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Americans tell pollsters they are unsatisfied with the current state of the nation’s public schools and the presidential candidates can’t stop talking about education.  

All of this would make it seem the perfect time for dot-com millionaire Timothy Draper to launch an initiative to offer parents a $4,000 voucher to send children to the school of their choice. 

But instead of taking off as the bilingual education initiative did last year, Draper’s Proposition 38 is now behind in the polls, dropping from 45 percent in August to 37 percent last month, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.  

Educational experts and political scientists blame Proposition 38’s failure to catch on to everything from an inappropriate campaign strategy, to negative perceptions of vouchers and a misreading of the polls on education. 

To begin with, they said, it is easy to misread the voters’ desire for change in the education system. 

Americans may be unsatisfied with schools in general, but they are mostly satisfied with their local schools. This is true especially among the parents of school-age children. The vast majority, 70 percent, grade their kid’s schools with As and Bs, according to the 2000 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s attitude toward Public Schools. 

In addition, Proposition 38 supporters decision to make access to the voucher system universal, instead of targeting it to low-income children, played against them.  

“The majority of parents with kids in inner-city schools don’t vote so the backers said ‘if we just make it for the poor people we won’t have enough voters,’” said Pam Riley, a political scientist from the Pacific Research Institute. 

The campaign failed to ally with organizations such as the Catholic Conference, which could have helped to move middle to higher income voters around the subject, she said. The Catholic Church’s 718 schools, which serve 254,000 of the state’s students could have given Proposition 38 support from those type of families, as Riley predicted. 

Moreover, involving Catholic educators would have also provided an expert opinion on the mechanics of running a school, said Luis Huerta, researcher of the Policy Analysis of California Education, a joint effort between UC Berkeley and Stanford University.  

“The Catholic Conference would have flat out just told them that $4,000 was not enough to run a school,” he said. 

But the initiative’s campaign strategy is not the only factor working against it. Vouchers have a bad reputation. Less than 4 percent of Americans see vouchers as an effective action to improve public schools in the United States, according to this year’s Gallup polls. More than 50 percent of Californians think that passage of the voucher initiative will not help the public school system, or the students with the lowest test scores, according to the Public Policy Institute’s findings. 

Moreover, with the economy booming, California residents have seen big changes in the education, system in recent years, including more funding, improved bonuses for students and teachers, increased accountability through tests and smaller class sizes. 

“(Prop. 38) is a hard sell in the current state of California because if we are seeing improvements, why are we going decentralize and risk whatever gains we have been making?” asked Huerta. 

To top it all, Proposition 38 would cost California residents at least $2.6 billion dollars, and so far now, there is no evidence that it would work. None of the other existing voucher programs in the country are based on the universal access that Proposition 38 promises. 

“It is a more drastic measure than most people are comfortable with,” said Kim Rueben, education research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. 

But even if Proposition 38 fails, its presence on the ballot has given public schools a wake-up call. 

Its second one. 

The first was in 1993, when another voucher initiative, Proposition 174, was on the ballot. 

Although it failed with a ratio of 3-to-1, it did have an impact on the education system: It strengthened the charter school movement, Riley said. 

Since then, 261 charter schools that serve 121,000 students have sprouted in California. 

The current voucher initiative could have less impact on school choice, but more on its less publicized half: state school funding, said Huerta. 

“One positive thing is that it calls attention to folks that school funding is still very low to 

compete with other states,” he said.