History sheds light on bars to school choice

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 28, 1997 | by Libby Sternberg

In Vermont today, a debate rages on school choice that has a familiar ring to any student of history A state Superior Court judge on June 27 ruled that it was unconstitutional for public funds to be used for tuition vouchers at a Catholic high school. Before the ruling, the body politic echoed with arguments that were used curing the debates on public education in the mid-1800s.

The case originated in the town of Chittenden (population: 1,100), which, like 90 other communities in the state, has no public high school. All its highschool students are "tuitioned" to public or private schools of their parents' choosing. The state and the towns pick up the tab, up to the state's average per-pupil cost. It's a fair deal, one that has worked for more than 100 years. For most of those years Vermonters in tuitioning towns could choose religiously affiliated schools as well as public and other independent schools. But in 1961, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that tuitioning to sectarian schools was unconstitutional. In 1994, citing evolving jurisprudence, the court changed its mind and forced a tuitioning town to fork over tuition dollars to a man who had sent his son to an out-of-state Episcopalian school.

The state's education commissioner, however, disapproved. Asked by a tuitioning town whether tuition reimbursement to parents who chose sectarian schools now was legal, the commissioner said no. The Chittenden School Board in 1996 brought the conflict to a head when it approved tuitioning more than a dozen students to attend Mount St. Joseph Academy, a local Catholic high school, at the parents' request. The state, not to be trumped, announced it would withhold Chittenden's state-education funds. The local school board stood firm. The state again refused to release funds earmarked for the Catholic school and the case went to court.

While the lawyers prepared their cases, the public jumped into the fray Those who opt out of public schools are opting out of their communities, railed an op-ed author in a major paper. What's more, he claimed school-choice advocates' true goal is to "dismantle" the public schools. Real-life experience exposes this mythology. Tuitioning-town students overwhelmingly choose public schools, debunking the theory that choice will destroy the schools even if it was a goal (which it is not).

Public schools are where we all learn to be Americans, argue some Democratic politicos, including, on various occasions, the state's governor. Interestingly, the governor, who has never been accused of being un-American, attended private schools.

Many of these arguments hearken back to the 1800s when public schools and compulsory-education laws were taking shape in state after state. Policymakers of that bygone era achieved a noble goal with some ignoble motives. Observing that the educated child was more likely to turn into a productive and successful adult, they sought to ensure that education was free and open to all. Thus compulsory financing of education, through taxes, and compulsory attendance, through truancy laws, began to become encoded into law.

But reformers had another goal as well, one they weren't shy in proclaiming during those politically incorrect times. A growing horde of immigrants was flocking to America's shores (2 million in 1857 alone). Unlike previous immigrants who had come mostly from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, these new arrivals were from countries where the language and religion were considered foreign. Most of them were Catholics a religion many Protestant Americans disliked at best and loathed and feared at worst. Catholicism, they believed, was a threat to the republic. The reformers sought to turn these Catholic immigrant children into Americans through public schooling. Unfortunately, learning to become an American in those schools had little to do with learning about freedom and a lot to do with learning about conformity Immigrant children were taught how to become American Protestants, with hymn-singing, Bible reading and prayers all a part of the school day. The reformers saw no constitutional problem in this religion-based curriculum.

When Catholic immigrants sought refuge in Catholic schools, public-school reformers cut them off at the pass by cutting off the possibility of funding for any school that didn't get the reformers' seal of approval. Needless to say, Catholic schools didn't pass.

This Americanization-through-public-schools movement reached its zenith in 1922 when Oregon voters passed a law that made it illegal to send children to anything but public schools. The Ku Klux Klan campaigned for the law, noting that public schools were "the foundation for the perpetuation and preservation of our free institutions." Nuns challenged the law and it was ruled unconstitutional a few years later.

Throughout this battle, and the prior battles for public-school monopolies, Republicans more often than not sided with the education policymakers and campaigners.

This snapshot of a distasteful history presents today's Americans with an intriguing question. If the education policymakers of yesteryear had not been anti-Catholic bigots, would our current public-education system more closely resemble our higher-education system? Would children be allowed to use publicly funded vouchers, just as college students use publicly funded grants and scholarships, at the public, private, or private religiously-affiliated schools of their choice?