The teachers union hatred of competition

Pete DuPont:

One hundred eleven years ago, in 1896, the state of Utah joined the Union. Today its Legislature is focused on enacting sound policies that will help improve its education system. Its citizens, though, have a different view, for in Tuesday's referendum they voted down a very strong parental school choice bill.

Last February the Utah Legislature enacted the Parent Choice in Education Act, giving parents the option of a $500 to $3,000 scholarship, depending upon their household income, to send their child to the private school of their choice instead of the public school they are attending. Since there are 120 private schools in Utah, with an average tuition of about $4,000, the scholarships would help low-income families get the best education for their children and give Utah parents substantial educational choice.

School choice is not a new idea--there are voucher programs operating in about a dozen states--but the Utah program reflected some fresh thinking. The average cost of the scholarships would be about $2,000 a student, so lawmakers decided to increase support of the state's public schools by allowing them to keep the difference between the cost of educating each of their students--about $7,500 per child--and the scholarships when a child left their school. For each student who chose to move to a private school, his former public school would get the $5,500 difference for five years, after which it would go back to the state's education budget. Utah State University estimated this would give the public schools about $1 billion in additional funding over 13 years.

The cost of the scholarships would be paid from the state's general funds, not from state school funds or local property taxes, costing the Utah government about $5.5 million in the first year and $8.5 million in the second as more children took advantage of the opportunity to go to the private school of their choice, and up to $71 million in the 13th year.

This scholarship program would make public schools better because class sizes would be smaller and more money would be available per pupil. Education would improve, and the scholarships would help level the playing field by giving educational opportunities to families with lower incomes.

School choice and charter schools have proved very effective in improving the quality of education. Milwaukee has had a school choice program since 1990, and a 2004 study showed that vouchers students the previous year had a 64% graduation rate, vs. just 36% for the public schools. A Texas study showed that students at charter schools had a significantly higher increase in performance than their peers in traditional public schools.

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Teachers unions must do everything they can to hide their failures. Competing with private schools would make their failures too obvious. One of their real problems is they demand too little of themselves and in turn demand too little of their students. This lack of metrics is what ld to the No Child Left Behind Act which has done much to improve children's test scores, but is also hated by the unions who do not want to be judged on what they produce.

Michael Barone discusses Alan Greenspan's new book where he trupets the forces of competition in improving education. " So if you're concerned about widening disparities in income, Greenspan tells readers attracted to his book by its publicists' promise of criticism of George W. Bush, then what you need to do is to 'harness better the forces of competition' in educating kids." Putting aside the publicists' Bush bashing pander to the left, it is pretty clear that harnessing the forces of competition is the last thing unions want for our children.