School Reform @ the Speed of Thought

The Internet, which is profoundly changing how many industries operate, could revolutionize the movement for parental choice in education. The first organization that creates a true portal on the Internet for school reformers will lead the national school reform effort in the 21st century.

I’m pleased to report that this idea is about to become reality. Thanks to the generosity of a dozen donors and help from two partner organizations, we’re about to take school reform into cyberspace.

Market-based School Reform

Today we trust markets to deliver our food, clothing, and shelter. We trust markets to ensure the safety of the automobiles that carry us and our families at high speed, often within a few feet of other vehicles going at similarly high speed in the opposite direction. We trust markets to price and deliver telephone service and, increasingly, electricity, services once thought to be “natural monopolies” and therefore properly the province of government. Yet we leave the schooling of nine out of ten children in the cold and clumsy hands of government.

Market-based reforms can take a number of forms. Complete privatization–also called “load shedding”–would eliminate government’s role as both the funder and producer of educational services. Less sweeping reforms would privatize the production of education but not its funding; these reforms would use “vouchers” to allow parents to choose the schools their children attend, or authorize various models of contracting out such as “charter schools.”

Parts of the education system can be privatized–e.g., cafeteria, busing, testing, facilities management, even administration–without more systemic changes taking place.

Market-based school reforms are being effectively advocated today by a coalition of conservative and libertarian activists and foundations, private school (particularly Catholic) interest groups, minority rights proponents, and taxpayer groups. These groups have scored some impressive victories in recent years, including adoption of charter school legislation in some 30 states, pilot voucher programs in several cities and statewide in Florida, and tuition tax credit laws in four states.

Outreach and Marketing

The accompanying table identifies 12 components of the national school choice movement and over 50 organizations working for education freedom.

The Heartland Institute plays a key role in this movement by reaching out to potential allies and members and effectively marketing the ideas of parental choice and privatization to elected officials and opinion leaders. Our monthly newspaper, School Reform News, reaches 45,000 people each month and covers the entire spectrum of market-based school reform efforts taking place across the nation. No other publication comes close to doing what SRN does.

In February, we took an important step toward tapping the awesome power of the Internet to dramatically expand and accelerate our outreach and marketing efforts. We started to build a school reform portal on the World Wide Web called SchoolReformers.com.

SchoolReformers.com will have a home page designed to attract parents by offering brief essays on how to help children with their homework, how to choose a college, how to talk about drugs, and other helpful tips on parenting. A prominent button will appear on the home page that says “I want to help improve public schools.” Clicking on that button will take the visitor to a “command center” for school reform activists.

The command center will be loaded with networking resources: directories of allies, calendars, job listings, and bulletin boards; grassroots organizing tools such as advice on how to host a meeting and how to raise money; the latest news about reform efforts taking place around the country; and links to research and data from the nation’s leading think tanks and mainstream media.

The purpose of all of this information and these tools is not to entertain or merely “keep people informed.” Rather, it is to attract new people to the movement, mobilize people who would otherwise be passive, and make more effective people who would be active but might otherwise be ineffective.

A New Partnership

We’ve partnered with two outstanding organizations. The Henry Hazlitt Foundation, based in Chicago, specializes in using the Internet to popularize libertarian ideas. It has one of the busiest pro-freedom sites on the Internet and considerable skill in Web site design and operation. It will create and maintain the site, while we focus on providing content.

Our second partner is the Educational Freedom Foundation, the tax-exempt foundation affiliated with Citizens for Educational Freedom (CEF), the country’s premier organizer of grassroots chapters devoted to school choice. The St. Louis-based organization is the nation’s oldest organization devoted exclusively to school choice. Its national network of activists and volunteers will welcome newcomers to the movement and “show them the ropes” of effective grassroots advocacy.

Together with start-up funding from some far-sighted and committed donors, the alliance of Heartland, Hazlitt, and EFF creates a powerful new force on the school reform scene. We’ve hit the ground running, and expect to have the site up and fully operational in 60 days. After that, we expect to have our hands full managing a steady stream of newcomers to the school reform movement.

The future of school reform may depend on who wins the battle of ideas on the Internet. This is a playing field where the huge size and resources of teacher unions are of little help to them. SchoolReformers.com will quickly become the cutting edge of the school choice movement in the twenty-first century.

If you like the idea of using the Internet to achieve “school reform @ the speed of thought” and can help, please call administrative assistant Cheryl Parker at 312/377-4000 and ask for the SchoolReformers.com proposal.