Monday, May 1, 2000 in Chicago Tribune
by R. Bruce Dold
The opposition breezed through town last week. He didn’t look so dangerous.
A year ago Ted Forstmann gave 40,000 kids a chance to jump to a new school. Forstmann is a billionaire investment banker. He and another fabulously wealthy gentleman, John Walton, put up $50 million each to set up the Children’s Scholarship Fund and take kids out of public schools and send them to private schools.
The response was amazing. They raised another $70 million, and 1.25 million children applied for the scholarships.
This wasn’t free money. The scholarships would provide about $1,000 a year for each child, but the families would have to provide the rest of the school tuition. And this was limited to children from low-income families.
That says something about public education: A whole lot of people want out.
To hear some of the talk, though, you’d think these two guys were trying to round up 40,000 kids and send them to forced labor. Forstmann and Walton have been accused of being stalking horses for a conservative fringe that wants to destroy the public education system and promote religious edu-cation.
I got a taste of that talk after writing last week about Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s frustration with public schools and teachers unions. Madigan, a Democrat and an ally of labor, said there’s a “widespread discontent” with the quality of public schools, but unions are trying to protect their monopoly over education. There were plenty of letters and calls from people who thought I must be a Catholic school parent who’s just tired of paying for somebody else’s education.
Not so.
My children go to public schools, good public schools with good teachers. We could pay the tuition for the good Catholic school. We chose the public schools.
But the demand for Forstmann’s scholarships shows that many parents aren’t happy with their schools, they don’t have a choice, and they want one.
It has been about 150 years since the last revolution in American education. It seems like a good time for another one.
The last revolution came with good intentions. In the mid-1800s most schools were private and you had a good chance of going to one only if you were white, wealthy and male. Reformers pushed for common schools and for laws that required all children to go to those schools.
The reformers won. They guaranteed everyone could go to school, but they also guaranteed that the government would have control over education. Some state laws ordered not just that kids had to go to school, but they had to go to public school. In 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled parents wouldn’t be breaking the law by sending their children to private schools.
Public schools have about 90 percent of the kids today, which is about as good as a monopoly gets.
Ted Forstmann has some interesting ideas about how to change that.
“Who should be in charge of the education of the child? The parent or the government? If you say the parent, I’ve got you,” he said in a conversation here last week.
“The government should be like an ATM machine,” he said. “The government should be ambivalent about where the parent sends the child. If the government wants to compete, fine. There will be places where the government can compete and some places where the government won’t be able to compete.”
An ATM dispenses cash, but no orders on where to spend it. The argument against ATM-style education funding is that it wouldn’t guarantee there is a school available for everyone. There has to be a model that breaks up the education monopoly and still guarantees every child can go to school.
So why not keep public schools operating by paying them not to educate kids?
The Children’s Scholarship Fund showed there are a whole lot of parents who don’t like being caught in an education monopoly but can’t afford on their own to escape it. When they were offered the $1,000 scholarship, though, they were willing to scrape together the rest of the money for private school tuition.
Illinois sends about $5 billion to local public schools each year, about $2,500 for each student.
So Illinois should do what the Children’s Scholarship Fund did, and offer each low-income child a $1,000 scholarship for a private school. And then the state can give the rest, $1,500, to the public school the child left. The schools would get the money but not the expense of teaching the kid.
Paying schools not to teach kids sounds as perverse as paying farmers not to grow crops, which is what has passed for agriculture policy. It’s a bribe, a subsidy, a payoff. But it’s a thought. It would create more competition in education.
There will be more competition in education, because so many people want it. Forget all that talk about conservative stalking horses.
Look at some of the people on the advisory board for the Children’s Scholarship Fund: Andrew Young, Rep. Charles Rangel, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, Joseph Califano, Henry Cisneros and Martin Luther King III.
And throw in 1.25 million children. That’s a lot of children.