One judge shuts out 4,000 students

Teachers Unions Argue Cleveland Has Established a Religion

West Union Elementary School is located 25 miles west of Portland, Ore. Attending West Union I could look at cows, forests and fields while ignoring the remarkably high quality of education I was supposed to be receiving. I had no fear of being shot. My teachers didn't fear their cars being jacked by some felonious bovine. The schoolhouse door wasn't decorated with barbed wire and metal detectors.

Fast forward 20 years and 2,000 miles to Cleveland, Ohio, where the public schools have vehement defenders, even though metal-detector sightings far outnumber cow sightings and the quality of the education is abysmal. The failings of the Cleveland City School District are staggering. In Ohio's 1999 School District Report Card, the district failed to meet the state's minimum performance standard in every category. Only 22.6% of 4th-grade students in Cleveland public school's passed the state's standardized test. By the 12th grade, only 16.6% passed. In only 8 of 26 categories were the results even half the state's standard.

Harvard Says Students Improved

Despite this dismal record, the National Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Federation of Teachers and the People for the American Way formed an alliance to protect the Cleveland school system from the threat of free-market competition. This week that alliance scored a quick and, hopefully, short-lived victory.

A U.S. District Court judge issued an injunction to halt a three-year-old voucher program called the Cleveland Scholarship Program. This program allows low-income parents to choose the public or private school they want their child to attend. It has been not only popular with parents, but also highly effective.

A Harvard University study this year showed that students in the Cleveland Scholarship Program showed significant improvement in their math and reading test results as compared to nonprogram students. Between the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1998, students enrolled in two program schools gained 7 percentile points on national reading tests and 15 percentile points in national math tests.

A Cleveland Plain Dealer poll found 76% of Cleveland residents favored the program.

The opponents of the program don't ever bother to argue about its popularity or effectiveness. They claim the school-choice program violates the 1st Amendment by creating an unconstitutional relationship between church and state.

In an identical claim before the Ohio Supreme Court earlier this year, the program was ruled constitutional. But the ACLU-teachers' union alliance pushed ahead with their attack on the program in the federal courts. That is where District Court Judge Solomon Oliver, appointed by President Clinton in 1994, decided last Wednesday-just as the new school year was to begin-that he would issue an injunction summarily shutting the program down.

Just 17 hours before the first day of school, the judge arrogantly told 4,000 students and their parents that the program that had been in place for three successful years had to close pending a determination whether it established a religion in the city of Cleveland.

Aside from being a travesty of constitutional law, this injunction is a finger in the eye of lowerincome children who are now being deprived of the only chance they have to get the education they deserve. Many parents will now have no option but to send their youngsters back into Cleveland's disastrous public schools, which will be totally unprepared for their arrival.

It is because of situations like this that the Institute for Justice has been fighting for school choice and to secure the power of families to control their children's education. It is because of rulings like this that the Institute for Justice is committed to taking this fight to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

Students in Cleveland may never attend an elementary school where they can daydream while gazing out the window at cows and countryside, but they should at least have the option to attend a school that gives them a chance of getting a decent education.

Mr. Rounds is a writer with the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.Cbased public interest law firm that represents students in the Cleveland Scholarship Program.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Sep 3, 1999
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