Payday for Vouchers?

School choice remains a popular idea, but public-education activists see a grave threat.

Quentin Quade and Mark Weston are both staunch school-choice advocates. But from very similar vantage points, they express remarkably different perspectives on where their cause is headed.

Quade, a national networker for school choice at Marquette University in Wisconsin, sees the voucher movement building populist momentum despite legal setbacks. In the end, it will triumph, he believes.

Yet Weston, an official at the Education Commission of the States, sees the school-choice movement, though an important influence on public education, as being outgunned and outfinanced by existing special-interest groups, particularly teachers’ unions, which have successfully contested school-choice initiatives.

Nationally, lawyers, legislators, educators, and judges are responding to parental demands for taxpayer financed, parent-controlled school-voucher programs. Voucher programs are a critical component in the larger public-education reform movement, driven by decades of weakening test scores, high education costs, and the triple threat to children from drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and inner-city violence.

WORRIED PARENTS: About a year ago, school vouchers were given up for dead by many educational analysts. It is now one of the areas of greatest ferment within the school-reform movement. State and federal elections last year swept into power many officeholders who are sympathetic to parents worried about their lack of influence over their children’s education.

Among Christians, school-voucher activity has been focused on passing legislation to permit religious organizations to use public funds for education in a way that would withstand a court challenge. They have yet to succeed.

The battle over choice is now entering a decisive phase that will involve as many courtrooms as classrooms and is likely to climax with a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court within a few years.

With its reputation for being a “laboratory of reform” still intact, Wisconsin, especially its largest city of Milwaukee, has evolved into a hotbed of advocacy for school choice.

Though stayed for now by the state supreme court, Wisconsin’s trailblazing program for low-income students in Milwaukee has boosted its legislative maximum sevenfold and for the first time has made religious schools eligible.

Cleveland is gearing up to begin a similar program next year. And the Washington, D.C., school district may be given the green light to experiment with vouchers as part of a sweeping reform package that Congress wrapped up in the summer.

“This has been a breakthrough year,” says Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.—based organization that represents choice programs in legal challenges. “The more that we can force the opposition to fight on multiple fronts, the more battles we will win.”

SEE YOU IN COURT: Nevertheless, at least for the time being in this power struggle, voucher opponents have the upper hand. In late August, after thousands of children already were in school under Wisconsin’s expanded choice program, the state’s supreme court suspended the new law because it included religious schools. The court refused to reconsider the issue until this month. Parents were dazed, and private donors scrambled to fill the void left by the sudden absence of counted-upon state tuition vouchers (see “Court Halts Milwaukee Program,” p. 78).

In addition, voucher opponents are considering lodging a court challenge against the Ohio choice program over the church-state issue. “It’s headed nowhere but straight for the courts,” says Sheila Simmons, director of the National Education Association’s (NEA) Center for the Preservation of Public Education, an arm established by America’s largest teachers’ union two years ago.

“Choice proponents shouldn’t declare victory yet,” says Rob Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has joined NEA affiliates, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other liberal organizations in legal challenges of school choice. “This will be a much longer and uglier battle than many of them think.”

PUBLIC EDUCATION THREAT: Although voucher programs have drawn the sharpest fire, there are other components to the concept of school choice.

Broadly defined, school choice encompasses many varieties of programs nationwide that allow parents to pick certain public-school programs for their children in their own or nearby school districts.

Charter schools and magnet schools are two established means of setting up educational alternatives. Also, there has been growth in the use of “released time” during the school day for children to receive religious instruction (see “Public Schools Get Religion—Legally,” CT, Nov. 14, 1994, p. 74).

Voucher programs have become lightning rods for criticism because of the threat they pose to existing government schools. Under a voucher system, much or all of the public financing that normally goes to public-school systems follows individual children to schools of their parents’ choice—public or private.

Parents and children are best served educationally by vouchers, the argument goes, and the competition eventually will force the nation’s public-school monopoly to improve or funds would dry up.

Though the Wisconsin program has been the only working model in recent years, support for vouchers has grown among parents and others dissatisfied with the performance of public schools.

