With the Utah voucher program’s recent failure, school choice advocates have seen yet another “victory” (the legislature’s passage of a voucher bill) slip away, this time at the hands of voters and not judges.

For those of you who have not been keeping count, voucher programs have now lost at least three big referenda at the state level.  To add to school choice advocates’ misery, Florida’s Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed Florida’s voucher programs, and Ohio has started to whittle away at its meager choice plans.  The crown jewel of voucher programs, Milwaukee, was recently expanded, but is continuously under attack.  It too will eventually fall if the school choice movement doesn’t wake up to the reality of political dynamics.

School Choice is the empowerment of citizens over a politically powerful government monopoly - which one might call the “Government/Education Complex.”  This complex; easily as powerful as Eisenhower’s “Military/Industrial Complex;” will stifle and destroy any threat to its monopoly.  Political power is seized, never given. School Choice, therefore, will never become a reality until its proponents mount an attack on this monopoly.  To engage in such an attack is apparently too much to ask of some of the think tank mavens who seem to control the strategy for the school choice movement.

School choice advocates argue that the good news is that, despite [setbacks], public interest in and support for vouchers and tax credits continues to grow. Sooner or later, they believe, there will be a breakthrough, and they will get a universal voucher plan. Somewhere. Someday. The defeat of the Utah Voucher Plan has proven them wrong.

It should now be clear to the gurus atop Mount CATO and Koch’s Peak that the “Government/Education Complex” maintains the ability to eventually subvert, weaken, or crush choice initiatives. They maintain this capability because of the huge reservoir of public support for the ephemeral concept of “public education.” Until this of reservoir of support is drained, most choice initiatives will remain small “pilot programs” that can (and will) be crushed in their cribs.

Though we in the choice movement owe think tank gurus (and their benefactors) a great deal for providing us with a massive armory of intellectual ammunition, it is time to realize that we can no longer rely on policy studies to make school choice a reality. I submit that the tiny examples of school choice around the country do not represent examples of small successes, as Milton Friedman himself argued a few years before he passed away. Rather, they come closer to being examples of failure.

Mr. Friedman pointed to “experimentation with such alternatives as vouchers, tax credits, and charter schools.” After giving examples of choice programs that are “in effect in a few places (Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, the District of Columbia),” he goes on to admit that “all of these programs are limited; taken together they cover only a small fraction of all children in the country.”

From an intellectual, economic, and moral perspective, school choice is so dramatically superior to the current overpriced, and under-performing system that its electoral failure simply must be viewed as a breakdown in terms of strategy. The United States of America has been in a state of educational crisis for at least 25 years with financial and academic evidence that the crisis is worsening.  Perhaps it is time for promoters of school choice to change their strategy.  Perhaps a “surge” is in order.

Though the “Policy Study/Think Tank” infrastructure has been instrumental in winning the intellectual battle regarding education, they have failed utterly on the political battlefield.

Proponents of education choice continuously look for better ways to “sell” their ideas. They seem to believe that more mailings to legislators will yield results. They have also spent inordinate amounts of effort wooing the minority community, when the roadblocks to school choice come from the politically powerful suburbs.  They refuse to engage in a negative campaign despite decades of political science showing that to defeat an incumbent, one must weaken that incumbent.

Most people realize that there is something wrong with public education in America today, but they have not specifically been told what is wrong, or how school choice will solve the problem.  Confronted with the well-funded machine of Education Industry misrepresentation, school choice advocates have chosen to fund cheap and weak campaigns for choice instead of strong and expensive campaigns to change public opinion.

Most statewide school choice initiatives have started with positive approval ratings, only to collapse in the face of huge expenditures on negative ads. The time has come to attack the failures, lies, and the malfeasance of the “Government/Education Complex.”

Voters need to know that (in most states) increasingly painful property taxes are a direct result of growth in education bureaucracy, perks and pension abuse – with “local control” being mostly a myth.  Voters could also be told that contrary to myth, teachers and administrators are highly paid, and that education spending has outstripped inflation since before World War II.  In addition, if a few active citizens take the time, one will find examples of malfeasance in nearly every school district – examples they can show their neighbors.

Most of all, school choice advocates have to attack the durable myth that America’s suburban schools are of “high quality.”  They are not, and the substantial amount of “remedial education” in the freshman year of most 4-year Universities is evidence of that fact.

I believe that many political factors are working in school choice proponent’s favor. The “Government/Education Complex” has overreached in many states, and some people are beginning to wake up. The Education Industry has purchased legislation to pad payrolls, engaged in schemes to enrich their members, and promoted policies that are blatant grabs for greater money and political protection.  With property taxes skyrocketing in the face of now falling property values, the time has never been better to point out the flaws that make the current system unsustainable.

School Choice advocates simply need to arm themselves with the facts, and commit to openly stating, promoting, and disseminating these facts. The evidence that the current system is wasteful is overwhelming, as is the evidence that school choice is superior to the current system.

It is for that reason that supporters of school choice should shift their resources from passive tactics to active ones. Wealthy supporters of choice should be funding aggressive candidates and/or ads that attack the current system. They need to stop funding symposiums and policy studies, and start funding aggressive billboards and hard-hitting television ads.  They need to stop promoting weakened choice plans that keep money in the hands of the bureaucracy - as in Utah - and promote fully-funded scholarships that drain funds from failing schools.

The political clout of the “Government/Education Complex” is based on its political support, and it will remain powerful enough to destroy school choice until that support is undermined. Absent a sustained negative campaign that accurately points out the failures of the entrenched Education Industry, we will never be “Free to Choose” — only free to lose. Conversely, if we engage in an aggressive attack on the current system, we may well watch them collapse more rapidly than most of us are capable of imagining.