JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

To all of you aficionados of the arts and people to whom I owe money

who phoned last week to find out if I had departed this world or had been

fired, my deepest thanks.

There should have been a block of copy where my column usually appears

saying something clever like “Joe Bell is off this week to concentrate on

incantations against the New York Yankees.” But there wasn’t, and I

apologize to all three of you.

Actually, my wife and I were wallowing in fall colors in the Great

Smokey Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, about which I plan to

write later. We were also in Jimmy Carter country while he was opting out

of the Southern Baptists for reasons that relate rather directly to some

things going on here. But I’ll save that, too, because this week is full

of portent, both locally and nationally, and I’d like to run on a little

about one element in our upcoming election.

Because I have this note pasted to my forehead that says “Keep It

Local,” I ask you to accept a small stretch. I believe that nothing is of

more local importance than our schools, and they will be deeply affected

by two of the propositions put before California voters on Nov. 7.

Proposition 38 would authorize annual state payments of $4,000 per

pupil for privatereligious schools. Proposition 39 would permit school

bonds to be passed with 55% of the local vote.

To take the latter first, we were most fortunate -- and sufficiently

enlightened -- to pass a school bond in Newport-Mesa by more than a

two-thirds majority earlier this year. Dozens of other school districts,

including our neighbors in Irvine, haven’t fared so well.

In district after district, one-third of the voters -- often

prevailing by a few tenths of a percentage point -- has managed to abort

desperately needed school bonds. An earlier statewide effort to change

this to a simple majority almost passed -- and probably would have passed

had Gov. Davis given it his support. The 55% compromise will hopefully

satisfy enough of the doubters to bring it home. I hope to help make that

happen.

While the passage of Proposition 39 would make it easier for the

majority of voters to address critical needs of their local public

schools, the passage of Proposition 38 would do just the opposite. It

would divert massive public funds and attention into dubious and unproven

private school vouchers that author and MacArthur fellow Stanley Crouch

called, in a recent Los Angeles Times essay, “nothing more than pink

elephants walking through hills of horse feathers.”

The California media in recent weeks have offered a cornucopia of

information on how voucher schools have performed in the places where

they have been tried.

Perhaps the most succinct appraisal came from Edward Fiske, former

education editor of the New York Times and coauthor of a highly pertinent

book called “When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale.” He wrote in the

Los Angeles Times: “Practical experience demonstrates that the solution

proposed by Proposition 39 on the November ballot -- a $4,000 voucher to

every child to be used at any public, private, parochial or home school

-- will not work.”

Here are just a few of the reasons:

* There are 640,000 students already attending private and religious

schools in California. Proposition 38 would hand each of them -- who

presumably can afford private schools and/or have strong religious

reasons for attending them -- $4,000 a year in various stages. That adds

up to $2.5 billion of public money annually before we lay a glove on

those poor kids in crummy schools who are supposed to benefit from

vouchers;

* The vast majority of private and religious schools enroll only

students who are performing at grade level or above -- and nothing in

Proposition 38 would require them to accept anyone else, especially those

poor kids in crummy schools;

* A recent study by the nonpartisan Policy Analysis for California

Education showed that private and religious schools don’t have the

capacity to absorb more than a tiny fraction -- between 1% and 3% -- of

public school students;

* There is nothing to prevent schools that accept voucher students

from discriminating against them on the basis of religion, gender,

language skills, sexual orientation, physical problems -- and the

student’s inability to come up with the difference between $4,000 and the

$20,000 that some elite private schools charge for tuition.

There are many other solid reasons for opposing vouchers, but by far

the most important is that the great majority of private schools in

California are religious. Thus, billions of public dollars would be

directly funding sectarian religious indoctrination.

This means, for example, that our tax money might well be invested in

teaching young people that those who disagree with the religious views

they are being taught will surely go to hell.

No one opposing vouchers would deny that the public schools in the

United States need serious help in a multitude of ways. But public

education is the mother’s milk of a democratic society, and our money,

attention and creativity would be far better directed toward improving

the public schools than pulling the rug from under them -- which is what

this draconian proposition would do.

Proposition 38 turns us away from seeking real answers to our

educational problems by offering up an easy fix that could well torpedo

the reform process -- and harm the very children it is supposedly

designed to help.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.