Schoolyard chums

While civil libertarians are furious over the Supreme Court's voucher decision, many low-income African-Americans are solidly in the conservative camp.

By Michelle Goldberg

Jun 29, 2002 | In the late 1980s, Roberta Kitchen had a sixth-grade daughter in an inner-city Cleveland school who could barely read. Kitchen asked her daughter's teacher to hold her back a year, but, she says, the teacher told her "they had already reached their quota as to how many kids they could fail." The students in her daughter's class had to share books, and since there weren't enough to go around, the teachers couldn't assign reading for them to do at home.

Kitchen says that same daughter was being threatened with rape by a classmate who was a gang member, so every day she would leave work at 2:30 to pick her up and take her home.

Now Kitchen, a single mother with five children, has another daughter in sixth grade. Instead of the 35 students who crowded her elder girl's class, her younger daughter shares her classroom with perhaps 12 other kids, and she's on the honor roll. Kitchen uses the Cleveland voucher program -- upheld by the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote Thursday -- to pay her daughter's tuition at Saint John Nottingham, a Lutheran school. She doesn't care at all that her tax money is flowing over the wall that once decisively separated church and state.

In fact, she's furious with the civil libertarians and African-American leaders who oppose voucher programs. "They have a lot of nerve telling us, who have children in a failing school, to be satisfied, when their children don't live in Cleveland and don't have to be subjected to the type of things that kids here are," she says. "I'm angry that they can have dreams and see those dreams come to fruition for their children, while ours are hampered because our kids are in situations where if they go to school, there's no guarantee they'll come home intact."

Nor does Kitchen care about the political firestorm ignited by the high court's ruling on school vouchers. "I don't want to sacrifice my children to a school system," she says. "I refuse to do that."

Families like hers are what make the voucher debate so difficult, and so divisive. Since Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, the issue has been painted as crucial to the separation of church and state, with Christian rightists cheering and liberals and civil libertarians wringing their hands. "Today's decision is bad for education and bad for religious freedom," Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a press release. Added ACLU Ohio executive director Chris Link: "Sadly, this decision essentially defunds Cleveland's public schools and leaves parents who want vouchers with no options but parochial education for their children."

Meanwhile, many on the right are delighted at the privatization of education and the prospect of public money flowing towards church schools. "With a green light from the high court, the possibilities for new programs are endless," said a statement from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington.

It's not just the right that's cheering the court's ruling, though. Many poor families who've never voted Republican in their lives are also thrilled. And that makes the issue complicated.

The Ohio Legislature introduced vouchers to Cleveland in 1996. It was a response to a crisis in the city's schools, which were failing so badly that in 1995 a federal judge ordered the state to take them over. Though smaller than Milwaukee's voucher program -- which has around 10,000 participants as opposed to Cleveland's 4,300 -- the program in Cleveland has been particularly controversial because almost all its students use the vouchers to attend religious schools.

A coalition of teachers and civil liberties groups challenged the program on church-state grounds in a suit that was finally decided Thursday by the Supreme Court. After big setbacks for the voucher movement in recent years, including overwhelming defeat in California and Michigan referendums in 2000, it's been re-energized, and conservatives are planning on introducing programs in Texas, Utah, Arizona and other states.

But while it's now clear that voucher programs are constitutional, it's far less clear whether they're good policy.

There are many strong arguments against them. They siphon money from public schools into religious schools, where more than 96 percent of voucher students land. The high percentage of voucher students going to religious schools isn't a result of parents' choices, say people on both sides of the issue -- it's because religious private schools are more likely to accept vouchers than secular ones.

According to Meryl Johnson, spokeswoman for the Cleveland Teachers Union and a teacher at Charles Eliot Middle School, vouchers have drained $46 million from the city's school system that would otherwise have gone to tutoring, reducing class sizes and increasing security.

Next Page: Whether public or parochial, parents want good schools

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