I enjoy reading letters to the editor supporting equal treatment for gay people, especially those in small, regional, "heartland" newspapers. I find it encouraging that pro-gay voices are being raised in burgs where you wouldn't think the "movement" had penetrated. But that doesn't mean I always agree with the views expressed on what's in the "gay" interest. Take, for example, a letter that ran a few weeks ago in the Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune under the title "Vouchers prompt fear for gays."
The letter writer, Luann Conaty, prefaced her remarks by noting she is "the mother of a gay man and the stepmother of a lesbian." She notes that Florida's governor, Jeb Bush, has just signed a bill permitting tax dollars to be used to send students from failing public schools to the schools of their choice, including private and religious schools. Ms. Conaty worries about anti-gay discrimination that gay or lesbian students might face in religious schools, and remarks, "I could have been a prime candidate to send my son to a religious school under this system, not knowing that he was struggling with his sexual identity. I assure you he would have been at least brainwashed about the 'evils' of his sexual orientation and, at worst, humiliated, emotionally abused and perhaps physically attacked." After its publication, this letter was distributed via e-mail by a group called (take a breath) The Coalition for Safer Schools' Actual or Perceived GLBT Student Protection Project.
I marvel that Ms. Conaty and her activist allies express such concern about anti-gay harassment in private, religious schools at a time when attacks on gay students in the American public school system are rampant. A story on high school harassment last May in the Los Angeles Times noted that teachers and administrators ignored "pervasive anti-gay abuse" in the halls of a suburban high school in the Morgan Hill Unified School District, south of San Jose, where "the words 'faggot' and 'dyke' were uttered about as often as 'hello' and 'goodbye'." Slurs were hissed at one out lesbian student in class, and "scribbled on her locker and on pornographic death threats, including a picture of a bound and gagged women with a slit throat." I wonder if the GLBT anti-school-choice activists are glad that this student was kept trapped in the public school system.
Or consider the pervasive anti-gay abuse at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a killing rampage. The Denver Post reported that members of Columbine's now-notorious Trench Coat Mafia were "tormented" by jocks who called them "faggots" and bashed them into their lockers when they walked down the school halls. A story in the online magazine Salon noted, "it's clear that 'gay' is one of the worst epithets to use against a high school student in Littleton." Time magazine's post-Columbine story looked at patterns of violence, and found that anti-gay taunting was also a factor in provoking killing rampages in Pearl, Mississippi and West Paducah, Kentucky.
Of course, the issue isn't that some disturbed straight boys turn to murder in the wake of anti-gay taunting; the issue is the anti-gay harassment and physical abuse that kids who are gay (or perceived as gay) face in the public school system, and the persistent lack of concern shown by public school teachers and administrators.
Following Matthew Shepard's murder, a CBS poll found that nearly half of 11th graders said gay and lesbian students were abused verbally and otherwise at their schools. At the same time, a CNN story reported that public school officials used "community values" to defend their inaction. "You have to...not be so sensitive and so open that you are promoting something that certain portions of your parent population and students would be opposed to," said Paul Houston, a spokesman for the American Association of High School Administrators.
A few public high school students have won lawsuits charging that their schools failed to protect them from anti-gay attacks, but that hasn't stopped other school districts from imposing what they call "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" or forbidding gay and lesbian student groups from meeting. Maybe, just maybe, school vouchers could be part of the remedy instead of the threat that some activists fear.
A Pro-gay Case for School Choice
Advocates for school choice argue that under the status quo the government pays noncompetitive public schools a "head price" for each of their captive students. Alternatively, with school choice parents are free to send their children to the public school of their choosing or to receive a scholarship voucher to help pay for a private school. This "market competition" forces the public schools to compete for students, creating better, more responsive schools. And since the private school tuition support is always less than what the government pays the public schools per pupil, the system is more economical to boot.
