, failing schools. We must attack Hillary's refusal to support nonpublic charter schools by saying that she is extending housing discrimination—which leads to all-white neighborhoods—into the school system to produce all-minority schools.

Hillary wasn't always owned lock, stock, and barrel by the teachers' union. Indeed, she began her political career by dramatically defying teachers' unions. After Bill lost his first bid for reelection as Arkansas governor (after serving only two years), he and Hillary fought a determined campaign to get back in office. After they succeeded, the Arkansas Supreme Court dealt the former and now future governor a severe blow: It declared Arkansas's system of financing public education discriminated against poor school districts. The Court
ordered the state to give richer districts less money, because their more wealthy homeowners could afford higher property taxes to fund schools, and give poorer districts more funding to make up for their lack of a viable property tax base.

Governor Clinton, who had been defeated for a second term because, in part, of his decision to raise taxes, now faced the need to increase them again. To meet the demands of the Supreme Court, Arkansas would have to raise its sales tax by one-half of 1%—the first such increase in many years. It was Hillary who boldly proposed that Bill reject half measures and raise taxes by a full point and reform education in the state.

She toured the state holding hearings on the quality of education and was appalled by what she uncovered. Teachers who had themselves been educated in low-quality black segregated schools were now being called upon to teach new students. Many did not master even the subject matter they were called on to teach. (One teacher was found to be teaching her class about “world war eleven”—World War II.)

Hillary demanded that all teachers in the state be tested for overall competency and knowledge in their specific area of teaching. Many states required new teachers to be tested, but Hillary was unique in calling for existing teachers to be tested. She insisted on legislation that provided that those who failed the test would be put on probationary status and have another chance to pass the test. If they failed again, they would be discharged. (And in fact, about 10% of Arkansas teachers were fired—although evidence indicated that a larger percentage should have failed.)

The teachers' union went crazy! They battled Hillary's proposal tooth and nail, showering the state legislature with letters, petitions, telegrams, and demonstrations. But Hillary and Bill stood firm. It was their finest hour. The teachers' union, the bedrock of the state's Democratic Party, refused to endorse Clinton for governor for the rest of the 1980s, each time backing his primary opponent and then sitting out the general election against the Republican—highly unusual in a Southern state.

But when Hillary moved to the national stage, she morphed into a compliant tool of the teachers' unions. There was no daylight between them in their opposition to tenure reform, merit pay, and school choice. She went from a crusading battler for students to a tool of the unions.

Hillary's weakness on the education issue will sit especially badly with minorities. African Americans are desperate to get their children into charter schools. A recent poll conducted by the Black Alliance for Educational Options, shows 60% of African Americans support school choice. Matt Frendewey of the American Federation for Children, the organization that sponsored the survey, says, “Too often urban families have children assigned to some of the worst schools in America. Especially those who live in an inner-city environment—where some of the worst and lowest-performing schools are found—recognize that their best option to get their child to a better school is private choice.”
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Frendewey is quick to point out the political salience of the issue to black voters. “Really,” he says, “among African American voters, education is a driving issue. It is an issue they care deeply about, that they want to know their representatives and the politicians who represent them care deeply about, and [they want to know] that they're aligned with their views. And I think that means candidates should be aligned with school choice.”
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The school choice issue is also especially important for Latino parents. Harvard professor Caroline Hoxby found that Florida's Hispanic public-school students underperform their white, non-Hispanic peers by 21 points in math and 22 points in reading. But fortunately, Florida has been a leader in adopting school choice. Hoxby has determined charter school students in predominantly Latino communities outperform their peers in neighboring public schools, with 7.6% more students meeting state reading standards and 4.1% more meeting mathematics standards.

Trump can make huge inroads in the Latino vote by pushing the school choice agenda. To adhere to the dictates of the teachers' union
and confine students to the bad public schools is to imprison them in a poor education and deny them a future.

Those who claim that more money for public schools is the way to solve the problem aren't looking at the evidence. Public schools in Washington, DC, for example, spend the highest amount per student in the nation—$18,000, 50% higher than the national average—but rank last in the percentage who graduate or go on to college. Pouring more money after bad won't work as a strategy to improve public education.

School choice creates competition and lets parents “vote” on the results of their child's education by deciding where to send their children. If the public schools don't measure up and parents send their children to other schools, teachers and administrators in failing schools will lose the state funding that they would normally get for each child. This trend could lead to them losing their jobs, creating a wonderful incentive to do better.

But the issue of school choice begs the ultimate question: What are Hillary's priorities? Do they lie with parents and students or with teachers and their unions? The dilemma this poses for Democrats is well-nigh unsolvable. They need the votes of the parents and the campaign money and organization of the unions. Hillary's entire public persona is based on her claim that she represents the needs of women and children. Yet, here, on the most fundamental issue facing our children, she sides with the providers of service—the teachers—not the consumers of the service—children. She follows the money, not the needs of our kids.

Is this issue of school choice and education reform a voting issue? Is it strong enough to alter how people vote? Again, look at Wisconsin. A historically blue state that narrowly elected a Republican governor in the national GOP sweep of 2010, Wisconsin tested how effective the issue is at the ballot box.

Scott Walker was elected in a squeaker—just 52%–48%—amid the national GOP sweep of 2010, an election in which the Republicans
picked up over 60 new House seats and narrowly missed taking control of the Senate. His victory was widely dismissed by pundits as a fluke in a landslide year.

But as opposition to his bold education reforms intensified and he faced new electoral tests, he rose in each one. As voters began to learn about the details of his education plan, they rallied around and gave him increasing margins of victory. In the 2012 recall election, he picked up a point, winning by 53–47. Then, when Walker ran for a second term, he triumphed by a hefty 57–43. Battling against the unions on education, Walker and the Republicans were able to make decisive inroads among Latino, black, and female voters. Among women, Walker picked up six points from 2010 to 2014. Among blacks, he picked up three. Among voters aged 18–44—mostly parents—Walker gained four points.
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Can a Republican win on the education issue? The George W. Bush campaign of 2000 proves that the answer is yes. During the Clinton presidency, voters rated the Democratic Party as best in addressing education issues. But Bush and the Republicans devoted their entire 2000 National Convention to the education issue, touting Bush's record as governor of Texas to show his commitment to better schools. And when he took office, Bush's first important piece of legislation—passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities—was his No Child Left Behind Law that established national standards for America's schools. For the first time, Republicans passed Democrats as the party most trusted on the education issue.

We can do so again as long as we switch the debate from a bidding war to see who can spend more money to an issue-based discussion of reform and choice. With parents, especially minority families, clamoring for more school choice, and Democratic politicians trying to force them into regular public schools regardless of their preference, there is a huge opening for Republicans to show that they put children ahead of the unions.

We permit people to choose their own kind of car, appliances, houses, and all manner of consumer goods. But the most important
decision of all—where to educate their children—is taken out of their hands and given to bureaucrats based on a zip code. Democrats cannot decry housing discrimination on the one hand and insist that the results of that bias determine which schools one's children should attend.

In desperation, some parents are flouting the laws that require them to send their children to failing public schools rather than quality ones nearby. They are today's civil rights protesters as they risk jail and heavy fines by camouflaging their real residences to get into better school districts.

Kyle Spencer of the Hechinger Report describes how Philadelphia resident Hamlet Garcia and his wife, Olesia, an insurance agent, were arrested for “theft of services,” a charge usually reserved for those who skip out on restaurant checks or steal cable TV. Their crime was stealing an education for their eight-year-old daughter, Fiorella, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of seven years.
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