My name is Bruce Adelstein. I am a 36-year-old appellate lawyer in Los Angeles. (I also maintain a webpage devoted to appellate law.) Simply put, I wrote this webpage because I believe that the public school system as it is currently run is failing to educate our students well, and school vouchers will significantly improve both public and private education in California.
I am a strong supporter of public schools in general. My father taught high school in LAUSD for 36 years until he retired last year. Also, I attended public schools from kindergarden through 12th grade. When I graduated in 1982, my high school (El Camino Real, in Woodland Hills) was excellent. It had many AP classes and honors classes, good teachers, and I think good students. Overall, I recieved a great education. I would not have taken a voucher and gone to private school if the option had then been available. And El Camino has continued to do well. It is one of the better regarded schools in LAUSD, and it recently won the National Academic Decathalon.
Unfortunately, not every high school is as good as El Camino. Students who attend some of the worst high schools often cannot get a good education, regardless of how bright or capable they are. And this handicaps them for life. Many of our social problems like crime and poverty, would be eliminated or at drastically reduced, if people simply got a better education.
I realized many years ago that a high quality education had the potential to solve some of our most serious social problems and that (for all the reasons set out elsewhere on this webpage) vouchers would help improve the quality of public schools. In 1993, when Proposition 174 was on the ballot, I debated extensively in favor of the intiative.
During those debates, many of my opponents argued that we were on the verge of massive public school reforn. Charter schools had just been launched in California, and LEARN was supposedly going to revolutionize LAUSD. Moreover, these people argued, vouchers are untried and unproven. They had only been tried for a few years in a very limited way in Milwaukee, and there was no good data or other information as to whether they actually worked. Many people who listened to these debates expressed the same concerns.
Now, seven years later, two things are true: (1) the public school reforms being launched in 1993 (as well as the ones from the mid-1980s, and the late-1980s, and the late-1990s) have failed to produce any real and significant improvements in education quality, and (2) the data and other information about voucher programs in other states show that vouchers empower parents and force the public schools to improve in order to retain their students. This is not speculation. This is based on real experience in other states.
In short, vouchers are critically important to improving education in California.
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