(From the September 24, 2000 Commentary Section)

Television ad campaigns already are battling over Proposition 38, an initiative for the November ballot that would provide vouchers for every student in California who wants to go to a private school.

The typical arguments are at work. Proponents say their plan will save kids from failing schools by giving their parents new education choices and will infuse a monopoly system with much-needed competition.

Foes say it will cost too much, harm the public schools by robbing them of the best students, subject children to unregulated schools with unqualified teachers, and unconstitutionally fund religious schools.

Before we look at the nitty-gritty voucher arguments, answer this question:

Would you consider any country free if its children were spirited away from their parents by force, and subjected throughout their formative years to hours-long daily "lessons" that affirmed the ideology of the state?

I'm not talking about what the Cuban government did to Elian Gonzalez, but what goes on every day in the United States.

Americans are forced to fund public schools, to the tune of $8,000 or so per student per year. They must send their children to them - unless they have the money to pay private tuition or the time to educate them at home.

And even then, private schools must conform to certain government standards, and home-schooling parents often live in fear that their local school district will file truancy charges against them.

In other words, the current system is based on a socialist model - government control, lack of competition and freedom, the underlying goal of indoctrinating students into the proper state-approved ideas of the day.

The socialist model is by design, not accident. Public education's U.S. founders, such as Horace Mann and John Dewey, viewed social transformation as a key reason to replace the private schooling system that existed in America into the mid-19th century with the public system we're saddled with today.

"What the church has been for medieval man the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good," is how Mann, a devout progressive, put it.

(That quotation, and an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of public education, can be found in Christopher Klicka's book, "The Right Choice: The Incredible Failure of Public Education and The Rising Hope of Home Schooling.")

The fundamental problem with the system, then, is the system itself. Socialism doesn't work anywhere that it has been tried, in any aspect of life. So the only reforms that might work are ones that push, however incrementally, toward the current system's demise.

The big question: Will school vouchers do as their proponents say and advance that goal toward educational freedom?

Voucher supporters want to enact reforms that echo a market, that improve conditions by giving parents a set amount of money that they can use to pay for tuition at any participating private school.

Some programs target only the poor - like a school version of the Section 8 housing vouchers that allow welfare dependents to rent housing from private landlords. Others, like Prop. 38, are available to all comers, no matter their income.

It's an enticing idea. The California plan would divert about half of the $8,000 in public money spent per student to vouchers, and funnel the other half into the general fund and, possibly, into the school system.

Prop. 38 includes a guarantee that the state public schools are funded at the national average to avoid concerns that it will harm public schools. And it imposes strict restrictions on new regulations for private schools - a protection to conservatives who rightly fear that vouchers will further infect private schools with state rules.

Most political bases are covered, but opposition is strong nonetheless, especially from the teachers' union, which has exacted a mandatory fee from each member to pay for the anti-vouchers fight.

Many Prop. 38 foes are acting out of bureaucratic self-interest - fending off a challenge that could threaten their fiefdoms, force them to work harder, or reveal the poor job they're doing educating the kids.

Then there are the disciples of Mann and Dewey - the true believers in the progressive education vision. They fear that if people use their vouchers to send kids to unregulated schools with uncertified teachers, the "education experts" will lose their grip over what kids are taught. Some kids may end up at schools where they read C.S. Lewis rather than Malcolm X. Horrors!

In other words, public schools will no longer be the places where shared values - i.e., their liberal values - are passed down through the generations.

For example, during an Editorial Board meeting this month, Ann Bancroft, the communications director for California's education bureaucracy, said she opposed vouchers because "I don't want to pay for skinhead schools."

Ms. Bancroft's view is a scare tactic, a canard, a revelation about the low esteem in which the education establishment sees the public, the progressive school vision taken to its logical conclusion. We're all a bunch of racists, you see, who would send our kids to the Aryan Nations Academy for Hate were it not for the guidance and foresight of the state!

Interim secretary of education John Mockler not only agreed that racist schools might pop up if vouchers were approved, but said that parents should keep kids in public schools out of their sense of civic duty.

What should a parent do if his children are stuck in an ill-performing, dangerous school of the sort found in many of the state's inner cities?

