Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
Hosted by The Center for Education Reform
CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE THE CURE FOR GOP FUNK
By Bruno V. Manno
Investor's Business Daily, December 2, 1997
Republicans in Washington are in an education funk. They can't seem to take the education issue back from Bill Clinton, who portrays them as anti-public school. But with the right message, Republicans can be pro-public education and true to their free-market principles.
Republicans and free-market conservatives need to realize that they won't win the education debate by preaching only about local control, vouchers and educational savings accounts. Rather, they must talk positively of what the nation needs to do -state by state and school by school -to transform its sclerotic public education system. Only then will their market solutions seem palatable to most Americans.
There are two dimensions to taking back the education issue from the president and the Democrats.
First, Republicans must recognize that Clinton has nationalized the education issue. For years, surveys showed education to be a top state or local issue, but not a national one. No longer.
Today, many Americans believe the nation's public schools are in a time warp and need fundamental reform if they're to prepare our young people for the 21st century. That's led a growing majority of Americans -especially female voters - to place education at or near the top of the national worry list.
A Republican education agenda that focuses on the virtues of local control without a wider message of public education reform from the national bully pulpit means that the GOP is missing the mark - while Bill Clinton is pretty close to the bull's-eye.
Second, Republicans must talk about how our nation - state by state and school by school - needs to reinvent public education.
It's true that small but growing majorities back market-based education reforms such as vouchers and educational savings accounts that can be used for private (or public) schools. But most families send their children to public schools. That means that most Americans want to hear about how to transform what they perceive to be the Pony Express world of public education into something better suited for the Digital Age.
A reinvented public school system can be based on principles which are near and dear to the GOP: academic excellence, including the importance of obtaining a safe, first-class education for every child; freedom, including the right to select the school to teach in or to attend; and public schools, provided to all at taxpayer expense and accountable to public authorities for their performance.
In fact, polls point toward a straightforward but revolutionary agenda for change backed by most Americans that reflects these principles. It's a reinvented public school system that's safe, with high standards for all students. Its professionals are free from bureaucratic red tape to teach to those standards and use tests to measure whether kids are learning. And it's a system that offers all families a choice of a public school that meets their needs.
These new American public schools are not micromanaged by school boards or platoons of assistant superintendents. Nor are they subject to the thousand clauses of teacher union contracts that make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent ''educators.''
These new schools welcome site-based control and grass- roots initiatives - today's version of ''local control'' - and entrepreneurial management.
School boards govern these schools by setting academic performance goals and holding schools accountable for meeting these goals. The school board's job is to ensure that the public has the broadest range of choices available to it, that every child has a safe and ''world class'' school to attend, and that the performance goals of the school are met.
Sound familiar? They're called charter schools. And they're cropping up all over the country.
Republicans in Washington do have a way out of their education funk. It involves helping the nation picture the new American public school. It's public because it is open to all and taxpayer money follows the child to the school he or she chooses. It's minimally regulated and run by a variety of sponsors and organizations. And it's accountable.
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Bruno V. Manno is a senior fellow (on leave) with the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.