Are schools vouch safe?

Insight on the News, May 27, 1996 by Gene Koprowski

Two cases before state courts could determine the fate of `school choice' in America.

Fannie Lewis journeyed from a small hamlet in the rural South to Cleveland decades ago, searching for freedom and economic opportunity. What she and her family found was disappointment.

She wanted her children to get a good education, but the city's public schools were a wreck. "The North is more segregated than the South," says Lewis, who is black. By the time Lewis became a grandmother, she was more leery than ever of inner-city schools, fearful of exposing her grandchildren to weapon-wielding drug dealers and other ruffians.

But Lewis, through a lifetime of persistence, had traveled the route from welfare mother to minister and member of the Cleveland City Council. She and others in the city had agitated for school choice, seeing vouchers as a way to help their children get ahead. Eventually, the Ohio General Assembly passed a measure enabling a kindergarten-through-third-grade pilot program to open.

Then the local affiliate of the National Education Association, or NEA, and the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit to stop the plan from expanding, just as the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, did last year in a similar case in Milwaukee. This summer, the two separate but intimately related cases are being heard in the state courts.

According to conservative activists, the Ohio and Wisconsin cases are the Armageddon that could determine the fate of school-choice initiatives across the United States. As such, they are attracting considerable attention from leading conservatives. Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, has joined the effort to defend the school voucher program in Wisconsin, helping Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson attempt to preserve the program through arguments before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit conservative advocacy group in Washington, has joined both cases on behalf of pro-choice parents. "These cases could very well determine the viability of voucher programs," Clint Bolick, founder of the Institute for Justice, tells Insight. "The educational establishment is trying to stop this in any way it can."

In Wisconsin, the school-choice pilot program helped 1,000 low-income children attend nonsectarian private schools in 1990. In 1992, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the right of the state to spend taxpayers' money on vouchers. Last year, the Wisconsin Legislature voted to increase the program's size by a factor of 10 and expand the voucher program to include Roman Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jewish-run schools. Teachers' unions and their advocates filed suit, arguing that the funding violated the Constitution's separation of church and state clause, as they did in Cleveland.

"In reality, the unions know that if this is successful, it will break their backs," says Bolick. According to Susan Mitchell of Parents for School Choice, a Milwaukee-based group, she and others -- including lawyers, community activists and business leaders -- worked behind the scenes for more than 10 years to persuade the state to sanction school choice. "Unlike the stereotypes painted of school-choice advocates, we went across racial, economic and religious lines," says Mitchell. "Ten years ago, most Milwaukeeans thought their children were like those of Lake Woebegone -- all above average. But it took a 1985 gubernatorial task force to show them that that was not the case. Gradually, they convinced people that change was needed."

As the initial pilot program thrived and positive educational results emerged, school choice moved from theory to practice, providing Parents for School Choice with an even larger support base. It also lent conservative activists a rationale to scrap piecemeal, union-backed reform efforts. After two decades of slow-paced change, they say, per-pupil spending in Milwaukee had gone up 82 percent while graduation had plummeted from 79 percent to less than 50 percent.

"School choice is primarily a power struggle," says Mitchell. "If it were on the merits, we would have won long ago. Poor parents and children are held hostage in a system that the teachers themselves as parents would not tolerate."

Indeed, passage of school-choice pilot programs in Wisconsin and Ohio can be attributed to the missteps of the teachers' unions. In Wisconsin, the union launched a massive publicity campaign and threatened to boycott businesses that supported the voucher program. "Sometimes, the left hand does not know what the far left hand is doing," quips Joe Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland, Mich.-based group that assisted the choice effort in Milwaukee. Overton said that unions and their allies overreached when trying to stanch school-voucher efforts.

In Ohio, when Lewis proposed the idea of school choice, legislators refused to believe that Cleveland's African-americans wanted choice, so she organized a caravan of buses loaded with black parents to demonstrate in the state capital.