They can't get away with it forever
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No Comments [ Add Comment ]By Robert C. Enlow
Guest commentary
O
ver the past 11 years, school choice has enjoyed unprecedented successes -- more public support and more political victories than ever before. That's why this week's referendum defeat for the breakthrough universal school voucher program in Utah is nothing but a bump in the road for the school choice movement. It's a big, big loss for the families of Utah, but it won't stop the growing success of vouchers nationwide. One state does not a movement make.
As usual, the unions were only able to secure a win through the combination of three ugly factors. They have oceans of money, secured from coerced union dues in all 50 states. They push misleading rhetoric that seeks only to scare people and that obscures the well established facts about vouchers. And they mobilize the thousands of passengers on the school monopoly's gravy train -- from teachers to bus drivers -- as voters and volunteers.
But don't let any of that fool you. These sources of teacher union power have been growing steadily weaker. Over the past decade, and especially in the past few years, school choice has achieved tremendous success.
Nationwide, school choice has exploded since 1997. Back then, there were only six programs, and two of those were tax credits for private school parents that didn't do much to expand real choice. The other four, two century-old voucher programs in Maine and Vermont, and two newer voucher programs in Milwaukee and Cleveland, served only about 14,000 students.
Today there are 21 school choice programs in 13 states and Washington, D.C. They serve about 130,000 students. And they're growing rapidly.
Moreover, the power of the school choice movement is accelerating.
Most of the growth of school choice has come in just the past few years. Last year, school choice had its most successful legislative year ever, with five new programs enacted and five existing programs expanded.
Then this year came the big breakthrough: Utah's universal program, giving almost every student in the state a school voucher. The unions know that we're getting stronger and they're getting weaker. That's why they're getting increasingly desperate, as was clearly visible in their Utah campaign.
Dues money taken without consent from millions of teachers nationwide was poured into Utah. The unions were reluctant to answer questions about this. However, media reports have confirmed that at least $3 million in union money flowed into Utah from out of state. The true number, when all other state and local NEA affiliate sources are added up, is probably much bigger.
It's funny -- early in the debate, the unions complained because national school choice organizations (like my group, the Friedman Foundation) were active in Utah. They complained that outsiders had no business participating in Utah's affairs. But for some reason they stopped saying this after the big out-of-state union money dump was exposed.
Unfortunately, this geyser of money ensured that they were able to blanket Utah with their phony scare tactics. Vouchers wouldn't work, they would encourage segregation, they would cripple the public schools, take money away, etc. In fact, there's a large body of empirical research on existing school choice programs nationwide, and it consistently shows that none of these negative effects has occurred anywhere. But never mind.
The unions' increased desperation is particularly revealed in how hard they are now pushing the segregation angle, which is simultaneously their most inflammatory claim and their most untruthful one. All the research shows that voucher programs provide better racial integration, because they break down residential barriers and draw children from different neighborhoods -- and hence different backgrounds -- together. But the unions and their allies in Utah smeared us with images of segregationists in the 1950s waving the confederate flag.
Probably the biggest factor, however, is that the government school monopoly is so huge that many thousands of voters now draw their livelihoods from its gravy train. Most of them can be counted on to vote their pocketbooks, and large numbers of them turn out to do volunteer work to defend their places at the trough.
To be fair, almost all of these voters and volunteers think they're really doing the right thing. They've bought the negative line on vouchers that their unions are selling. They think they're voting their consciences, not their purses.
But let's be clear. We know enough about human nature to know why the negative line on vouchers finds so many more believers among public school employees than it does anywhere else. Despite all this, I'm upbeat about the future of vouchers. We've survived defeats like this before. In fact, we're thriving in spite of them.
Over the past decade, for every one program the unions have managed to eliminate, several more have taken its place. School choice is winning, and the unions know it. What Utah shows is that they're scared. They should be.
Enlow is executive director of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.
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