Public school proponents are protecting their power base

02/22/2002

By RUBEN NAVARRETTE / The Dallas Morning News

Take it from a former kindergarten teacher: If the nine justices on the Supreme Court want to understand what is at the heart of the controversy over school vouchers, they should close the lawbooks and have a long talk with Steve Ulibarri of Albuquerque.

The 31-year-old Mexican-American father of two may not have the answer to the legal question that confronts the justices – whether an experimental private school voucher program in Cleveland violates the Constitution by breaching the separation between church and state. Mr. Ulibarri isn't a lawyer, though he has two master's degrees and once served as an aide to New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

Yet Mr. Ulibarri does know quite a bit about school choice, and he owes that education to Mr. Johnson, a voucher proponent who sent him across the country a few years ago looking for school choice programs that worked.

That road took Mr. Ulibarri to Cleveland, where low-income and mostly minority children are offered a lifeboat off a sinking ship – the inner-city public school system, considered among the worst in the nation. Cleveland's lifeboat takes the form of a voucher – up to $2,250 – that can be used by parents to pay all or part of the tuition at a public, private or religious school of their choice.

What Mr. Ulibarri learned in Cleveland and elsewhere made him a natural fit for his current posts. He is president of the New Mexico chapter of Freedom to Choose, a national organization intent on building grass-roots support for school choice programs among parents. He also is vice chairman of the Albuquerque-based Coalition for Latino Educational Opportunity, which organizes similar efforts aimed directly at parents who happen to be Latino.

Not surprisingly, all of those experiences have left Mr. Ulibarri with sharp insights into what really is behind the relentless opposition to school choice. Here is a hint: You won't find it in a legal brief or the Constitution.

For Mr. Ulibarri, the argument that the Cleveland program violates the separation of church and state is just the latest concoction of an educational lobby that resolved long ago that it would defeat vouchers – or anything that even resembles vouchers – wherever they surface.

"This isn't about religion," Mr. Ulibarri told me from his office in Albuquerque. "It's about money, and it's about power. It's about an educational bureaucracy trying to do everything it can to maintain control over the money that flows into public schools."

Mr. Ulibarri has done his homework, and he is absolutely correct. This is about nothing grander than money and power and who controls both.

Today, the argument of voucher opponents might be church and state. Yesterday, the line was that vouchers would drain resources from public schools. Tomorrow, it will be something new. This bunch not only is self-righteous, it is flexible.

Some believe the next move already is being contemplated – the race card. Opponents will suggest that giving Latino and African-American parents vouchers to move their children to private schools will encourage resegregation. Presumably, minorities could start their own schools and educate only their own kind.

But in this debate, the race card has another side to it. Increasingly, voucher opponents – many of whom would place themselves on the liberal end of the political spectrum – are at odds with some of the same groups they have spent years trying to save with one liberal scheme after another.

African-American parents, when asked, typically express their support for school choice at the rate of 55 percent to 70 percent. Among Latinos – perhaps the most poorly educated ethnic group in the country, with dropout rates that still hover at 50 percent – the support is even greater.

A recent poll of 1,000 Latino adults by Opiniones Latinas – a Latino polling firm operating from New York and California – found that 73 percent supported giving vouchers to poor parents to send their kids to the public or private schools of their choice. And no wonder. The poll also found that 58 percent of Latinos have a negative opinion of the public school system.

That public schools are so bankrupt in the eyes of so many explains why those who count on them for their livelihoods have become positively Churchillian in their defense. They have no choice but to fight – in politics, in court, on any battlefield. They never will surrender.

How can they? Giving up hastens the moment when parents with choices decide to choose something else.

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News.