The Quest for Better Schools in Three Cities

The Honorable Pete DuPont, Moderator
Mary Tanner, Lehman Brothers
Mirlanda Allende, The Mother's Alliance
Michael Joyce, The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

        Reflecting the diversity as well as the passion for children's welfare that bind education reformers on every level in every state across the country, this session, led by the Honorable Pete duPont, gave the audience an in-depth understanding as to the movement afoot in three vastly different cities.

        Mary Tanner from Lehman Brothers in New York City brings the perspective of 25 years of investment banking experience to the school reform debate. She presented a compact review of the climate in which this debate is taking place in New York and a review of changes that are currently taking place within the public school system itself.

        Taking a bit of poetic license, Tanner used the acronym "SUPRISE " to explain the current forces that are shaping the issues of school reform in the city and state of New York today.

Scale
Union
Private Schools
Religion
Incentive
Suburbs
Entropy

        Four areas of reform now bring promise -- and a challenge -- to New York schools:

1. Students are required to pass the New York State Regents Exam in order to earn a high school diploma.

2. Chancellor Rudy Crew's efforts to replace lifetime tenure with 3 - 5 year renewable contracts.

3. The efforts of individuals like Larry Tisch, John Walton and the Archdiocese of New York to provide scholarships to the most needy children to attend schools of choice.

4. The commitment to passage of a strong charter school law.

        Bringing an entirely different perspective to the table was Mirlanda Allende, a single parent from Miami, who spoke eloquently of the sacrifices her parents made to allow her to attend a private school as a child and the same sacrifices she is currently making for her own son.

        Well aware of the deplorable test scores and drop out rates of Florida's youth, Mirlanda helped found a new grassroots organization called The Mother's Alliance, which CER is proud to have helped develop. It is "a group of mothers who share the same vision when it comes to our children and education. We are not afraid to take a stand, in fact we are trying to rattle things a little. We are mothers from different cities, Denver, Detroit, Milwaukee, Washington and Florida. The main goal of the Mother's Alliance is to find and nurture a support network that helps leaders and lay people sustain and win the struggle for education reform. By having team work and commitment we can aggressively direct our energy to combat the social ills that plague our communities."

        The Mother's Alliance is clearly tapping into one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked sources of political influence in this country, mothers with moxie.

        "For me and for my colleagues at Bradley Foundation August 31 was a particularly gratifying moment. For after 13 years of struggle and over ten million dollars of investment, we had helped to take what had been an abstruse intellectual construct, a talking point, and translated it and transformed it into a concrete reality. A powerful educational reform involving real flesh and blood human beings exercising freely the bedrock principle of a self governing republic -- that the parent is the primary educator of the child."

        This was Michael Joyce of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation reflecting on Milwaukee's historic decision to allow parents to pay religious school tuition with public funds, thus allowing true parental choice.

        Joyce sees the simplicity and truth of the parental choice question so clearly that for him there is no question at all. "It's time to face the fact that parental choice in education is a policy about common sense. Bureaucrats and Academics may get all confused about it but when you are talking to real parents, the freedom and power to choose is not a difficult concept to get across."

        Since CER's conference in October the Supreme Court has indeed upheld the lower court's decision to allow parents to use public funds for tuition in religious schools. Mr. Joyce mused, "The U.S. Supreme Court decision will send a message to the whole country that vouchers are here and now a reality of American policy and it won't take long for the people to figure out that government schools are no longer the inevitable destiny for their children."

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