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Choice, Equality and Performance
| Article
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11290 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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9 / 1993 |
4,641 Words |
| Author
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Michael D. Weiss
Michael D. Weiss is an adjunct professor of law at the
University of Houston. He is also a fellow at the Texas Public
Policy Foundation, where he works in American legal reform. |
Equal educational finding has emerged in the 1990s as one of the most divisive issues in public education. Most proposals to solve this problem attempt to do so within the bounds of the present education establishment. On March 13, 1992, however, Texas House speaker Gib Lewis endorsed a different and controversial solution to Texas' school-funding dilemma: choice. The speaker noted that not only would allowing parents to choose their children's schools equalize student funding, but additionally, "studies have found dramatic improvements in the quality of education when parents, teachers and principals are given the freedom to operate their schools at the neighborhood level."
In California, Los Angeles attorney Manny Klausner, CEO of Whittaker Corporation Joseph Alibrandi, and the vice chairman of California's Excellence Through Choice Education League (ExCEL), Kevin Teasley, have gathered enough signatures on their Parental Choice in Education initiative to qualify it for statewide ballot in November. In Kansas City and Chicago parents are suing for educational choice as a remedy for years of neglect and unequal spending in public schools. These parents believe that only a system that allows school choice will provide an equal education for all children.
Today, choice exists in forty or fifty major sites across the nation, according to the Education Commission of the States. These projects prove that school choice not only provides the only feasible way to equalize per-student spending, but that it provides it in such a way as to maximize student educational performance.
Per-pupil funding can never be equal under a system that spends more than one-half of its education dollars on bureaucracy and waste. In addition to blocking equal funding, this waste and bureaucracy act as an impediment to the delivery of a quality education. By minimizing waste, choice both increases the quality of education for all and distributes it equally among students. What is more important, choice provides equal access to another important value: liberty.
WHAT IS CHOICE?
Educational choice comes in a variety of forms, all of which give parents more alternatives than the present system. In its broadest form, choice is designed to include both public or private, parochial or secular, and even home schools.
Under the broadest choice plan, any group can start a school that
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