Unz makes pitch against bilingual education in Arizona

Ron Unz is on the move again.

The controversial Palo Alto businessman who led last year’s charge against California’s bilingual education programs is advising a similar campaign in Arizona He’s also taking on other educational reforms, including vouchers and charter schools-oth of which he deems “gimmicks.”

That outlook puts Mr. Unz at odds not only with many fellow Republicans, who traditionally have been big backers of school vouchers, but also with other Silicon Valley executives including Pure Software founder Reed Hastings and venture capitalist Tim Draper.

Mr. Hastings has been one of California’s leading advocates of charter schools, helping found a nonprofit organization to promote their growth. Mr. Draper is behind a campaign to put a school voucher initiative on the state’s March 2000 primary ballot.

“The evidence I’ve seen before doesn’t suggest that either vouchers or charter schools are really all that successful,” said Mr. Unz, who says he’s met briefly with Mr. Draper and has talked at some length with Mr. Hastings.

In an opinion piece published Jan. 3 in the Sacramento Bee, Mr. Unz questioned the drive toward school choice. He claimed that “public education in most other countries is far more centralized and government controlled, with less local flexibility and free choice, than our own.”

Yet students from many of those countries routinely outperform those in the United States, he wrote.

He compared the school choice model to the existing technical and trade school sector, which he called “awash in entrepreneurship and the free enterprise culture,” but “a monumental failure.”

“Ron’s a unique individual,” said Mr. Hastings, who left Pure Software in 1997 to head up Tech Net, a Palo Alto-based lobbying group focusing on tech-related issues. “He’s got strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t.”

“He’s a very bright guy, and he’s trying to attack the same problem [I am],” Mr. Draper said of Mr. Unz.

Messrs. Draper, Unz and Hastings agree that the public school system is in decline. Political partisanship has muddied the waters, they say, and a host of trendy programs have diffused resources and confused teachers.

But while Mr. Unz encourages a return to “old-fashioned academics,” Messrs. Draper and Hastings think the entire educational system needs to be scrapped-or, at least, forced to compete with alternatives.

“I think the key is to let people take their schools back,” Mr. Draper said. “They’ve been dumbed down and run into the ground.”

Mr. Unz worries that letting parents use public school money to send their kids to private schools, as the voucher system proposes, could end up creating a system of schools divided along racial, ethnic or ideological lines.

Mr. Hastings-who is not a big fan of vouchers-agreed that it’s unclear how such a system would be regulated. By contrast, he pointed out, charter schools must be approved by local school boards and are required to admit any interested student.

Mr. Hastings suggested that one factor in Mr. Unz’s thinking might be that because charter schools are exempt from most state education statutes, they don’t have to toe the line drawn by Prop. 227, which requires schools to do away with traditional bilingual education programs.

Despite the animosity Prop. 227 has engendered, Mr. Unz said he’s reasonably pleased by the number of schools that are complying with the new law. He predicts lingering opposition will die down after new standardized test scores are released in a few months; he believes those scores will show substantial improvement among students in the English immersion classes established by Prop. 227.

Meanwhile, he’s pitching in on a drive to qualify a kindred ballot initiative in the Grand Canyon State in 2000.

English for the Children of Arizona (which borrows its name from Mr. Unz’s 1998 campaign) claims two recent polls in that state indicated 70 percent of its residents would vote for the proposed measure.

But the group may be suffering from its leader’s provocative reputation. A Jan. 5 rally reportedly was met by a crowd of protesters chanting, “Unz go home!”

The perennially upbeat Mr. Unz isn’t likely to be swayed by such criticism. In fact, he said, he’s still weighing the idea of running for political office here.

As for California’s new governor, Gray Davis, who ran on a heavy education platform, Mr. Unz is reserving judgment.

“It’s a little less clear to me whether any of [his] proposals will make a difference,” he said. “Some of them, I think, are better sound bites than reality.”



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