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A
Giant of a Man
Reggie
White was more than a football Hall of Famer. He
fought for school choice, parental involvement and
positive values to emancipate poor kids from even
poorer schools.
News
reports announcing the death of NFL great Reggie
White touched frequently on his football record,
less often on his life as an ordained minister
whose ministry kept professional athletes on the
“straight and narrow path” in a profession
filled with temptation and thuggish behavior.
Largely
ignored was his advocacy of greater educational
options for parents and kids, and the importance
he placed on educational institutions permitting--indeed,
demanding--greater parental involvement as a
solution for greater academic achievement and for
disciplined young adults.
White
served
as a Senior Fellow for a small think tank at which
I worked in the late ‘90s. Although it was
largely a long-distance relationship and I saw him
only twice in the year I was there, he made a big
impression. My first reaction upon meeting him
was: “This
is a very large man.”
The second impression, after talking with
him, was more important:
“This man has very large ideas.”
In
a 1998 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal,
White and his wife, Sara, advocated school choice
models permitting poor parents to select the
schools their children attend.
Arguing that “public-school teachers work
hard, (but) have little room to excel because of
the mound of government and union regulation,”
White declared that managing those rules in a
public school “requires an army of
administrators and bureaucrats, which siphons
precious resources away from the classrooms.”
After
taking note of rising test scores in
Milwaukee
,
Wis.,
where
publicly-funded school vouchers are available to
poor parents not able to afford other options, the
Whites offered the notion that “the greater
availability of private school alternatives in
Milwaukee
has helped public schools, which must improve to
keep their students from going elsewhere. The new motto of Milwaukee’s
public-school system: ‘We want to be Milwaukee’s
schools of choice.’”
More
importantly from White’s point of view, schools
of choice foster a parent-school-child
relationship that creates a dynamic for better
discipline and revives stronger values in children--often
because such schools have a religious affiliation
that instills positive values in ways that cannot
be replicated in public schools without violating
the separation of church and state.
As
Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder grapples with making
educational improvement a top priority, the ideas
fostered in Milwaukee
and advocated by Reggie White are among those he
ought to consider. Not
only would they be a good deal for Richmond’s
kids, they’d also be a good deal for Richmond’s finances.
Consider
what would happen if the General Assembly, with
Mayor Wilder’s backing, were to provide a 25
percent income tax credit to corporations that
contributed to organizations offering K-12
scholarships to poor children looking for
educational alternatives.
A
$5,000 scholarship for a student would “cost”
the state about $1,442 in tax credits.
But because the student would no longer be
in the public schools, the state would no longer
have to provide state aid, and the state treasury
would come out ahead by more than $3,000.
The
city of Richmond would do almost as well:
After deducting the “fixed costs”
remaining in the system even if a student left
(i.e., transportation, buildings, etc.), the city
would retain more than $2,500 in its coffers for
each departing student it would no longer have to
educate.
The
General Assembly could even sweeten the offer by
transferring half of the state’s “savings”
to the city for public school improvement.
These
are, of course, the kind of financial figures that
make the head spin and legislators drool.
But
that’s not what motivated Reggie White.
He believed that African-American children
have “inherited a racial legacy that includes
being the target of hatred they have not earned,
exploitation they did not deserve, and guilt and
shame for sins they did not commit.” And in a
precursor to Bill Cosby’s remarks of last
summer, he looked across the landscape and found a
society on the verge of implosion, parents who had
lost control, and children who were not gaining
either the values, the discipline or the education
to ensure a bright future for themselves.
His
answer: Not demanding “more of the same” but
"exposing those things that hinder our
progress, uncover the weaknesses of our present
assumptions … and reexamine old, corrupt
alliances that have failed us.”
In short, empowering children and their
parents with choice, and fighting for the means to
provide them the same educational opportunities as
their wealthier brethren.
When
it came to education, the two-time NFL Defensive
Player of the Year knew how to play Offense.
Now
… who in Virginia
will pick up the ball and run with it?
--
January 4, 2005
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