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Posted on 11/29/2001 4:43:31 AM PST by LarryLied

THE U.S. SUPREME Court has agreed to rule on what will undoubtedly be the most closely watched and most controversial subject of next year -- school vouchers.

The Ohio legislature created the Cleveland Scholarship and Tuition Program in 1995 to let low-income families in the state's lowest-performing school district choose a public or private school of their choice. The program has been under legal assault from the beginning, and the case is now before the Supreme Court.

The futures of thousands of Cleveland school children, and the meaning of the phrase "separation of church and state," will probably be clarified. Some foes of parental choice in education are motivated by an almost ideological hostility to religion. Many of these groups profess to promote tolerance, but fail to notice the extreme intolerance of their own attitudes.

There is a crucial difference between not wanting your own children to attend private religious schools on the one hand, and something else altogether to argue that you don't want anyone else's children to attend a religious school.

The First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Anti-choice activists seem determined to misinterpret the meaning of the first part of the amendment while ignoring the second clause completely.

The Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment in reference to the British government's establishment of the Church of England as an official state religion. Choice supporters have argued successfully that giving parents the ability to choose between public and private schools of all sorts in no way whatsoever represents the establishment of a particular religion, because parents are free to choose nonreligious schools, or religious schools of any type.

The Cleveland program no more establishes a state religion than the G.I. Bill does when it lets servicemen choose between state universities and private religious universities such as Notre Dame, or when low-income parents use state vouchers to choose church-based day-care centers.

If the government did actually try to impose a state religion, many school-choice supporters (this author included) would be among the first to join the rebels in the hills.

The Cleveland program, however, represents absolutely nothing of the sort. Some foes of school choice feel economically threatened by the concept of choice -- first and foremost, teacher-union officials. Private-school teachers are less likely overall to join unions, and teacher-union bosses representing Cleveland understandably want to avoid having parents hold schools accountable for lack of performance.

A recently released study of graduation rates found that only 28 percent of Cleveland's Class of 1998 graduated. Cleveland children deserve much better, and multiple academic evaluations of the Cleveland program show that the children in the Cleveland program are making academic gains. Continuing to blindly send money into school systems such as Cleveland's, with sky-high dropout and illiteracy rates, will simply perpetuate the cycle of poverty all too common in our urban centers.

Studies have shown that children participating in the Cleveland voucher program are much more likely to attend racially integrated schools than public school children. This may seem surprising, but people who can afford to move into the suburbs around Cleveland are long gone from what is now a highly racially segregated district.

Sixty percent of the public school students in the Cleveland metropolitan area attend public schools that are either 90 percent white, or 90 percent minority.

Private schools in the Cleveland area are much better integrated than the public schools because they ignore racially segregated housing patterns while serving children from both the inner-city and the suburbs.

Seventy-five percent of the children participating in the program are minorities, with average family incomes of $16,000. If the opponents of choice in Cleveland win in the U.S. Supreme Court, these children would be forced to leave relatively integrated private schools to return to a highly segregated and highly ineffective school district.

Many years after 1954's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Cleveland's children deserve much more than a court-mandated "resegregation order" forcing them into dysfunctional and racially isolated schools.

All American children deserve an equal opportunity at a quality education, and neither narrow interests nor ideologies should stand in the way of their futures.

Matthew Ladner is policy director of Children First America. He can be reached at Mladner@childrenfirstamerica.org.

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