SACRAMENTO — A legislative champion of taxpayer-financed vouchers for private and religious schools is targeting the chronically troubled schools of Compton for an experiment he believes may ignite a sweeping shake-up of education in California.
As Assemblyman Ray Haynes (R-Murrieta) sees it, public school students in Compton have been victims of a broken education system for too long, but they can be rescued with voucher-style "scholarships."
"These are kids who have been lost," said Haynes, a conservative Republican from suburban Riverside with long-standing ties to bishops and community activists in urban Compton.
Haynes, an author of past voucher bills, said he introduced his latest plan at the request of a conservative religion-based think tank and some low-income Compton parents who believe their children could get a superior education in private schools but cannot afford it.
However, opponents of the proposal (AB 349) call it a transparent attempt by school voucher advocates in California and nationally to extract from the Legislature what California voters twice denied them at the ballot box in the 1990s.
"Ray Haynes is trying to bring about public financing for private religious education. That's his agenda. As long as he holds public office, he'll never stop," charged Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Assn., which opposes vouchers.
Typically, vouchers are redeemed at the schools themselves. But in a new twist, the Haynes bill would establish an experimental program in which taxpayer-financed subsidies called scholarships would be attached to the student and would travel to the private or parochial school of the student's choice.
In another twist, the Compton experiment would be modeled after the highly popular Cal Grant program for college students, which provides the financially neediest students with grants of as much as $9,708 a year to pay tuition and student fees.
Haynes refused to detail his strategy for getting the bill approved in a Legislature dominated by Democrats who oppose vouchers. But he indicated that packaging the subsidies as scholarships similar to Cal Grant subsidies would make the bill more attractive to Democrats.
The plan would get a five-year test run, starting Jan. 1. The results would be evaluated and decisions made on whether to expand it elsewhere.
As a potential model for the rest of the state, Haynes said, Compton "was a good place to start.... What we need in Compton is a revolution."