Yes, school choice proposals includes parochial schools, but I know at least some Catholic school veterans who tell me that, unlike at many public schools, gay baiting and bashing simply would not have been tolerated at their alma mater, regardless of the Church's teachings about sexuality. Richard Sincere of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL), a libertarian gay group, says his all-male Catholic school was a far cry from the hate-and-fear-filled hallways of Columbine High. In fact, demonstrating respect for fellow students was ingrained and fostered by the faculty on a daily basis, with an affirmative attempt on the part of administrators to make sure different sorts of students mixed with each other, so jocks worked on the school play and musicians assisted the basketball coach.
It could be that one reason this example seems so far from the reality of most public schools is that the public system has become, like most government monopolies, insulated, corrupt and lazy, with little regard for serving its "customers" (the students and their parents). While students in public high schools report widespread harassment, with many going so far as to say in online discussion groups that they understand how Harris and Klebold felt, we're just not hearing that cry of pain from private school students.
But more than simply providing for safer schools, allowing for choice supports a real diversity of educational options for students -- including allowing them to attend public or private schools that have gay-supportive reputations or curriculums, or that allow students to organize gay-straight alliances. It could even mean that more public school districts would be willing to experiment with alternatives along the lines of New York City's Harvey Milk school, which takes openly gay, lesbian, and transgendered students who've dropped out -- or fled -- their local schools.
That's not a perfect solution, since some kids come from homophobic homes, or from homes where parents just don't care at all. But competition is the engine of innovation and improvement. In the long run, applying market competition to force government-funded and operated public schools to compete would provide an economic incentive to curb the worst aspects of high school hell faced by all students, gay and straight, trapped in schools that just don't give a damn.
The Politics of School Choice
So, why are some vocal lesbigay activists so opposed to school choice? The main opponents of choice reforms are the teachers' unions, and public employee unions are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. Moreover, school choice is seen as a "Republican" issue. The result: in the name of alliance politics, gays and lesbians are once again being asked to take the left side of an issue which has nothing to do with gay equality per se and everything to do with maintaining entrenched government bureaucracies.
It's ironic that so-called progressives want to keep economically disadvantaged kids imprisoned in rotting public schools. And it's unconscionable that some in the lesbigay movement, whose leaders insist we support a "broad social agenda" with a "multi-issue" focus, want us to add opposition to school choice to the mix.
Who Decides?
To sum up, the disagreement over school choice is one of basic principle -- whether parents should be able to choose how their money (taken by the government as school taxes) is used to fund their children's education, or whether the state should decide. The anti-choice side seems to be saying, as regards gay students, that once progressives take control of the state (or the school district) that policies will be implemented to teach tolerance and enforce anti-discrimination. I just don't buy it; too many of today's noncompetitive public schools can't even teach reading, writing and math, so why on earth should we expect they would be more successful with sensitivity training?
Furthermore, there will always be political resistance to attempts to mandate that public schools teach 'gay is ok' when some parents who must send their kids there believe (often based on their religious convictions) that being gay is, at the very least, not morally equivalent to being straight. That's the sort of social engineering that gives rise to an effective backlash, as happened in New York City over its proposed Rainbow ("Heather Has Two Mommies") Curriculum.
Yes, choice may give some tax money back to some parents who will choose to send their kids to conservative religious academies. That's what choice means -- parents decide, not Hillary Clinton. Still more pupils would be able to flee the worst public schools and attend far more tolerant private schools, or go to public schools that do a better job of ensuring that they don't get beat up in the hallways. When the bad schools and their union employees have to pay a financial price, there will be a real incentive to improve those institutions, or face going out of business.
Finally, you may hear that the pro-school-choice side wants to "destroy public education." Again, I don't believe that. It seems the only hope for our highly dysfunctional schools is not throwing even more money at them, but to engender competition and its universal byproducts -- efficiency and innovation. To be blunt, I am sorry that the teachers' unions are more interested in protecting their iron rice bowls than in seeing how necessary these reforms are.
By fostering a diversity of educational options, school choice could strike at the heart of the one-size-fits-all public system predicated on fears of offending some homophobes' "community values," and instead would allow both public and private schools to "market" a gay-inclusive alternative. At the very least, this would help besieged gay students to escape from the Columbine Highs of the world and seek out competitive institutions that foster human decency, rather than bigoted depravity.
In the end, wouldn't that be a better choice?