President George W. Bush proposed vouchers during his campaign, as a means of giving poor parents a choice in the type of school their children attend. Now it looks like vouchers, as an education reform tool nationwide, have hit a snag: They are unacceptable to Congress and have been dropped. Why? Is it because NEA, the nation’s strongest teachers’ union, has either befriended or intimidated many members of Congress into doing its will — killing the President’s compassionate program for our nation’s poor children? From my experience, this is by far the most likely answer.

Admittedly, I have a personal stake in this discussion. As a veteran school choice advocate in Wisconsin, I could visualize the NEA and its Wisconsin affiliate, the WEAC (Wisconsin Education Association Council) breaking out the champagne when their candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Elizabeth Burmeister, defeated me in the April 3rd election. I am grateful to the leaders of the choice schools in Milwaukee, along with some of the usual choice proponents, who worked tirelessly for me. However, other leaders sat complacently on the sidelines. It seems that many have let their guard down, assuming that school choice in Milwaukee, at least, was safe regardless of the election outcome. I believe, sadly, they are wrong.

But it is not just me who believes that the Milwaukee voucher program, perhaps the best known in the nation -- which hosted New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his city’s education leaders just last week -- is facing “rough water.” Reporter Sam Schulhofer-Wohl used that term in the title of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article with the subtitle “You could compare Milwaukee’s private school choice program to the Titanic."

Early in the State Superintendent’s race, I warned my traditional supporters from previous campaigns of the threats to school choice. Wisconsin’s current State Superintendent, John Benson, had thrown new stumbling blocks in front of the choice schools last August just prior to classes opening, in the form of last-minute rules and regulations. I complained at the time to Benson that leading parents and their children to worry about whether their school would open on time, or at all, according to the Department of Public Instruction’s whim, just a couple of weeks before the end of summer vacation was no way to treat parents and their kids.

In addition, a lawsuit against 18 Milwaukee choice schools was filed by People for the American Way -- with the apparent support of the DPI – on the grounds that the schools were not “accountable.” Apparently, in the words of Ronald Reagan, they "just don’t get it." On the contrary, the idea of school choice is ultimate accountability. Parents choose to place their children in a school and choose to remove them from that school if they are not satisfied with the results. If many parents pull their students out of a school, the school will be forced to close. As a 31-year public school teacher, I know that type of accountability cannot be applied to public schools by poor parents. They only have that flexibility in a school choice program.

Now Wisconsin awaits the swearing in of new State Superintendent Burmeister, in July — elected with hundreds of thousands of dollars of direct and indirect support from teachers’ unions. If her campaign against me is any indication, she will continue the games that John Benson has begun in the name of “accountability."

All the more pity, then, that the voucher component of President Bush’s education reform package has been scrapped. While many middle-class and affluent citizens outside (and inside) Wisconsin may think that poor parents should either pay for private school themselves – as our parents may have done 30 or 40 years ago – or leave their children in public schools, times have changed. If we think back, we probably had two parents in our homes, while many poor parents today are single mothers whose jobs pay minimum wage. On such salaries, a parent couldn’t pay private school tuition for one child, let alone more than one. That is modern reality.

Had President Bush’s voucher plan survived, it would have fit admirably in the President’s speech at Notre Dame on May 20, when he referred to President Johnson’s Great Society. Vouchers for poor parents give them and their children the possibility of everyone sharing in the American dream and of truly “leaving no child behind."

How sad that the NEA and their affiliates, here in Wisconsin and nationwide, are not as compassionate toward poor children as President Bush and all those “dangerous” education reformers

Linda Cross is a teacher at Hortonville High School in Hortonville, Wisconsin. She is a former candidate for Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Schools, and a member of Teacher Choice, a national association of teachers and educators who support choices, accountability, and reduced regulation in education. The group’s web site is http://www.adti.net/teacherchoice.

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