Category: Education

Public officials and teacher unions often compare teacher salaries in a particular city or region against the national average or against other U.S. cities. They assume teachers in areas with higher than average pay are doing well, whereas teachers in areas below the national average must fare poorly. Legislators in states where teacher pay is below the national average are under considerable pressure to raise salaries.

Hurricane Katrina wrought devastation and chaos, leaving hundreds of thousands unemployed and homeless. Among the victims are at least 372,000 displaced students.

Charter schools are independent public schools exempt from many of the rules and regulations that impede innovation and flexibility in conventional public schools. Traditionally, charter schools are sponsored by churches, community centers or nonprofit organizations, and cater to lower-income or needy families. However, they are increasingly becoming a tool for nonprofit and commercial builders to lure young families into urban and suburban housing developments.

The U.S. Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris affirmed the constitutionality of the publicly funded school voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio.

Since 1996, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program has provided tax-funded vouchers that allow children from low-income families to opt out of the city's failing public schools. Teachers' unions and the education establishment have challenged the program in court, arguing that it violates the First Amendment because many voucher students attend religious schools. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the Cleveland case, a decision that is expected to clarify whether it is constitutional for children to use tax-funded vouchers to attend religious schools.

The Horizon Program, the most sweeping experiment in school choice ever attempted in the United States, began in 1998 in the Edgewood Independent School District (EISD) in San Antonio, Texas. The Children's Educational Opportunity (CEO) Foundation offered a privately funded full tuition scholarship to any low-income student in the district who wanted to attend another school, private or public. About 90 percent of the 13,500 students in the predominantly Hispanic district are considered economically disadvantaged.

Charter schools are public schools that operate with a great deal of autonomy, free from many of the regulations of traditional public schools. One difference is that teachers in charter schools generally have less job security – by design. They have no tenure, work under year-to-year contracts and risk dismissal if they fail to contribute to student achievement as judged by the school. In return, however, they usually have more teaching flexibility, less paperwork and participate more fully in decision making. If Arizona's charter school experience is typical, they also often earn more than their public school counterparts.

While the issue of using tax-funded vouchers to provide school choice is being debated and contested in the courts, an increasing number of privately funded voucher programs across the nation are making it possible for children from low-income families to attend private elementary and secondary schools.

Many legislators who vote for sweeping government programs without a second thought about their constitutionality suddenly grow concerned when the issue is school vouchers. The moment a dollar of public funds crosses the threshold of a religious school, they contend, it violates "separation of church and state."

President Clinton has vetoed a federally funded voucher bill that would have given about 2,000 scholar ships of up to $3,200 each to children from low-income families in the District of Columbia's troubled public school system.

While a debate rages over whether parents should be able to use tax money – or tax credits – to choose between public and private schools for their children, the movement to provide school choice to children from low-income families through privately funded vouchers is mushrooming.

Tax-funded vouchers are allowing some inner-city children in two large cities to escape failing public schools – but not without fierce opposition, primarily from teachers' unions and from those who question the constitutionality of vouchers.

Texas has adopted one of the most liberal charter school laws in the country. It also has established one of the first statewide school accountability systems, a model for the nation. Rigorous testing standards that apply to both regular and charter schools give parents the information they need to evaluate their children's schools and compare them with other schools.

At a recent White House conference on child care, President Clinton called the day care market "dysfunctional." First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton complained of a "silent crisis" in child care. Both the president and Mrs. Clinton advocated more government intervention, including more federal spending on training day-care workers. But government is the cause of many of the problems parents face, including arbitrary, cost-increasing regulations at the local level and discriminatory tax laws at the federal level.

The tax code has always allowed various deductions and credits for investment in physical capital. But there have been few incentives to make comparable investments in human capital – expanding the productive capacity of human beings.