Supreme Court backs school vouchers
Another scam aimed at the poor
By Martha Grevatt
Cleveland
A Supreme Court ruling in favor of school vouchers is going
to hurt the very people it claims to be helping. It will take
money away from the public education of poor schoolchildren,
especially children of color.
The June 27th decision involved a suit by the Cleveland
Teachers Union, but it has wide ramifications throughout the
country.
Several thousand Cleveland students have received vouchers
worth up to $2,250 towards tuition in private and parochial
schools.
The public schools have lost millions of dollars under this
program. Cleveland is already one of the poorest school
districts in Ohio, and has suffered financially from property
tax abatements to wealthy developers.
The Cleveland Teachers Union accuses the court of engaging
in union-busting by funding schools where teachers are usually
not unionized.
The union's lawyers had charged that the voucher program
violates the separation of church and state. Over 95 percent of
the students receiving vouchers from public funds are attending
religious schools. One-third of them were already attending
those schools before the voucher program, and now take
advantage of government subsidies.
Right-wing supporters of vouchers around the country have
been waiting for the outcome of the Cleveland case. Now they
have been given the green light to subsidize religious
instruction at the expense of poor students who don't get
vouchers. In Cleveland itself, voucher proponents want to
increase the number of voucher students, increase the amount of
subsidy per student, and expand the program to include high
school students.
This decision is being called the most significant ruling on
education since Brown vs. Board of Education--the 1954 Supreme
Court decision that struck down segregated schools. This
analogy deliberately gives the impression that the ruling is
favorable to African American students. Voucher supporters say
it allows Black parents to make the same school choices as
middle-class parents in the suburbs.
In reality, it has made the public schools even more
segregated by allowing more white children in Cleveland to
leave them. Those students who don't get selected by the
private schools--and they are the vast majority--suffer from
the resulting funding cuts.
Some leaders and elected officials in the Black community
support vouchers, but many do not. When the case first went to
the Supreme Court, a huge rally against vouchers was held in a
church in the Black community where leading clergy from
Cleveland and around the country spoke. The NAACP is opposed to
school vouchers. After the ruling, the Cleveland Plain Dealer's
leading Black columnist condemned the decision.
The high court's ruling argued that vouchers don't violate
separation of church and state because parents have the option
of sending their children to secular private schools. But most
parents cannot afford the tuition at those schools, even with
the vouchers, and many cannot transport their children to the
outer-ring suburbs where the schools are located.
Studies show that voucher students do no better academically
than students in the struggling public schools. The voucher
schools can reject any pupil as unqualified. There is no proof
that this "faith-based" theft of public education benefits
anyone but the Christian right wing by subsidizing its pro-Bush
propaganda.
Like tax "reform" and welfare "reform," this attack on
public education adds up to yet another theft from the poorest
workers carried out by this pro-big business government.
Reprinted from the July 11, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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