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Educational Choices
Nationally, Connecticut's ‘reform'
efforts don't amount to much
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Business New Haven
9/8/1997
By: Laurence D. Cohen
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NEW ORLEANS, La. - Just like everyone else who is blond and named Carlson, Arne Carlson lives in Minnesota, where he prospered, entered politics and, in 1994, won re-election as governor by the largest margin in state history.
But his roots weren't in that land of 10,000 lakes and 40 million Lutheran churches. He was raised in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, attended lousy public schools in said Bronx, and then won a full scholarship to the Choate School for Rich Kids in Wallingford.
Carlson was so unprepared for real education that when he was told he would have to take a grammar test as part of the admissions process, he was too embarrassed to confess that he didn't know what “grammar” was. He turned in a blank sheet of paper.
But Choate didn't throw him out, or put him in a bilingual class for Swedish-speaking immigrants, or shuffle him off to some dark corner of the Special Education universe. They taught him. They demanded that he learn. And so, he learned.
Carlson was one of the star attractions at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative cult of state legislators from across the country.
Legislators, policy wonks and more lobbyists than you could fit in a fundraising dinner descended on this steamy river city to feast on the red meat of less government, lower taxes, utility deregulation and, of course, “school choice.”
The subject that dominated the convention was education: what was wrong with it, and how to fix it.
Freed from their teachers-union-controlled legislatures, freed from the pounding of status-quo “civic leaders,” the legislators sucked up the collective wisdom on school choice, on vouchers and tax credits and various other strategies to inject some competition into the public-school monopoly.
Arne Carlson was a big hit. Assuming power in a “progressive” state with a reputation for good public schools, Carlson insisted that the high test scores in the aggregate hid Minnesota's dirty little secret: poor children, particularly poor minorities, weren't learning, weren't graduating, and couldn't escape to better schools, as he did when he attended Choate.
This year he insisted on a big increase in the existing tax deduction, and a new tax credit for poor families, for educational expenses at any school in the state - public, private or parochial - and vetoed the entire education appropriation when he didn't get it. The legislature caved, increased the existing tax deduction and approved the tax credit for lower-income families.
One of the great “education” moments at the convention came during the discussion of electric-utility deregulation. A speaker from the American Association of School Administrators (the public schools superintendents) explained that electricity was one of the biggest school expenses, and that his organization favored deregulation and choice in the electric marketplace.
You can guess where this is going. If you favor deregulation and choice in electricity, the hostile questions began, do you also favor deregulation and “choice” in education? Mumbling and fumbling from the front of the room.
Arizona State Sen. Tom Patterson, a champion of that state's best-in-the-nation charter school legislation, touted his latest “school choice” achievement: a 100-percent tax credit (up to $500) in lieu of income tax deduction which can be donated to any IRS-approved non-profit charity in the state - including, of course, private and parochial schools. The Arizona legislature also passed a $200 tax deduction against educational expenses such as uniforms or fees.
Patterson says the new legislation should meet church-state constitutional challenges because the tax credits and deductions represent money “that at no time was in the hands of the government.” He told lawmakers that the legislation could be sold as a “tax cut” quite aside from its school-choice implications; and it wasn't anti-public schools, because no money was taken away from public schools.
“It's a matter of fairness,” he said. “We wanted to do something to stimulate public schools.”
And what of Connecticut's efforts at school reform? Not good enough to merit much attention from this crowd. Our charter-schools legislation is too wimpy, and our “school choice” stuff is barely credible. There's always next year.
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