by AFT President Sandra Feldman
November 1997

No matter what
you call them,
vouchers do not
mean reform.

George Orwell's blunt assessment of political speech still rings true: It's too often pure wind." Nowadays, we call it putting a "spin" on the facts.

Take the campaign to sell the American public on vouchers. Although supporters have tried, over the years, to present vouchers as a good way to "reform" public education, vouchers are quite simply and plainly a way to use public money to send children to private schools. They're a scheme to siphon off money from public schools rather than help them improve. The American public hasn't bought the line that vouchers will reform public education, and they've repeatedly voted against adopting them. So voucher advocates have had to come up with some more appealing words. Two favorites are "Parental Choice" and "Opportunity Scholarships."

Disguising the "V" Word!

Pro-voucher political consultant Frank Luntz gives advice about using the new voucher lingo in a manual called Language of the 21st Century (Orwell would have relished the title) that was recently distributed to Republican members of Congress. Luntz advises voucher supporters to stay away from the word "vouchers" because the public doesn't like it. Refer to them, Luntz says, as "opportunity scholarships, not vouchers....Fully two-thirds (66%) prefer 'opportunity scholarships,' while fewer than one in four (23%) choose 'vouchers.'" Elsewhere, Luntz repeats his advice: "DON'T USE THE WORD 'VOUCHER.' " And he tells voucher supporters to speak about "parental choice" because people like it better than "school choice": "Just as we need to talk," Luntz says, "about children in almost every sentence, we need to refer to parents even more often than to schools."

Choice--But for Whom?

A particularly dishonest argument that voucher advocates use in selling "parental choice" is that all parents should have the right to choose a good private school for their children-- "the way President and Mrs. Clinton did for Chelsea." The people using this argument conveniently neglect to point out that good private schools generally have many more applicants than places, so it's the schools--not the parents--who do the choosing. And of course they don't mention that parents can't choose what they can't afford. As one New York City parent said about a private school voucher she won in a lottery, "You're supposed to be poor to get the scholarship, but you have to be rich to use it." She wasn't seeking a parochial school and discovered that the tuition at other private schools was way beyond the $1,300 voucher, and way beyond her ability to pay. She kept her daughter in a good public school.

The favorite term for vouchers right now is "opportunity scholarships." It really means taking money away from inner city schools so a few selected children can get vouchers to attend private schools, while the majority of equally deserving kids, who remain in the public schools, are ignored. This is presented as an equity issue. Indeed, one accomplished spinmaster calls it "the civil rights issue of our generation."

What happened in Cleveland shows how empty this talk about equity really is: $5.25 million of public money was spent giving private school vouchers to 1,994 children (only 664 of whom were former public school students). With the same money, the school district could have helped 40,000 children with an intensive reading and math program that has gotten excellent academic results with inner city kids.

"Opportunity scholarships" sounds terrific, until you understand its Orwellian meaning: Give up on public education in America; stop investing in it; siphon off as much of its funding as you can to enable a few "deserving poor" to go to private (mostly religious) schools, and to hell with all the kids left behind.

If a public school isn't good enough for a few of the children, it isn't good enough for any of them. Let's fix our failing schools, even if it means closing them and starting anew.

And let's speak truthfully. Vouchers do not mean reform--no matter what name you give them. What they do mean is a radical abandonment of public schools and public education.