According to Mockler, the parent is obliged as part of this duty to organize parents to throw out the board of education, or to lobby the Legislature, or to undertake other political avenues for change.

The civic duty argument is even more patronizing than the skinhead canard. Political action may or may not achieve anything over many years. As a poor working parent spends her evenings on a quixotic quest against the school board, the administrators and the principal, her children languish in substandard schools.

This is liberal "compassion" in all its splendid glory.

If this bloated, self-indulgent education establishment - which views kids and their parents as cogs in their social engineering schemes, and has an insatiable appetite for tax money - is against Prop. 38, shouldn't everyone else be for it?

I'd like to say yes, but I have some concerns.

Costs don't worry me too much.

According to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office, the cost impact ranges from $2 billion in additional costs to the state if only 5 percent of students opt out, to a $3.4-billion savings if 25 percent choose private schools. The anti-voucher campaign is using the high-cost predictions based on the idea that virtually no one will flee their Soviet-style school paradise. That's nonsense, and it's pretty funny hearing them complain about higher costs when they simultaneously lobby for more public school spending.

The big potential problem with vouchers is that although they are designed to reduce the role of government in schools, they could actually increase government's role instead. There is the regulatory problem. Once public money goes to private schools, there will be a push for more regulations - despite whatever regulatory restrictions are in place.

These "firewalls are made of tissue paper," Marshall Fritz told me; he runs the Separation of School and State Alliance in Fresno, a free-market organization that opposes vouchers. He calls the voucher initiative "a case of extreme attorney hubris." He doubts that anyone can "write an initiative so tight that a liberal judge can't break it in 20 minutes."

(Maybe that's why some prominent leftists, such as former labor secretary Robert Reich, are starting to view vouchers in a more positive light. Reich, like other liberal voucher supporters, only wants choice for poor kids, whereas Prop. 38 is commendable in its efforts to apply the voucher equally, to any parent who wants a better school for his kids.)

I fear this scenario: A handful of bogus private or home schools will set up shop to capture the new voucher dollars. The news media will go crazy, and legislators will be beating their chests about the need to protect "the children" from voucher "abuses" faster than you can say Evil Tobacco or Big Oil.

There are other potential problems. Whereas today's private schools are filled with students whose parents sacrificed to send them there, Fritz argues that tomorrow's voucher-ized schools will be filled with students who are there simply because they are given an entitlement.

The result: More problem students, less ability to screen applicants or evict troublemakers, a move to a lowest-common-denominator curriculum to avoid controversy. There's also the real possibility of price inflation as the market is flooded with voucher-carrying parents.

Right now, 88 percent of parents are on "the dole" by sending their kids to public schools, Fritz explains. "With vouchers, [the percentage of people dependent on government for schooling] moves from 88 percent to 98 percent. That's an odd first step" toward getting government out of the school business.

Those are good arguments.

But Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur bankrolling Prop. 38, argued in a recent Editorial Board meeting that the initiative's regulatory restrictions offer more protections than private schools now have. He is sympathetic to Fritz's views, but argued that without vouchers, the state is consigning 88 percent of its school children to a system that is not preparing them for life's challenges.

Mr. Draper described a hypothetical situation, whereby a private school is starting with 500 students. Multiply that number by the $4,000 voucher and the school has a $2 million budget. He adds in teachers (at $60,000 a year), nurses, janitors, the leasing of a building and so forth, but says that he is hard-pressed to use up that sized budget. "Then I thought, 'What are they [the public schools] doing with all the money?' You add it up."

That's a persuasive argument. The schools are a money pit, yet any junior high school student who hasn't studied the New Math could see how under the voucher scenario lean and effective private schools could start up, and give the bureaucrats a run for the money.

I know that vouchers use a government entitlement to approximate competition. I know that the honest-to-goodness way to improve education and bolster freedom is to shut down what the Register's legendary publisher R.C. Hoiles called "gun-run schools," slash taxes and let people pay for their own kids' education.

But I also know that such a dream is just that - a dream. Whereas Prop. 38 is as close as the majority vote in the November election. I don't know how I'll vote yet - but Prop. 38's looking awfully tempting.

Steven Greenhut is a Register editorial writer. His email is: Steven_Greenhut@link.freedom.com