The one promising initiative, to give the parents of poor children in nonperforming public schools vouchers to purchase education services elsewhere, was stripped away. As it is now written, those students forever stuck in bad schools could use federal funds for tutoring and could transfer to another public school. The serious problem, however, is that Congress and the education bureaucracy will attempt with the dollars to micromanage by regulation. This is a stalking horse for a huge expansion of federal involvement. This is a dangerous time for conservatives who wish to restrain the federal government's intrusion into the neighborhood school.
Education is a hot-button polling issue.
The American public has concluded that something's not working, that despite their generosity and years of tinkering, after all the inputs and through-puts were put, the outputs are the same or worse. Washington has been involved in local schools in an exceedingly limited way since 1867. It wasn't, however, until 1965 that it had a presence that mattered. That's when former President Lyndon Johnson, as part of his Great Society social programs, signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the reauthorization of which Congress is debating now. One provision, Aid to Disadvantaged Students, or Title I, sent federal money to poor schools in an effort to eradicate poverty.