THE SUPREME Court is preparing to hear arguments in the appeal of a school voucher case concerning Cleveland-area schools. The outcome of the case will have a major impact on localities everywhere, whose individual actions regarding vouchers either will bolster or hamper President Bush's ambitions for an eventual nationwide voucher program. The Supreme Court must uphold the lower court's ruling that Cleveland's voucher program is unconstitutional. Vouchers not only create constitutional problems based on government entanglement with religion, but they also fail to improve our national education standards. They're bad for religion, bad for Cleveland and bad for America.
In the current case in Cleveland, qualified students have the option of taking $2,250 per year out of public school funding and using it to pay tuition at an alternative private school, be it secular or parochial. The vast majority of these students are inner-city minorities of low socioeconomic status. They also have the option of attending suburban public schools that are willing to take them, although these schools have their own problems and few have volunteered to participate in the program.
Advocates of the program call it "school choice." Solicitor General Theodore Olson claims that "parental choice, not government indoctrination, is the hallmark of the Ohio program" ("High court readies for school voucher case," CNN.com, Feb. 18).
But the voucher program provides many parents and students with little choice. In Cleveland and throughout America, the overwhelming majority of private schools are religiously affiliated and suburban public schools are unwilling to accept inner-city academic refugees. Many areas may lack secular alternatives for non-religious voucher candidates.
With religious families abandoning public schools and taking their public money to private institutions, those students left in public schools will be faced with a dilemma. They will have two equally unjust choices: they either must go down with the sinking ship of secular public education or be forced into parochial schools, thereby subjecting themselves to unwanted yet unavoidable religious indoctrination.
Of the 4,456 Cleveland students in voucher programs, three fourths of them attend Catholic schools, with most of the rest going to other religiously affiliated schools. This data, along with religion's national dominance of the private school sector, ensures that almost all vouchers nationwide would go to religious schools. In such a situation, entanglement of government with religion would be inevitable. Our national education system would become dependent upon the vast constituency of private religious schools nationwide, and they in turn would become dependent upon the government's public tax money to fund their operations. With this power of the purse, the government would have leverage with which to meddle in private religious affairs.
The proposed voucher system is a wrecking ball swinging toward the solid American wall that stands firmly between church and state. It is poison to both the government's impartiality and the autonomy of private religious institutions.
Aside from knotting up government and religious institutions, vouchers simply can't and won't improve education as its advocates hope it will. The key to better education unfortunately does not rest in any prettily-presented programs or complex ideas cooked up by education specialists who got their degrees by clipping pictures out of magazines and talking about children's feelings. Most students are destined for success or failure years before they hit their first kindergarten class. Their academic careers live or die with the environment that they live in outside of the classroom.
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The basic attitude and motivation that makes students successful comes from parents and family life. It simply can't be taught in school. A student with a healthy environment at home will succeed in the worst of schools, while a student who lacks such an environment is doomed to failure no matter where he receives instruction.
Private schools currently have better test scores and grade point averages, not so much because they employ more effective methods of teaching, but because they are filled with students whose families care about their education and provide healthy home environments. Parents who spend their own money on private schools obviously are concerned about their children's education.
By providing public money that would allow everybody to attend private schools, voucher programs simply would be transplanting the problems of public schools into the private school system. Private schools would become filled with the same children who now have problems in public schools - not because the public schools teach poorly, but because these students come from poor intellectual backgrounds.
Vouchers create a slew of problems without offering any solutions. They threaten basic precepts of our Constitution while failing to serve their purpose of remedying education. If President Bush really wants to "leave no child behind," he had better leave vouchers behind and start looking at the real problems of our education system.
(Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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