Supreme Court Ruling on Vouchers Praised, Decried by Educators

By Catholic News Service
(From the issue of 6/27/02)

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court's June 27 ruling that upheld Cleveland's school voucher program was hailed as a victory for low-income parents by Catholic educators and other church leaders but decried by public school educators for validating a system that does not address the problem of inferior public schools.

The Supreme Court upheld the Cleveland voucher program in a 5-4 ruling in the case of Zelman vs. Harris, saying the program is "entirely neutral with respect to religion." A majority of the students who receive the vouchers use them to attend Catholic schools, which led opponents of the program to charge that it constitutes state support of religion.

The majority of the court disagreed, however, siding with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who said the system is "a program of true private choice" and does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Arlington Bishop Paul S. Loverde applauded the decision because he believes a good education is beneficial for every American.

The bishop said the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that as those first responsible for the education of their children, "parents have the right to choose a school for them which corresponds to their own convictions. This right is fundamental."

"By allowing economically disadvantaged parents to use tax dollars to send their children to a school of their choice, parents are enabled to fulfill this important parental responsibility," Bishop Loverde said.

Dominican Sister Glenn Anne McPhee, secretary of education of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the decision "reinforces the basic right of all parents to choose the school they believe best serves the educational needs of their children."

Mark Chopko, general counsel for the USCCB, said one of the most important elements of the court's decision was that it "relied on evidence about the design of the program, rather than statistics about the choices actually made."

"This means that when legislators enact a program for valid reasons that gives parents constitutionally permissible choices, legislators can more confidently act without worrying that some court will second guess that judgment when people actually begin to make choices," he added.

Rehnquist was joined in the majority by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

In a separate concurrence, O'Connor detailed the amount of money spent by the state on the voucher program and compared that to other ways in which government money goes to religious institutions, such as through tax credits and exemptions, public health programs and grants for college educations, housing and community development.

Thomas wrote that the voucher system is an effective way of helping minority students get the education needed "to defend themselves from some of discrimination's effects."

Four members of the court strongly disagreed with the majority, however.

Justice John Paul Stevens called the majority decision "profoundly misguided."

He likened the ruling to taking a step toward religion-based strife such as that which led the first colonists to migrate to the New World from Europe or which has torn apart the Balkans, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

"Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy," Stevens wrote in his dissent.

Also dissenting were Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Breyer raised concerns that the voucher program would lead to government interference in how religious schools are run and that it might lead to dramatic social division.

The Ohio Legislature created the voucher program in 1995 after a federal judge declared that the schools -- considered some of the worst in the country -- were being mismanaged and put them under the authority of the state superintendent of public instruction.

The program provides for vouchers of up to $4,000 annually for children in low-income families to attend other public or private schools or pay for tutors.

The vast majority of participants use their vouchers to pay tuition at church-affiliated schools, nearly all of them Catholic. In the term just ended, 3,567 voucher students were enrolled in 30 Catholic schools, according to Robert Tayek, spokesman for the Cleveland Diocese. The program has about 4,000 participants in all.

The students at Catholic schools receive funds to pay 90 percent of their tuition, which averages about $1,750, Tayek told Catholic News Service. Parents pay the balance, typically about $28 a month. Parishes also pay part of the cost of educating the students in their schools, he said.

About 46 percent of the students in the 30 participating Catholic schools receive voucher funds, according to Tayek.

The Catholic conferences of New York, Maryland, Wisconsin and Michigan, the archdioceses of Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia and the dioceses of Pittsburgh and Arlington, Va., were quick to weigh in in support of the ruling.

John Huebscher, executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, said the ruling affirms that "parental choice is neither a poison for public education nor a panacea for every child with learning disabilities."

School vouchers are a strategy for parents to exercise their rights and to make society more family friendly, he said. Milwaukee also has a school voucher program.

"The fact that voucher programs are constitutional should in no way diminish our commitment to public schools," Huebscher said. "Our state has shown that generous support of public schools and an adequately funded voucher program are not mutually exclusive commitments."

The director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals said in a statement that by diverting funds to private schools, voucher programs "will negatively affect the majority of public school students who are left behind."

The president of the National Education Association, Bob Chase, said vouchers are no substitute for reforming schools.

"If policymakers want to act on the issues that parents care most about ... they will address teacher quality, class size, making sure all schools have high expectations for every child and providing the resources to help students succeed," he said in a statement.

Maryland Catholic Conference Director Richard Dowling said the court's ruling is hopeful news "for the parents of kids who are consigned by the government's education monopoly to failing schools." However, in his own state "where the public school teachers' union maintains a hammerlock on the minds and hearts and re-election strategies of most incumbent legislators" any movement toward such a system is primarily speculative.

Kevin Hasson, president of the Becket Fund, a public interest law firm focusing on religious expression, said the court "had a chance to do something heroic and they took it."

Hasson cautioned that the constitutions of a majority of states contain Blaine amendments that prohibit the use of tax money for use by any religious sect. Such amendments were added to state constitutions after an unsuccessful effort by Rep. James Blaine of Maine to add such wording to the U.S. Constitution in 1875.

"The next step is to persuade the courts that these remnants of 19th-century religious bigotry are also violations of the U.S. Constitution and should be nullified," Hasson said in a statement.

The case reached the Supreme Court after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2000 that the program was unconstitutional because the vouchers are primarily used at religious schools.

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