On the campaign trail, the candidates have spent a lot of time on only one piece of the education-reform puzzle: school choice. That’s because choice is relatively easy to explain in a few words. All three candidates support letting parents pick their children’s schools, but they have very different views on how choice should be implemented:
Like many conservatives, the president envisions education as a free market, with families choosing public, private or parochial schools-all paid for with public money in the form of vouchers.
The governor supports choice within public schools, but is “unalterably opposed” to vouchers because he would rather put the money into improving the public system; both major teachers’ unions back him.
He favors a middle road, public-school choice with experimentation in vouchers.
Bush’s plan is clearly the most radical-and the most controversial. Critics say widespread use of vouchers for private schools would destroy public schools. In fact, there’s no evidence that vouchers work. Two years ago Milwaukee instituted the country’s first publicly subsidized private-school choice program. Applications have increased each year, but attrition has been high. Of the original 341 students, only 46.5 percent returned the second year. There’s been no significant increase in achievement scores of the students, all from inner-city families-the group Bush says choice will help most.
The president did not support vouchers until recently. In the 1988 campaign, he argued only for public-school choice; a spokesman says his views have “evolved” since then. Will a second Bush presidency mean enactment of a voucher system? Probably not. Bush has been full of “choice” rhetoric, but he hasn’t actively lobbied for choice legislation in Congress. In the absence of any concrete achievements, he has to rely on words alone to win over voters weighed down by tuition bills.
Clinton likes public-school choice, but it’s not a silver bullet either. Although politicians on the right and left embrace the concept, educational researchers have yet to find proof that choice alone will fix schools. The most commonly cited successes-New York’s East Harlem and Cambridge, Mass.-upgraded schools as part of comprehensive reforms, not simply in response to choice.
On other school-reform issues, the candidates’ sound bites sound alike. They all want more preschool and national goals, standards and tests. That’s not a coincidence. Many of Bush’s ideas come from Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, a former Tennessee governor. Alexander and Clinton both chaired the National Governors’ Association’s five-year education-reform effort and worked together to establish national goals. In Texas, Perot ran a 1984 citizens’ committee that drew up a list of reforms-many of them similar to the governors’ goals.
Higher education hasn’t received nearly as much attention as choice, but, again, there are real differences between the candidates. Bush rarely mentions the issue except to bash Clinton for attending Oxford-while Clinton outlines a new financing plan he calls the National Service Trust. Instead of the often bewildering array of national-loan programs, Clinton would set up just one plan students could repay through taxes after graduation or public-service work. It sounds good-maybe too good. Clinton estimates that if his plan is phased in over four years, the price tag could be $18 billion to $20 billion.
Even the most innovative plan is meaningless without the drive to turn it into reality. So who cares the most? As he tries to explain away his weak first-term record, Bush sounds like a little boy who has failed a spelling test and promises to do better next time. Bush’s supporters admit he does not come across as personally committed to schools-the way his wife does when she speaks about literacy. That hurts Bush with voters. In a NEWSWEEK Poll, education matched job creation as the most important issue. Clinton beat Bush nearly two to one when people were asked who would be most likely to fix schools. Clinton would seem to have the background to be a genuine education president. He has made school reform a cornerstone of his rise to prominence, and he understands the subtle points of “school-based management” and “developmentally appropriate curriculum.” Even his critics don’t deny his commitment. The classroom is one place where the policy wonk doesn’t have to apologize.
