Playing in a fixed game

The conservative movement for parental freedom to choose with public funds among different kinds of schools seems rather clearly to be laced with prejudice against traditional public education.

I hear public educators now. They’re saying, “You think?”

Bold, clear evidence presented itself last week that Arkansas Republican legislators — many of them, anyway — want to establish competition between public, private and parochial schools, only with an uneven playing field. They want to give advantages to private and church schools while leaving public schools with the unilaterally imposed onerous burdens that fueled the movement for choice in the first place.

It’s as if the basketball official says to the competing captains, “Let’s have a good game, men. Remember that the team in red will have its score displayed on the scoreboard based on the points it scores. The team in white will be declared the winner if its fans show up for the next game. This way, all of you will become better players.”

State Rep. Jim Wooten, the Republican of Beebe with a sense of responsibility to traditional public schools as well as accountability and fairness, finally got a hearing in the House Education Committee for his resplendently fair and accountable bill.

It would provide that private schools accepting public money for students with these looming vouchers would have to submit to the same published standardized student achievement test scores required of traditional public schools. That, Wooten explained, would help parents make informed choices.

Alas, the committee voted down his bill 12-to-5. That qualified as a close committee vote in the context of a legislative session controlled by 80% Republican majorities and determined to pass right-wing bills perfunctorily while round-filing Democratic ones. Great credit must go to Wooten for one thing, which was getting three Democratic votes and — get this — two Republican votes.

Overwhelmingly evident logic and fairness still count for something at the Capitol. Two votes. That’s what.

One committee objection was that the bill also would require private schools accepting one voucher transfer to accept all voucher transfer applicants. That might mandate facilities expansion and payroll costs on private schools, the members complained.

Wooten, pesky in his sense of a fairness that gave him a logical answer for anything, said vouchers in general will vacate space in some places and require new space in others. He said Bryant’s public schools would have to build classrooms if 200 kids from Little Rock took vouchers there.

Nonetheless, Wooten might have done well to leave that provision out of his bill and force legislators to confront without clutter the simple fairness of requiring the same accountability testing of voucher-enriched private schools as long as applied to public schools. Rep. Stephen Meeks of Conway, a church-school advocate, said the very idea of school choice was to let the market rule. He said private schools would be judged meritoriously every year by the decisions of parents whether to keep their children in them.

So, private schools would be accountable to a market based not on fact but parental senses of satisfaction. Public schools would remain judged — indeed condemned — by published test scores lowered by the public schools’ singular responsibility to all comers including those mired in disadvantage.

The state is setting up competition to be decided by a mixture of nebulous subjective scoring methods and credible objective ones.

Private schools would be scored like gymnastics — as East Germans performing before East German judges. Public schools would be scored like the 100-meter dash, by both a stopwatch and the public evidence of one runner hitting the tape before the others.

Why are the ruling Republicans of our Legislature fearful for private and parochial schools of a credible scoreboard displaying an established scoring system? And why do they insist on forcing public schools to take all students and submit to public ridicule as failed when less-fortunate kids in the universe of school-goers bring down public-school test averages?

It must be that they don’t like education as a public service but only as a for-profit enterprise or religious-indoctrination vehicle.

It’s like privatizing a voluntary Social Security system and saying the private investment sector will be judged in its performance of that system only by people’s decisions to stay in it year to year, not by any publicly disseminated data, and will let you know when you’re 67 how much, if any, money you’ve got coming.

Whoever heard of such a thing, since George W. Bush proposed it, I mean?

It’s also like keeping a traditional public retirement system in place in competition with the new voluntary private one, and demanding strict public dissemination of actuarial standing for the traditional public system, even as, all the while, we encourage people to switch to the voluntary and secretive private one that we’ll blindly assume to be better than the traditional one we rob.