Bush finally gets going on school choice

DALLAS — You think you know a president, and then he goes off and surprises you.

President Bush probably surprised many in the school-choice movement when he used a recent visit to a predominantly African-American charter school in the nation's capital to declare his support for private-school vouchers.

Education has long been one of Bush's pet issues, and yet Bush has never seemed as committed to vouchers as some in his party would like.

Two years ago, when Democrats in Congress expelled voucher provisions from the No Child Left Behind Act — the administration's first education initiative — the president gave in without a fight. And in the numerous education-related speeches that Bush has given since, he has rarely brought up the subject of school choice. This has led many conservatives to conclude that the president wasn't completely on board with private school vouchers.

Well, he's on board now. Bush is proposing that Congress approve a $75 million initiative to fuel private-school choice and see if it makes a difference in educating students. The president envisions an experiment to determine whether giving parents choices can provide their children better educations.

One of the laboratories would be Washington, where $15 million would go to fund vouchers of up to $7,500 for students in the troubled District of Columbia public schools. How troubled? The D.C. schools demolish the old myth that the way to get better schools is by throwing money at them. They remain among the best funded, and worst performing, schools in the country. According to recently released exam results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth- and eighth-grade students in the District scored lower in reading than their counterparts in each of the 50 states.

Totally unacceptable, Bush told the cheering, mostly African-American crowd at the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a public charter school. Bush noted, quite correctly, that the public school system has no reason to improve as long as parents and students are a captive clientele. It is only with the threat that parents with choices might choose something else that schools have any incentive to perform better, to inspire students and to set higher standards.

For Bush, a lot of it comes down to one of his favorite themes: accountability.

"If parents don't have any options besides public schools, there is no accountability," Bush told the crowd. "Accountability without consequences means nothing."

Bush didn't actually use the word "vouchers," opting instead for "scholarships."

Personally, as a supporter of school choice, I wish Bush had used the V-word. And yet, semantics aside, the president showed real leadership. He put himself at odds with teachers unions, public-school administrators and others who fear that increasing accountability could lead to increased unemployment of underperforming adults. The education lobby plays the political game for high stakes, donating millions of dollars every election year to candidates — most of them Democrats. And so in next year's election, Bush can expect a barrage of television commercials depicting him as callous for supposedly draining resources from public schools.

No worries. Bush can weather that assault. Besides, he has won an important moral victory. The president now stands on the side of Latino and African-American parents who — having discovered that the public school ship is sinking — are simply trying to get their children into a lifeboat. In cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where voucher programs are under way, the leaders of the choice movement are African-American women. Latinos, in poll after survey after study, express strong support for school choice.

Catch the color scheme. It matters that most of the parents who cheered Bush at that D.C. charter school were black. It matters that Bush's allies on this issue include Washington Mayor Anthony Williams, an African-American Democrat who was once opposed to vouchers.

Just as it matters that the people who are trying to hold these African-American and Latino students hostage in mediocre public schools too often look nothing like them. According to the Department of Education, as recently as 2000, more than 84 percent of public-school teachers were white. At the same time, four out of 10 public school students nationwide were nonwhite.

So basically what you have is a teaching profession dominated by whites standing in the way of a reform movement that provides schooling options to other people's children. The effect is to deny opportunities to African-Americans and Latinos.

Sound familiar? School choice is much more than just another political issue. It is the new civil-rights movement.

Ruben Navarrette's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com