TO ANYONE with eyes to see and ears to hear, parents across America — especially those in urban neighborhoods with wretched public schools — are wild for school choice. In Milwaukee, where vouchers are making it possible for 8,000 poor students to attend private or parochial school, 62 percent of city residents support the program, according to a poll commissioned by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among black Milwaukeeans, the level of support is 74 percent; among Hispanics, 77 percent. And among Milwaukee residents with very low incomes, a whopping 81 percent favor vouchers.
Milwaukee is no fluke. A national poll last year by a leading black think tank, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, showed that substantial majorities of blacks in the Northeast (69 percent) and Midwest (65 percent) support vouchers. Broken down by age, support was especially pronounced among blacks most likely to have school-age children: Nearly 59 percent of those between ages 26 and 50 think vouchers should be widely available.
 Ted Forstmann, pictured here with a Washington, DC, student, is the co-founder of a foundation to defray the cost of private education for kids from poor families. |
"Many such parents," he writes, "are . . . black women raising kids or grandkids on their own." Rose Blassingame, for example, who is raising four grandchildren in a two-bedroom apartment, struggles to pay for tuition, books, and school uniforms at the Catholic schools the kids are attending. "Covering these costs means giving up the monthly meal out, a summer amusement park trip, and visits to the beauty parlor. . . . For Franciscoe" — one of her grandchildren — "it meant spending all but $31 of the $347 he earned at his summer job on the gray slacks, white shirts, and green blazer that constitute his uniform."
There are millions of Rose Blassingames out there, and no one knows it better than businessmen Ted Forstmann and John Walton, two donors to the Washington Scholarship Fund who last year decided to take the idea nationwide. They raised $170 million — $100 million from their own pockets — to create the Children's Scholarship Fund, and invited low-income families to apply for 40,000 scholarships that would defray part of the cost of private school tuition. Winners would be required to supplement the scholarship with (on average) $1,000 a year of their own money.
To their astonishment, nearly 1.25 million applications came flooding in, representing almost 1 out of every 50 schoolchildren in America. "These were not parents seeking a free ride," Forstmann marvels. "Though their average income was less than $22,000 a year, they were willing, asking, to make significant financial sacrifices to take advantage of our partial . . . scholarships. Think of it: 1.25 million applicants asking to pay $1,000 a year over four years. That's $5 billion that poor families were willing to spend simply to escape the schools where their children have been relegated."
Which brings us to Al Gore and Bill Bradley, two Democrats who daily profess their devotion to the poor and trumpet their keen empathy for black Americans. During their recent debate on "Meet the Press," the two candidates were asked by Tim Russert whether, if elected, they would support vouchers. Do you suppose they jumped at the chance to back up Rose Blassingame and the armies of inner-city parents who are desperate to get their kids out of dangerous and incompetent government schools?
If so, you suppose wrong.
Q: "As president, would you support . . . vouchers?"
Bradley: "The answer is, Tim — no, and I will tell you why. I have supported vouchers on an experimental basis on a number of occasions over 18 years. I do not believe that vouchers are the answer to the problems of public education."
Gore: "The reason I oppose vouchers, Tim, is because . . . if you drain the money away from the public schools for private vouchers, then that hurts the public schools."
Russert tried again. "Why don't those poor minority moms with their kids, who could not possibly deal with the chaos of public schools, deserve a break?"
He tried a third time. "They have decided the public schools don't work. . . . Why not give them a couple hundred bucks to offset the burden of tuition?"
But Gore and Bradley can't answer the question. They have tucked themselves so deeply into the hip pocket of the politically powerful teachers unions — which, like all monopolists, want to strangle competition — that the cries of beleaguered parents with kids in lousy schools have become inaudible to them.
Their callousness is disgraceful. Neither would allow his own children to rot in a dysfunctional public school, yet they scorn a reform that would empower poor parents to rescue their children. What would happen to public education, they wail, if kids are allowed to opt out? It never occurs to them to wonder what will happen to the kids if they aren't.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read something different? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.