The Odd Couple

Chancellor Joel Klein and the Reverend Al Sharpton are billing themselves as the "Odd Couple" as they join forces in a new campaign on public schools. The two announced their union at a parley last week at Washington, where they rubbed shoulders at the National Press Club to the delight of a perplexed press corps. The idea is to convince our leaders, particularly the two men running for president, that the educational challenges we face are the "foremost civil rights issue of the early 21st Century."

We find this line of argument unconvincing, though we share their concern over the learning gap between white and black students that they say they are trying to address. They are calling their initiative the Education Equality Project, and its awareness campaign already has a list of 20 high-profile supporters. It also has a press campaign — mainly a weekly radio duet on Reverend Sharpton's nationally syndicated talk show, "Keepin It Real," that will include Mr. Klein as a guest host.

Our doubts are different from those of, say, the teachers union president, Randi Weingarten, who has complained that the project is too "top down," having no teachers on board, and that it is too ready to blame teachers unions for the difficulties in American schools. We tend to agree with elements of the Equality Project's statement of principles, which argues that public school systems have been wrongly serving the needs of themselves, rather than the needs of their customers, who are children — or, as we would put it, parents.

But it's hard to credit the Reverend Sharpton as an advocate of what the economists call public choice theory. Neither he nor Mr. Klein is prepared to take the next logical step, which would be vouchers. As one member of the group, Mayor Booker of Newark, explained on the "Keepin it Real" show, teachers unions have prohibited school on Saturday, school after 3:15 p.m., and school in the summer — not to mention, in New York, new restrictions on the ability of administrators to deny under performing teachers jobs.

Instead of vouchers, all the solutions offered by the chancellor and the reverend focus on forcing children to stay inside the public system that has already failed them. They want to make teachers more effective, but keep them in the public system monopoly. They say that they want to "empower" parents, too, allowing them to have "a meaningful voice in where their children are educated." But they would withhold from parents the only real power that one can have in matters of schooling — a voucher that would let them vote with their feet and leave, and bring funding along with them.

Forgive us, but if the education of minority children is an issue of civil rights, who are the George Wallaces and Ross Barnetts of today? They are the governmental authorities who are standing between our pupils and the schools to which their parents would send them if they had voucher systems enabling them to afford the private schools that give the kinds of education they want. We do not mean to suggest — we do not believe — that the government and union authorities resisting vouchers are racists. But to sit around and say there are not enough private schools for a voucher system is not convincing. With a voucher system in place, private educational opportunities would sprout like spring flowers.

The Equality Project does extend its support to public charter schools, but charters are encumbered by being inside the public system — and are therefore but a weak version of vouchers. We've been saying for six years now that Mr. Klein, a famed trust-buster, is ideally equipped to take on the government monopoly on schools. But it doesn't look like this latest demarche is going to bring him into the fight for vouchers. The Equality Project turns out to be interested not so much in expanding parental choice — the right of poor parents as well as rich parents to send their children to the school of their choice — as in enforcing immediate, state-sponsored actions. This is something that doesn't comport with the rhetoric of civil rights.