Word: clevelandism
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...Islamic school is part of Cleveland's pioneering school-voucher program. More than 3,700 of the city's students, nearly 5% of the public school enrollment, now use vouchers to escape the public school system. In a controversial move, Ohio chose to include religious schools in the program. Today the vast majority of vouchers are used at more than 50 religious schools--Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Islamic and Seventh-Day Adventist. (The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet decided if tax-funded vouchers for religious schools violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state.) The remaining vouchers...
Vouchers may be the next big thing in American education. Thousands of students in Cleveland and Milwaukee, Wis., are using tax dollars to attend private schools, and Florida is poised to adopt the nation's first statewide program. Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania may follow. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of introducing vouchers, though his schools' chancellor has threatened to resign if the mayor does. Privately funded voucher programs have sprung up in an additional 39 cities, and this week the largest such program in the U.S., founded by Wal-Mart scion John Walton and financier...
...years the voucher debate has been conducted in what-ifs and let's-assumes. But with Cleveland's program wrapping up its third year, hard results and conclusions are coming in--from parents, academics and standardized tests. There has been one clear upside to vouchers: a Harvard study found that two-thirds of Cleveland's voucher parents were "very satisfied" with the academic quality of their children's private schools, compared with only 30% of parents who stuck with public schools. What's not clear is whether they're right to be so happy...
...total battery"--voucher students did no better than their public school counterparts. In fact, the only students who really stood out--for their weak performance--were those in the city's two Hope academies. The test scores of these students, who are the poster children for vouchers in Cleveland, were not just lower, according to the study, but "significantly and substantially lower" than those of public school students and of voucher students in other private schools...
Still, public school backers seized on the hard numbers in the Indiana study as proof that vouchers can't deliver on their lofty claims. "These results are absolutely astounding," says Richard DeColibus, president of the Cleveland teachers' union. "But no one takes any notice of it because it goes against their preconceived notions that private schools teach better." The fact that the Indiana study didn't give second thoughts to voucher supporters is proof, he says, that their foremost concern is not children, but promoting a conservative education agenda. "Why would they want to expand a system that is demonstrably...