RUST COMMENTARY: STANDARDIZED DISCRIMINATION, SCHOOL CHOICE AND ABORTION

Death sentences guaranteed to destroy American education -- and more

Want to read a death sentence? Try this one from the Office of Civil Rights that says "the use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin or sex is discriminatory."

How about another sentence claiming that colleges using standardized tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the American College Test could expect "to be called in for long and grueling interrogation that most of us would call harassment," according to syndicated columnist John Leo.

What if you read sentences declaring that each school must develop procedures to assess and prove the validity and reliability of the tests they use, that they must also prove the validity and reliability of the assessment procedures themselves, that they must defend the use of cutoff scores for scholarships, that they must report the results of the tests and the "composition of the test-taking population" according to "race, ethnicity and gender" and that any form of disparate treatment could be interpreted as deliberate discrimination?

Couldn't happen here? It already has, in a low-key Clinton administration sneak attack aimed at the very heart of American education: excellence. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes that the "excelling" part of excellence, by its very nature, creates different levels of performance and results. To many educational bureaucrats, however, those different ("disparate" in their terms) levels of achievement could be seen as evidence of discrimination and subject institutions to any number of government penalties, all of them nasty and expensive.

The New York Times recently reported that "12 times as many Asians as blacks score above 650 on the math SAT's; that's a disparate impact in stark relief." If Princeton admits "proportionally more Asians than blacks," has the school "denied its rejected black applicants equal `opportunity'? Have Asians been granted excessive access? For the Office of Civil Rights, the answer is a presumptive `yes.'"

What we're really talking about is not equality of opportunity, as is claimed, but equality of results. And equality of results is just another name for mandated mediocrity. The real issue here is quotas, or, in bureaucratic jargon, the avoidance of "disparate" results based on "racial, ethnic and gender composition." The real issue is the death of excellence.

While the administration says nothing to upset the public, a smarmy army of policy wonks conducts its own form of behind-the-scenes ethnic cleansing in Washington. With a clandestine rationale bordering on the immoral, Clintonistas doggedly pursue their hidden agenda of forcing everything into their version of racial, ethnic and gender justice, regardless of consequences.

Can you imagine the fate awaiting a society that refuses to acknowledge, let alone celebrate, individual differences as the wellsprings of excellence and instead wants to exalt equality of results over equality of opportunity?

The real enemy, an arrogant, irresponsible, unelected educational bureaucracy, having created federal-funding dependency addicts, will simply cut off funding for those institutions that do not comply. Hillsdale College does not accept federal funding or federal control. Is Hillsdale a beacon in the daylight? As the prospects for American higher education and American excellence continue to darken, that question will answer itself. -- George Roche, president, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Mich.

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Cleveland rocks

In one of those jerky, stunning reversals that have about them the aura of history being made, U.S. District Court Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. tore up his own work, deciding to allow thousands of poor Cleveland children to continue to attend schools that their families had chosen for them after all.

The reprieve for 3,214 of the nearly 4,000 kids in Cleveland's pilot voucher program came just three days after Judge Oliver had dug himself into the seemingly irreversible position that the program must be halted while his court meticulously reviewed whether it had "the primary effect of advancing religion."

Regrettably, the sudden reversal was only partial. Some 587 new entrants into this year's program will not receive public money, at least for now. Moreover, the judge, a Clinton appointee and manifestly no friend of vouchers, left himself plenty of room to disrupt the lives of Cleveland's school-children and their families yet again, by making their attendance in the schools of their choice subject to the outcome of a trial and another review by him come December. Still, the news was as sure a concession of the new mood of retreat as we are likely to get from the opponents of the school choice movement.

To fathom that mood, consider the landscape as it must have appeared from Judge Oliver's bench last week. Instead of duly reporting to their local public schools after he pulled their funding, all but two of the 3,801 voucher recipients showed. The local paper, the Plain Dealer, lambasted the judge, a former civil rights attorney, as a "voucher vulture."

In Milwaukee, meanwhile, a record 8,500 students were preparing to enter their voucher schools. In Florida, 136 children were for the first time using their own state's vouchers. And across the nation 40,000 children were starting private or parochial school on charity scholarships courtesy of a protovoucher program known as the Children's Scholarship Fund, with a full 1.2 million on the fund's waiting lists.

And that's just the demand side. We are seeing a similar surge on the supply side of the choice equation. Parochial schools are readying themselves to serve a wider clientele. Ted Forstmann and Wal-Mart heir John Walton, founders of the $160 million Children's Scholarship Fund, recently announced a parallel initiative to focus on the creation of schools to serve the burgeoning choice market.

In other words, choice has arrived. A few years ago, choice was an abstraction confined to think tanks and academe. But the Cleveland schoolchildren who had their lives turned upside down show that movement has real, live constituents, a growing army of them-America's future. And the movement is also producing results, however preliminary. A study by Harvard University's Paul Peterson found that Cleveland's voucher students gained seven percentage points in reading on a national scale and 15 points in math.

Against this new backdrop, anyone who stands in the way of choice is going to look embarrassingly retrograde, as Judge Oliver so painfully found. That all of the GOP Presidential candidates have come out as pro-voucher will only turn up the heat. Just across the water from Cleveland in Michigan, for example, an otherwise progressive Republican Governor, John Engler, is now taking fire for his hesitation in backing a pro-voucher initiative set to appear on the ballot next year.

The message Ohio has sent is that people are no longer willing to tolerate the discombobulation and indifference to family life we saw on display in Judge Oliver's court this past week. The time has come for the Supreme Court to end the confusion. In five consecutive rulings over the past two decades, it has already let stand public aid in religious schools, as long as the money flowed through parents and vouchers.

Manifestly, Judge Oliver's last-minute decision demonstrates that this falls far short of the clarity the schools need and our children deserve. At this writing school choice cases from Maine, Florida, Arizona and Ohio are all wending their way toward the High Court. Any one of them would make a fine test case for the choice Cleveland has so resoundingly made. -- The Wall Street Journal

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Encouraging poll

Zogby International has released a new poll with encouraging results on abortion. An overwhelming majority of respondents, 77.7 percent, said physicians should notify parents if an underage girl is seeking an abortion. This ought to bode well for the Child Custody Protection Act, which the Senate still needs to pass. The CCPA would make it a federal crime to avoid state parental notice and consent laws by taking someone else's minor daughter out of the state for an abortion.

Another majority, 52 percent, say that abortion destroys a human life and is manslaughter. Also, while we wait to see whether Clinton will follow through on his threats to veto the congressional tax cut proposal, the president might want to know that the same poll found that 59.8 percent of those surveyed say they pay too much in taxes. -- Washington Update

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.