Word: voucher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Although most Americans support the idea of school choice, voucher programs from around the country are being pounded by lawsuits. The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union and one of the most powerful political forces in America, is opposing school reform with all its might. In several states the NEA has sued county school boards which have tried to implement these reforms. They argue that any public money that goes to parochial schools violates the First Amendment and that charter schools and vouchers will compel the best students to leave crumbling schools, leaving teachers with kids...
However, the most troubling aspect of the Cleveland voucher experiment has nothing to do with test scores and everything to do with the danger that vouchers could undermine the role that public schools have played in American life. Public schools have long held the promise of being America's great equalizer, mixing students of different races, classes and religions in a single student body. At their best, public schools have united diverse groups of students, many of them immigrants, by passing on the nation's shared civic heritage, from George Washington to George Washington Carver. Public schools have the ability...
...Cleveland's voucher program threatens to replace the single-heritage credo of public schools with a system that teaches one faith in one school and a competing faith in another. That's because the hard truth of the city's voucher program is that the choice it offers parents is mainly a choice of religious schools. The problem is that Cleveland's vouchers are capped at $2,250--not unusual for a voucher, but far too little money to allow real choice in the private school market. A poor parent who wanted to use a voucher at the Hathaway Brown...
...parents use vouchers in suburban public schools. Ohio's voucher law was written to allow vouchers to be used in the suburban schools, but only in those that agreed to take them. Bert Holt, director of Cleveland's voucher program, had high hopes when she made the rounds of suburban school districts to persuade them to sign up. But not one suburb agreed to accept students from the city's heavily poor and minority student population. Result: 80% of Cleveland's vouchers are being used in religious schools...
Which is what these scholarships, once they stop coming out of Forstmann's pocket, will ultimately do. For then they will be vouchers, which set off alarms because they involve tinkering with what Jefferson envisioned as the "gratis" common school, the one institution that could make good on the Constitution's promise of equality. According to a 1997 Gallup poll, most Americans are happy with public schools. Few parents in Greenwich, Conn., would take their child out of its fine public schools for a voucher of $1,600. But in inner-city Hartford, many parents would sensibly embrace them, which...