NewsMax.com Wires
Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001

"We are putting a face on the school choice issue," said Kaleem Caire, executive director of Wisconsin-based Black Alliance for Education Options, a group that advocates school choice for black children.

School choice, one of President-elect Bush's campaign themes, allows parents to use public funds to send their children either to private schools or to government schools outside their neighborhoods.

The ads, for the most part, appear to target black parents.

Black Alliance for Educational Options, run in conjunction with the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University in Wisconsin, launched a $1.3 million television and radio ad campaign in the Washington metropolitan area in an effort to reach lawmakers, Caire said.

The campaign, which includes 10 television ads and nine print ads, will run for six weeks, and it was intentionally initiated on Nov. 13 to prevent the perception that the alliance was trying to influence the outcome of the election.

Caire said members of his organizations have asked him whether they plan to address the issue with Latino parents in their ads. Cairo said it may happen in the future, but it was important for the group to focus on black children.

In one of the alliance's 30-second television spots, a parent named Julia Doyle talks about her son's frustration at not being able to read before she used a voucher program to send him to a new school. "I believe school choice is working, because my son has learned how to read," Doyle says.

Center for Education Reform estimates that 74,000 of the nation's 53 million children in government schools participate in the nation's 79 government and private school voucher programs. That figure represents less than 1 percent of the country's government school population.

Polls Show Support for School Vouchers

Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a group that conducts research on public policy issues of concern to blacks and other minorities, reported that support for school vouchers among blacks grew by 25 percent since 1998. It found that 60 percent of black respondents favored the program. A similar increase (27 percent) was found among whites, and for the first time since the question was first asked in the Joint Center's 1996 National Opinion Poll, a majority of whites (52 percent) favored vouchers.

The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indiana began airing television spots on New Year's Day in support of school choice. President and Chief Executive Officer Gordon St. Angelo said the organization had in the past run ads in Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Illinois and California.

St. Angelo said ads could cost more than $500,000, and the foundation expects to spend "a couple of million dollars" in promotions. But the organization does not specifically target minority groups.

"Ours don't. We've got five different scripts – five different commercials, all targeted towards the general public," St. Angelo said.

Campaign for America's Children, an organization that advocates putting parents in charge of their children's education, launched ads in late September. The multimillion-dollar print and television ad campaign funded by financier Theodore J. Forstmann includes full-page advertisements in newspapers such as USA Today, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Craig Brownstein, spokesman for Campaign for America's Children, said the ads, which aired nationwide, were timed to coincide with the election, except in California and Michigan, where school choice initiatives were already on the ballot.

Brownstein was unsure whether the promotion was being directly targeted to minorities, but said it was meant to appeal to those having difficulty accessing quality education.

"It's targeted to America, to whomever has a stake in answering the question 'Who should be in charge [of children's education],' " Brownstein said.

Copyright 2000 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
School Choice