Public education: a monopoly no longer
A chance to choose the school you want

BY THOMAS TOCH AND WARREN COHEN

Buoyed by last week's Supreme Court decision and the election of a slate of sympathetic state lawmakers, backers of school vouchers are launching new legislative offensives in big states like Pennsylvania, Texas, and Florida.

The high court last week handed vouchers' advocates a critical victory when it let stand a Wisconsin law that provides low-income students there with state funds to attend private or parochial schools. The ruling has energized the school voucher movement, which had been caught in a political tug of war while both sides awaited the court's decision. The suddenly favorable climate also opens the door to initiatives that expand eligibility for existing voucher programs.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that the state's law passed in 1990 did not violate the constitutional separation of church and state. The reasons: Funds are funneled to students, not schools, and one religion is not favored over another. This fall, 6,200 Milwaukee students are attending 57 religious schools and 30 secular private schools with vouchers that are each worth $4,900.

Despite the legal win, there's no guarantee that vouchers the decade's most divisive education issue will be widely embraced. Apart from its political value, last week's decision not to hear the Milwaukee case establishes a legal precedent only in Wisconsin. The U.S. Supreme Court would have to rule on a case to set a national standard. That could come sooner rather than later: Voucher-related cases are pending before the top courts of four states Maine, Arizona, Ohio, and Vermont. In the meantime,"there's only a cautious green light to consider private school choice," says Clint Bolick, who defended Wisconsin's law as chief litigator for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Bolick, a former Reagan administration lawyer, has led the legal defense of vouchers in other states and has played a key role in developing the movement's political strategy. His principal legal adversary has been Robert H. Chanin, the general counsel of the National Education Association, the powerful teachers union that has joined such organizations as the People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union in attacking voucher laws. The Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling was "woefully reasoned," says Chanin. Much is at stake in the Chanin-Bolick battle, because the U.S. Supreme Court's blessing of private-school vouchers would greatly speed a trend toward a system with a wide range of educational providers competing for publicly funded students.

Pro and con. Advocates argue that vouchers free disadvantaged students from failing public schools and that the competition for students they create spurs public schools to improve. Opponents counter that vouchers siphon resources from the public school system.

Despite the intensity of the debate, there's no conclusive evidence on the academic impact of vouchers. Voucher advocates have embraced the view of Paul Peterson, a Harvard University political science professor, whose research indicates voucher students score higher than their public-school peers. But state-sponsored studies in Milwaukee and Cleveland found no significant differences in the test scores of the two groups. The then strongly pro-voucher Wisconsin Legislature ended the state-funded collection of data on the Milwaukee program in 1995 when early findings cast the plan in a negative light.

The idea of educational vouchers started several decades ago with the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who touted it as a free-market way to improve the educational system. More recently, it has evolved into a policy solution to the plight of inner-city kids. The Wisconsin law limits vouchers to students at or below 175 percent of the poverty line. But market-oriented conservatives and many parochial-school educators want to abandon the means-testing of Milwaukee's vouchers. "Every child should go to the public, private, parochial, or home school of their choice, with public funding following the child," says Scott Jensen, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly. Counters Wisconsin Rep. Annette "Polly" Williams, a sponsor of the Milwaukee plan: "It would be disastrous. They already take money from the needy to give to the greedy." The coming voucher campaigns aren't going to be easy.