Washington — The Supreme Court has spoken, but the debate touched off by the recent 5-4 decision approving Cleveland’s pioneering school voucher case is already garbled with great torrents of spin and disinformation.
The outcome of the voucher fight, which now shifts from the constitutional to the political and educational policy arenas, will have a major impact on whether the nation can provide a decent education for millions of children who don’t have the benefit of high-quality suburban schools.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for intelligent, informed debate on the subject. When it comes to parochial school aid, both sides prefer spin and ideology to objective analysis.
In the case of voucher supporters, including some Jewish groups, another variable will complicate the discussion: naked self-interest and institutional greed.
Here’s some advice to supporters and opponents about ways to make this a genuinely productive debate, and not just the usual exchange of self-serving slogans.
To voucher opponents: Get a grip. The High Court has spoken and the constitutionality of school vouchers is no longer an issue, although there will be skirmishes over implementation.
Brace yourselves for voucher proposals in dozens of states and in Congress. The debate now will be about what’s best for America’s kids — and you’ll lose it if you don’t adjust your thinking to take into account the harsh educational realities facing millions of parents in America’s cities.
Alternatives needed
It’s no mystery why backers picked places like Cleveland and Milwaukee for voucher demonstration projects. Desperate parents in these communities don’t worry much about the possibility their children may get a dose of Catholicism along with the three Rs — not as much as they worry about public schools that doom their kids to educational oblivion.
Voucher opponents can’t just proclaim allegiance to public schools. To beat back attempts to expand vouchers, they will have to propose and press for alternative policies that will give a measure of hope to these parents.
They have to fight for massive influxes of federal, state and local money into the public education system just as energetically as they battled vouchers. They also have to fight for reforms to make sure that money is used wisely; simply throwing money at dysfunctional school boards only makes a bad situation worse.
“Too often, we’ve gotten so wrapped up in the narrow question of vouchers that we’ve lost track of the overall issue of how badly our schools really are doing for so many children,” conceded an official with a Jewish group that continues to fight vouchers.
To voucher supporters: Put your money where your mouth is.
You won a huge victory in the Court, but you have big credibility problems of your own, starting with this one: Many of the partners in the pro-voucher movement are lying when they say they want what’s best for all kids.
Don’t believe it? Listen to the TV preachers rally the troops on vouchers. Many describe public schools — “government schools,” they call them derisively — as evil tools of an anti-religious government. Others make clear their hope that the unraveling of public education will be an unprecedented boost for evangelization.
When asked about the anti-public education motives of these coalition partners, many pro-voucher Jews dismiss the question as irrelevant. It isn’t.
If a substantial number of voucher advocates hate the very idea of public schools, it casts a cloud over the claim by the school choice movement that these proposals are simply an effort to improve educational opportunities for all kids.
That cloud is even darker because of the obvious self-interest. The loudest advocates of vouchers are groups that stand to benefit the most, including the Catholic Church and Orthodox Jewish groups.
Too often, their claim that funneling money to parochial and private schools will somehow help battered public school systems by providing “competition” sounds like a flimsy veneer covering their desire to expand their own school systems.
To its credit, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America recently supported a reauthorized Elementary and Secondary Education Act that included more money for public schools. But that’s a relatively small part of the education activism of Jewish pro-voucher groups.
Voucher backers have to do much more to explain what else they support for helping those students — the vast majority — who will be left behind by any voucher plan conceived so far.
And they have to explain the tortured math they use to “prove” that providing public money for vouchers will not end up cutting funding for already-starving public schools, a claim that defies the logic of today’s parsimonious education budgets and anti-tax climate.
The bottom line is that the nation is in danger of losing its strongest weapon for economic growth and social integration — a public school system effectively serving rich and poor alike.
It’s time for serious debate about the causes of that failure — not for deceptively easy panaceas from the right, narrow sectarian activism masquerading as educational “reform” or reflexive church-state fights by liberal groups that can’t seem to understand the educational emergency that has propelled vouchers to center stage in national affairs.
Former Madisonian James Besser has been Washington correspondent for the New York Jewish Week, the Baltimore Jewish Times and other leading Anglo-Jewish newspapers for 15 years.
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