"Education is on the November Ballot"

Vice President Al Gore raises the stakes against Texas Governor George W. Bush in the final weeks of the 2000 presidential election. The two candidates gave strikingly different views of educational reform.

Asked about Governor George W. Bush’s support for charter schools in the final 2000 presidential debate, Vice President Al Gore gave a reply that took absolutely no one by surprise.

“Yeah, we have a huge difference between us on this question.”

Gore could have been talking about anything, really. In the months leading up to the historic November 7 election, education grabbed the spotlight early and often. Bush had promised that education would be his first priority upon taking residency in the White House, where he would install many of the accountability measures he championed in Texas. He spoke at the debate about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Gore scoffed at the notion. A proponent of $115 billion in additional education funding, Gore campaigned on reducing class size while aggressively hiring and retraining teachers. He called for adding 100,000 new teachers within four years. But the greatest difference between the two centered on the charter school movement and use of vouchers.

“Under my plan, if a school is failing, we work with the states to give them the authority and the resources to close down that school and reopen it right away with a new principal, a new faculty, a turnaround team of specialists who know what they're doing,” Gore said. Vouchers simply weren’t going to be an option in his administration.

It was —and still is— a controversial topic. That night, people in 18 states went to the polls to decide on ballot initiatives involving education, a handful of which dealt with vouchers. Ten years later, and the results are still mixed: a recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education showed that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program —the first federally funded voucher program in the country— “significantly” raised graduation rates by 12 percent. But the program has failed to raise standardized test scores and Congress ended the program this past summer.