Pilot Program Is Worth A Try

New Jersey is poised to take a vital step toward delivering on the elusive promise of providing quality education opportunities to inner-city children who desperately need them.

By enacting a pilot school voucher program for Jersey City, the Legislature would mark a milestone in educational reform by transferring power over basic educational decisions from bureaucrats to parents, teachers and the community. The pilot program will create school choice in the broadest sense of the term. In addition to ordinary public schools, the program will open three new options:

• Teachers may create "alternative" schools within existing schools.

• Parents, teachers, corporations, or university may establish independent "charter" schools.

• Parents may apply for scholarships toward private school tuition, with extra funding for low-income and special-needs students. The alternative and charter schools remain public schools, but are freed from numerous existing bureaucratic requirements.

In a state whose Supreme Court repeatedly has ruled educational services for low-income youngsters constitutionally inadequate-leading to massive spending but little improvement-school vouchers offer the immediate reality of equal educational opportunitie s. Parents whose children have been consigned to the worst schools will, for the first time, have the freedom to choose good schools for their kids.

Equally important, public schools will be given both the flexibility and incentive to improve. The expanded options made available to parents will mean that schools have to compete to attract students and the funding that comes with them. And public school teachers and administrators will able to free themselves from the stifling top-down bureaucratic control that wastes precious resources and destroys innovation.

If the Jersey City pilot program is successful, it could be extended to other cities with similar problems, such as Newark and Paterson. School vouchers could break the stalemate between those who seek better educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged children and those who protest that the tax burden for public schools is already overwhelming.

Both sides are right-but spending more money on the present system is like soaking a fire with gasoline. Only school choice can truly place low-income children on a more level playing field, and deliver to parents the power to secure decent schools for their kids.

But whatever school choice is proposed, its path is blocked by powerful special interest groups with a direct stake in preserving the status quo. I have had the honor of defending in court the two existing school choice programs that include private schoo ls, the results of which are impressive.

In Wisconsin, the legislature in 1990 enacted the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, which allows up to 1,000 low-income youngsters to use a portion of their portion of their public school funding-about $2,700- as full tuition in participating private non sectarian schools.

As in many New Jersey cities, the need was urgent: Of kids from welfare families, only 15 percent graduated from high school, and those who did, graduated with a "D" grade-point average. The inner-city schools were infested with crime and drugs. Meanwhile , community private schools serving the same population at a fraction of the cost provide a safe environment and boast a 95 percent graduation rate.

Results were swift: In the first year, several hundred low-income schools left educational cesspools for good schools. Involvement and satisfaction among low-income parents skyrocketed. Perhaps most important, the previously lethargic, unresponsive public school bureaucracy was induced to pursue sweeping reform measures. In Spring 1992, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the program against constitutional challenge.

A program of interest to Jersey City was enacted last fall in Puerto Rico, an island with perhaps the most abysmal public schools in the nation. The commonwealth deregulated several dozen public schools, transforming them into autonomous "community" schoo ls run by administrators, teachers and parents, and created a scholarship program allowing low-income children to attend private schools.

In the program's first years, more students left private schools to attend the newly unshackled public schools than those who applied for scholarship to attend private schools. These statistics debunk the myth that private school choice means the demise o f public schools-especially if public schools are given power to effectively compete.

Predictably, the Puerto Rico program was challenged in court by a teacher's union and the ACLU. Though a trial court struck it down this Spring under a provision of the commonwealth constitution, the Puerto Rico Supreme Court this Summer voted to allow the program to continue for the next school year.

In both Milwaukee and Puerto Rico, the prime boosters for school choice span the political spectrum: Milwaukee stat Rep. Polly Williams and Mayor John Norquist are Democrats and Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson is Republican; Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rosello is a Democrat.

Support for school choice in New Jersey transcends the partisan divide, and motivations vary. School choice offers possible relief for overburdened taxpayers and the prospect of a better-educated citizenry. For inner-city youngsters whose prospects are bleak at best, it provides hope for a better future.

At bottom, of course, their interests are paramount. Of all reform proposals, only school choice allows kids to leave failing schools for good ones, and creates the means by which defective schools can improve. Not 10 years from now, but today.

Though I now work in Washington, I am a New Jersey boy: I attended public elementary school in Linden and graduated in 1975 from Hillsdale High School. I received a good education that allowed me to pursue a fulfilling career. But if we are to provide chi ldren in New Jersey's schools today anything resembling the educational quality we had only two decades ago, we must put an end to business a usual.

The Jersey City pilot program is a modest yet vital step in the right direction. It marks not only a break with the failed status quo, but the dawn of a new day for children who very badly need a break.

Clint Bolick is litigation director at the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., which represents low-income parents in Jersey City seeking school choices.

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Hudson County, New Jersey is a place of many firsts - including genocide and slavery.
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