There is only one way to fix ailing public schools in the District and elsewhere: marshal all available resources – including tax dollars, management expertise and parental involvement – and focus them on creating and maintaining excellent public schools.

It is a ludicrous, politically inspired lie to continue the decades-old charade that pits tax-supported "competition" and "choice" against public schools as a way to improve them.

Proponents of such programs, which include charter schools and vouchers, can’t even seem to find, after many years of trying, the correct measure of success for their efforts. If these programs are intended, as proponents claim, to help improve the public schools, then the public schools should be showing significant improvement. They aren’t.

What that means is that "competition" and "choice" simply don’t work as a way to fix ailing public schools. How many more years will elected officials, in Congress and locally, continue to waste tax dollars on such failed experiments – which, not by accident, pump millions of tax dollars into the pockets of politically powerful special interest groups?

Undeniably, charter schools and vouchers help a relatively small handful of students. But government and taxes exist to support the greater public welfare, not a select few.

Bad public schools deny a choice to parents who want an excellent education for their children by forcing them to find ways to get their children out. For many, it means paying twice – with taxes and tuition – for their children’s schooling.

The majority cannot afford to pay twice. That’s why it’s high time for politicians to stop using other people’s children as guinea pigs. Investing the necessary resources to ensure the availability of an excellent public education for children in the nation’s capital would pay dividends by alleviating many of the attendant social ills that result from poorly educating the general population.

Congress is largely responsible for the present neglected, and in many ways unmanageable, state of D.C. public schools. Year after year, it is Congress, with ultimate jurisdiction over the District of Columbia’s local budget, that has mandated numerous publicly funded experiments for the public schools, failed to adequately fund capital improvements, cut to almost volunteer proportions the salaries of school board members, and provided abysmally insufficient operating dollars to meet high demands.

Now, some members of Congress and President Bush want to fix the problem by simply continuing the experimentation – this time, by giving $10 million of taxpayers’ dollars to private schools to educate a minuscule number of poor D.C. children. How does this voucher plan help fix the District’s public schools?

If "competition" and "choice" are such panaceas for poor-performing schools, perhaps Congress should consider offering a similar choice to improve another D.C. government institution that has ailing performance numbers: the Metropolitan Police Department. Just imagine how much help toward improving the police department’s performance could result from allowing residents to charter their own tax-supported neighborhood police departments or to use tax-supported vouchers to pay private police patrols.

A ludicrous proposal? No more so than what’s currently happening to D.C. Public Schools.

Copyright 2003, The Common Denominator