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player ready...I am going to break my self-imposed rule not to mention the young lady who lives with the Clintons and who deserves as much privacy as a First Child can possibly get. Unfortunately, that’s not much.
The young lady is not the subject of this column. On the contrary, today’s thesis is that, when it comes to choosing a school, the Clintons’ duty to their child’s welfare takes precedence over all other considerations. The only troubling aspect of their decision was the obvious care Bill Clinton took to check out his choice with various honchos of the education lobby-in order to minimize the political fallout. Bill Clinton is a father; he should not need anybody’s permission or even approval to do what is best for his child.
A president of the United States has many duties, among them to set a good example. The best example this one can set for all of us is to put his child first, last and always. No one doubts that is what the Clintons have tried to do. They should not be put in the demeaning position of having to make excuses for it.
Unfortunately, they were. The good, not-gray-enough New York Times began its unfortunate commentary on this subject by saying: “No one can reasonably argue with president-elect and Mrs. Clinton’s desire to choose the school they think best for their daughter . . . .” Then it proceeded to argue with the Clintons’ choice and not very reasonably.
Others used the Clintons’ decision to grind their own favorites axes. Everybody from Jimmy Carter to Joe Sobran was busy second-guessing. Some argued that the First Family’s choice showed the need for more tax money for public education-so public schools could compete for families like the Clintons. Never mind that Washington already has some of the best-financed and worst-run public schools in the nation.
Others said the Clintons’ choice demonstrated the value of a voucher system that, by channeling public money into private schools, would allow poor families to choose a good school for their child-just as the Clintons had done.
But no voucher system yet proposed would guarantee a poor child admission to the elite-and expensive-school that the Clintons chose. The major result of introducing a voucher system would be to subsidize those families with children already in private and parochial schools.
The problems of education in American society are largely reflective of others in this society; they’re not going to be remedied by some single innovation. The schools’ problems are rooted in those of the American family, which continues to break down. In 1959, 28 percent of poor families were headed by women. In 1992, that percentage was 52 percent. At the core of every study of poverty and its associated problems-crime, ignorance, drugs and disease-one finds the collapse of the family.
In many ways our schools have become the receiver-in-bankruptcy for the American family. And the schools may be so busy trying to care for children, and meet their basic physical or psychological needs, that there is precious little time left to educate them.
Offering public vouchers for private education may disimprove both kinds of education-and atomize a society that in many ways already has lost its sense of community. A voucher system might only further divide Americans by race, religion and class. The principal effect of vouchers could be to extend government control over private education. Yes, Virginia, money tends to bring control with it. And surely any schools that accepted vouchers would be required to meet accepted government standards. (How long before they would be watering down their curriculum and teaching politically correct sex?)
The benefits of school choice are attractive in theory. But it would be foolish to adopt a radical reorganization of American education (or anything else) on the basis of a theory untested in practice. It would seem only prudent to proceed carefully and find which reforms reform and which don’t. Remember the new math?
The public schools have scarcely started to experiment with competition through magnet schools and transfers; let’s see how that works before hailing vouchers as some kind of panacea for all of American education.
Why not try reason before opting for ideology? There is still no royal road to learning, even if it’s called Vouchers or School Choice or Restructuring. I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but education is still a slow process, and no single change is going to transform our schools into a Utopia or keep them from reflecting the society all around them.
More dangerous than any critics of the public schools are the kind of “defenders” who see no need to improve standards; they’re perfectly willing to go along with social promotion, low achievement and an unending series of feelgood substitutes for solid progress. These kneejerk apologists will defend teacher tenure and union rules and strikes-but not academic excellence or an uncompromising insistence on safety and discipline in the classroom. They make any critics of the schools seem relatively benign.
Here’s hoping this all-too-public choice of a private school by a prominent family will benefit the only American directly concerned, and that she finds her studies rewarding. That is about as far as one can or should go in weighing the public significance of what ought to remain a private choice. Those of us who believe in family values should remember that privacy is one of them.