Of Vouchers and Vituperation
by Nathan J. Diament
Director, Institute for Public Affairs -- Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
As Congress and schools returned from their respective summer vacations
this month, senators began to re-focus on a legislative initiative that
would provide some assistance to the parents of school children.
Sponsored earlier this year by Senator Paul Coverdell (R-GA), the
proposal would create a new class of savings accounts -- dubbed A+
Accounts -- akin to the Individual Retirement Accounts (IRA) that many
Americans use. Under this plan, parents of a child may invest as much
as 2000 post-tax dollars per child, per year in their A+ Account; the
interest accrued would be tax-exempt.
Unlike President Clinton's re-election campaign proposal that would
have set up such savings opportunities for parents of college students,
the Coverdell proposal recognizes that it is in the elementary and
secondary educational years that children learn their most critical
skills. Thus, the Coverdell proposal makes the savings accounts
available for a wide range of expenses associated with education at all
ages and irrespective of whether the student attends public, private or
parochial schools. Money may be withdrawn to be used for tuition fees,
transportation costs, tutoring or even buying a home computer.
When the Coverdell proposal was offered in the Senate last spring, the
National Education Association and the American Association of School
Administrators -- the teachers' union and trade group for school
administrators -- indicated to some sympathetic senators that they
opposed it. Senator Tom Daschle took to the floor to denounce it as a
"voucher" that would divert funds from the public schools. The bill
garnered a 59 to 41 vote for passage and made it into the final budget
package submitted to the President at the insistence of the Republican
Congressional leadership. The education lobby then turned up the heat,
and asked the White House to kill the proposal.
Towing the line of the National Education Association and the American
Association of School Administrators, the President wrote to Speaker
Gingrich and stated that he "strongly opposed the Coverdell amendment,"
and that he "would veto any tax package that would undermine public
education." In the face of this threat, Mr. Gingrich removed the
Coverdell initiative from the final budget agreement.
It has, however, been reintroduced as a free-standing bill; the
congressional leadership has promised to act on it this fall. Moreover,
Senate Democrats have begun to support the proposal in greater numbers
with Senators Torricelli and Lieberman already signed on; with Breaux,
Moynihan, Leahy, and Levin have indicated interest. Such support has
drawn fire from the education establishment and makes it likely that the
second battle over the Coverdell initiative will shape up as a turning
point in the education reform war.
The NEA and AASA are beginning to resort to the kind of extremist
rhetoric and tactics regularly used by the National Rifle Association
and the National Abortion Rights Action League. Like those groups --
which decry any reasonable restriction on the right to obtain a handgun
or an abortion, such as a brief waiting period, as a step toward
depriving Americans of their fundamental rights -- the NEA, AASA and
other defenders of the educational status quo are asserting in recent
letters to senators that A+ Accounts would steal money from public
schools and are unconstitutional "vouchers" that risk violating the
separation of church and state.
The Coverdell initiative is clearly different from the typical school
voucher proposal. Voucher plans are designed to give parents, rather
than school administrators, the power to decide how many education
dollars a particular school receives by giving each parent a voucher for
each child equal to the amount of the per-student spending allocation in
the particular school system. The money then "follows the child" to the
school the child attends. Thus, better performing schools that attract
more children receive greater resources than schools that aren't up to
the job. Voucher plans may very well take education dollars away from
public schools because it is part of the point; to make schools perform
better by forcing them to compete for students and funding.
The Coverdell proposal is a more modest effort to help parents. It
simply exempts from taxation the interest earned on money that has
already been taxed once by the federal government through the income
tax. It is really an incentive plan -- a modest one -- to encourage
parents to invest and save toward their children's education. To suggest
that this is an unconstitutional establishment of religion because a
parent might use the tax-free interest earnings toward buying a home
computer for a child who attends a parochial school is to suggest that
parents who are homeowners and benefit from mortgage-interest payment
deduction and use that financial savings for same expense, that
deduction, too, would be unconstitutional.
Moreover, just last term, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a
government funded education program -- special education classes -- could
be enjoyed by parochial school students as long as the program was not
specifically designed to benefit religion. The situation is
constitutional, the justices wrote, because government "money ultimately
went to religious institutions as a result of the genuinely independent
and private choices of parents."
The suggestion that the Coverdell initiative diverts funds from public
schools is also false. Unlike vouchers, which may re-allocate education
dollars based upon parental choices, the Coverdell plan merely prevents
people's money from being taxed twice by the federal government which
provides only a small amount of funding to school districts in the first
place.
Thus, the education establishment may now be approaching a watershed.
If the NEA and AASA continue to rail against the A+ Account proposal as
a "terrible threat to our nation's public school system" and a "plot by
the religious right" to grab public money for private schools, they will
certainly be perceived as a lobby for teachers rather than as champions
of greater educational opportunity for America's children.
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