School Wars: Learning Opportunities

THE 1993 defeat for school choice in California seems to have spooked choice supporters and set them to thinking about alternative strategies. Only in Arkansas and Oregon were choice initiatives circulated in 1994, and both of those drives failed. Many activists have decided the voters aren’t ready for choice, so it might be more effective to seek change through the legislative process or the courts.

For supporters of real choice, there are problems with both legislation and litigation. The biggest danger of school vouchers is that they will be used to regulate, control, and eventually destroy private schools. The experience with government aid to colleges, which are now subject to a plethora of rules and regulations, makes it hard to ignore that concern. The authors of California’s Proposition 174, the most carefully crafted choice initiative yet, tried to avoid the problem by providing that no new regulation of private schools could be imposed without a three-fourths vote of the state legislature or, in the case of city or county regulation, a two-thirds vote of the relevant governmental body and a nearly unobtainable majority vote of the voters in that jurisdiction. It is impossible to imagine a state legislature building such protections—against itself—into choice legislation.

DB

About the Author

David Boaz

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.

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THE 1993 defeat for school choice in California seems to have spooked choice supporters and set them to thinking about alternative strategies. Only in Arkansas and Oregon were choice initiatives circulated in 1994, and both of those drives failed. Many activists have decided the voters aren’t ready for choice, so it might be more effective to seek change through the legislative process or the courts.

For supporters of real choice, there are problems with both legislation and litigation. The biggest danger of school vouchers is that they will be used to regulate, control, and eventually destroy private schools. The experience with government aid to colleges, which are now subject to a plethora of rules and regulations, makes it hard to ignore that concern. The authors of California’s Proposition 174, the most carefully crafted choice initiative yet, tried to avoid the problem by providing that no new regulation of private schools could be imposed without a three-fourths vote of the state legislature or, in the case of city or county regulation, a two-thirds vote of the relevant governmental body and a nearly unobtainable majority vote of the voters in that jurisdiction. It is impossible to imagine a state legislature building such protections—against itself—into choice legislation.