Choice Advocates Urged to "Ask the Hard Questions"

School Reform News
January 25, 2001

Instead of criticizing the opposition for the way they conducted their campaign against school vouchers, the school choice movement should be asking the hard questions about "Where did we go wrong?" argues Myron Lieberman, president of the Education Policy Institute.

One obvious place to start, he said, would be for school choice advocates to find out more about the teacher unions and their strengths and weaknesses before initiating a campaign in a particular state.

For example, California and Michigan are the states with the two strongest teacher union organizations in the country, notes Lieberman. He questions whether they were the most appropriate battlegrounds for school choice. Future efforts would provide better odds of success. Lieberman suggests, if they were targeted to states that offered the best chance of achieving victory.

"We lost on Tuesday," he said, "and we have to be tough-minded about why."

While lack of money has been cited in the past as a reason for the defeat of earlier voucher initiatives, neither of the two 2C00 campaigns were shoestring operations. In fact, voucher proponents outspent opponents in Michigan. The unfavorable verdict voters delivered on Proposition 1 indicates the pro-voucher forces were ineffective in persuading voters to say "yes" to the details of the measure on the ballot.

Initiative proponents in both California and Michigan also failed to persuade other school choice advocates, not just voters, to say "yes" to the details of their ballot measures. That situation is not uncommon, according to David Kirkpatrick, senior fellow for teacher choice at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

"Sadly, there are too many examples over the past decade where such belittling of each other's suggestions has played directly into the hands of opponents," Kirkpatrick said.

According to John Williams of the Kids First! Yes! campaign, urban voters in Michigan rejected vouchers because the opposition had raised fears that vouchers would take money away from their public schools. Suburban voters rejected vouchers because they feared vouchers would increase their taxes.

Another problem, according to Anita Nelam, also of Kids First! Yes! was that support for school choice in the black community is "ten miles wide and an inch deep." When almost every black group in Detroit came out against Proposal 1, "that hurt," she said.

Looking to the future, Kids First! Yes! cochair Rev. Eddie Edwards suggested a stronger grassroots parents' group was needed, together with a voter education program started at least a year before the election. The aim of that program would be to inform voters about the failure of the current system. he said.

"The public doesn't know that eight-year-old children can't read." Edwards said.

Thinking strategically

Is an initiative the best way to proceed?

Kirkpatrick says "no": he has long favored the legislative approach. A more recent convert to that strategic position is Kevin Teasley, a veteran of the 1993 California campaign and several other initiative efforts. He now is president of the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation in Indianapolis, Indiana, an organization that specializes in building community awareness and grassroots leadership in support of educational options.

"I think it is fair to say that the initiative route is not the best road to school choice." Teasley says. "The other side has too many weapons, are better organized, and they have the easy job of playing the 'fear' card on the voters. Voters will vote 'no' more often than 'yes' if they are unsure of an initiative's impact."

Teasley's solution is "to get connected to the grassroots." He believes a good grassroots base should be available in both California and Michigan as a result of the campaigns, and that these bases should be nurtured and developed.

One important group that has been neither developed nor nurtured is public school teachers. Kirkpatrick believes "a major fault of school choice reformers is their failure to involve classroom teachers or other public educators in the process." Pointing out that opinion polls of public school teachers always have found a significant number who support parental choice. Kirkpatrick notes that just 20 percent would be nearly 600,000 teachers.

Lieberman suggested choice advocates investigate what the schools are telling parents about how their children are performing in school. Voters who give low ratings to public schools in general almost invariably give high ratings to their own local public schools, he notes. "What are those local schools telling parents about their performance?"