Until now, choice opponents have managed to negate the appeal of vouchers by arguing that they actually will harm public education by diverting needed funds and by allowing private schools to discriminate against students with special needs, keeping those children—and their expensive problems—in public schools. Opponents also argue that vouchers are a ploy to subsidize schools for the well-to-do, while shortchanging the poor. When proponents have sought to include religious schools, choice foes have used church-state separation arguments to exclude them.

In recent years, ballot initiatives have been a popular means to force states to adopt school-choice legislation. Statewide initiatives in Oregon and Colorado went down in defeat early this decade. In bellwether California, on ballots in 1992 and again in 1993, opponents with the financial backing of teachers’ unions thwarted proposals to amend the state constitution to permit vouchers.

Meanwhile, charter-school efforts are making important headway. With charter schools, states suspend some regulations for individual institutions to give them more freedom to innovate. Around the nation, charter schools are already in operation and have broad support. Charter schools may be run publicly or privately and often focus on a “back to basics” curriculum with a steady diet of student discipline.

REVERSAL OF FORTUNE: By the summer of 1994, the voucher movement seemed to have run out of steam. But the November elections offered a new sense of possibility. In many states, Republicans ended Democratic statehouse control that had long been a bulwark for choice opponents. Within months, choice proposals were being debated in capitols across the country.

This past spring, the Christian Coalition, calling the government-school system “a monopolistic system of mediocrity,” included school choice in its Contract with the American Family. That decision in part rallied the spirits of school-choice advocates.

In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, with the GOP having consolidated control over both legislative houses, engineered passage of a bill greatly expanding the choice program for this fall and, for the first time, making religious schools eligible.

In Ohio, Gov. George Voinovich pushed through a $5.25 million pilot voucher program in Cleveland that will begin in September 1996.

The Ohio program will provide up to three-fourths of the $2,500 voucher amount for as many as 2,000 students, which parents will be able to redeem at public or private schools, including religious institutions. Private sources would supply the remainder of the voucher funds, but low-income families will be able to receive all but $250 of the total voucher amount from the state.

Perhaps the most encouraging development for choice advocates is the potential of a high-stakes voucher debate in Congress. Last spring, Sen. Dan Coats (R.-Ind.) introduced a bill that would create 10 to 20 voucher test projects for low-income children.

During the summer, vouchers emerged as one measure proposed to jump-start the troubled education system of the District of Columbia. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) began talking about school choice as an important way to empower minorities. Washington Mayor Marion Barry, with Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting representative in Congress, appeared ready to go along with Republican demands that choice be part of any reform of District schools. And the reform package that finally made it into the congressional hopper in September includes a partially federally funded voucher for 2,000 low-income students, although the school district wouldn’t lose any tax funds for kids from that group who chose a private school.

“It’s a good move to help low-income kids, but it’s not the kind of choice program that will have a serious impact on improving D.C. schools,” says Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit group in D.C.

POWERFUL OPPOSITION: Voucher-program foes have stepped up their own activism, stalling voucher initiatives in Illinois, Texas, and Connecticut.

The power struggle between factions has been intense. In Pennsylvania, where newly elected Republican Gov. Tom Ridge pulled out all the stops to try to ensure passage of a voucher bill, wheeling and dealing for many lawmakers’ support, the measure failed by one vote.

In Arizona, the battle has been politically bruising. Early this year, both the re-elected governor, Fife Symington, and the newly elected state schools chief, Lisa Graham, favored a voucher program. Yet teachers’ unions managed to frustrate nine different voucher proposals, including one targeted only at the state’s poorest children.

“It’s tough for legislators when they oppose vouchers ever to change their position,” says Jeff Flake, executive director of the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based group. “They’re in league with the unions.”

Given such mixed results so far, the future of choice is difficult to forecast. However, advocates are optimistic for many reasons.

The legislative assault by choice backers continues. “You’ll see even more aggressive choice legislation next session,” says Weston, director of state services for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based bipartisan education-reform organization. “It takes awhile in each state for an issue to build critical mass.”

Jerry Hill, president of Landmark Legal Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, which is helping defend the Wisconsin choice plan, says, “The [teachers’] unions are in a panic because they see that parents are not only demanding [reform] but now are influencing the legislative process.”

Also, polls on school choice show consistent majority support for the basic concept by the general public. A 1993 Empower America poll revealed that 62 percent of Americans favored choice among public schools.

School-choice support is broad-based. Because voucher architects so far have aimed programs only at low-income students, they also are capturing the support of more and more blacks and other ethnic minorities. An increasing number of business executives, concerned about the declining quality of the American workforce, are actively backing vouchers.

“Even where we’ve had bad legislation, choice still gets more than 50 percent support,” Weston says. “Now it’s just a question of increasing the coalition by another 5 percent to 10 percent.”

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Now that more students than ever will be covered by choice programs, “they have to prove they can make a difference” academically and socially, Weston says. He is confident they will.

“It needs to be driven home on an emotional level as well as intellectual, so that people can see the results,” says Allen. “But given that the education establishment usually asks us to wait ten years to see results from fads that have no basis, at least they could give us a couple of years with choice.”

There is little clear research that school choice in itself creates a better environment for learning. John Witte, a University of Wisconsin researcher, has conducted regular studies showing that the Milwaukee choice program, in its five years in operation, has not elevated the performance of participants above that of their peers in public schools. At the National Conference of State Legislatures convention in Milwaukee in July, Harvard University researchers reported the results of a two-year study of nine public and private choice plans. They found that vouchers had not increased academic performance or pressured public schools to reform.

Yet, the Harvard study also found that choice programs have made parents and children feel better about their schools and in more control about the education of the children.

CHURCH AND STATE: In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Virginia violated the free-speech rights of Christian students by refusing to allot money to their newspaper, while at the same time giving student-paid funds to a wide range of other organizations (CT, Aug. 14, 1995, p. 62).

The Institute for Justice’s Bolick says this ruling, Rosenberger v. the University of Virginia, is “the latest in an unbroken line of cases bolstering the support for educational options that include religious schools.” He says, “This was the first case to suggest that direct funding of religious activities is permissible so long as they’re included among a broad range of funded activities.”

“When you look at the First Amendment decisions coming out of this Court, I believe they’ll uphold voucher plans,” Hill says. “Most constitutional scholars now believe that.”

Yet opponents cite their own reasons for believing that the choice movement is not positioned as well as advocates believe.

In addition to the legal entanglement faced by Wisconsin’s program, choice foes note that the Puerto Rico Supreme Court last year declared a new voucher program implemented there unconstitutional (CT, April 25, 1994, p. 42). They assert that Rosenberger indicates a similar fate awaits state-choice laws in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Boston, of Americans United, says the Rosenberger decision contains clear language showing a majority of justices are very wary of using public money for religious purposes. He says different constitutional issues are involved because Rosenberger funds came from student activity fees, not tax revenues.

“Choice advocates think getting one plan approved by a court will be the end of it, but that actually will be only the beginning,” Boston predicts. “Then we’ll try to force private schools to accept every regulation that public schools do now: no religious preference, race, or gender requirements or academic skimming. And we’ll require hiring of teachers regardless of their religious background. Private schools won’t accept that.”

Hill, the choice legal advocate, concedes that entanglement is an unresolved issue, but it would not threaten the “unique religious character” of the institutions involved.

CONSENSUS ALTERNATIVE? Analysts on both sides also believe that, if charter schools continue to gain favor, they could become the consensus alternative to vouchers.

“Charter schools are a positive development,” says Kevin Teasley, vice president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a Los Angeles—based conservative advocacy organization.

“But at the same time, they’re another way for the opposition to choice to stop the movement.”

Teachers’ unions are stressing reform more and more, and some analysts say that a truly new attitude also could take much of the steam out of the choice movement. “We’re moving to more dialogue and public engagement around these issues,” says the NEA’s Simmons. “Clearly we need to change the way we do things.”

But vouchers are one issue on which the educational establishment will not budge. As NEA president Keith Geiger said shortly after the defeat of California’s Proposition 174 in 1993, “We need to win everywhere, in every place, every time.”

“People simply haven’t wrapped their minds around the depth of the problem of social inertia,” says Quade. “That’s why I’ve always told people who want to sign up for choice that they have to be in it for the duration. We’ve just passed some small programs this year—after a 35-year try.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green directed the Real Choices research project and is currently director of communications for the National Women’s Coalition for Life. This article was adapted from her hook Real Choices: Offering Practical, Life-Affirming Alternatives to Abortion (Questar, ©1994).

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.