On February 20, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the constitutionality of Cleveland Ohio's school voucher program.  The decision, which will likely be made in late June, has deeper implications that will impact not only the legality of funneling public money to private religious schools, but also giving state and federal tax money to "faith based" social services of all sorts.

      Proponents for private school vouchers tend towards three sources of motivation: those who wish to introduce religion into every facet of public and private life; those who oppose government control of schools and favor privatization; and those who believe the public school system is in crisis, unable to be repaired, and seek an alternative.  Proponents argue that the Cleveland voucher program "is not about religion, but about education."  Obscuring religious issues, they have argued that vouchers will benefit students by increasing educational opportunities for poor families; increase racial integration; create smaller class sizes; increase competition between school systems to improve education generally; and teach better social and moral values to students.

      To evaluate these arguments, it is necessary to look at specifics in this case, but because of the relatively short duration of the program — six years — and because of the limited amount of research and access to information in private schools, talking about specifics is not easy.  Further, arguments about social good or harm are only marginally related to the Supreme Courts' real concern of  whether the program "establishes religion."

      From the beginning, the Cleveland program has been touted as a way to improve the educational lot of poor families.  This is a crucial principle for voucher proponents — stated explicitly and repeatedly, and implied in more subtle ways such as by showing only black, usually single-parent, families in their literature and web sites.  Indeed, written into the state law that created the Cleveland program is the requirement that families receiving the maximum amount available, up to $2,250 per child, earn no more than 200% of the federal poverty level (i.e., $35,300 for a family of four).  Families earning more, and there is no cap on the income of families who may apply, may receive up to $1,875 per child attending a private school.  Overall, this policy has worked to target aid to poorer families from whom came most of the 4,266 students in this year's voucher program.

      The amount of money for tuition per student is relatively small.  Because of this, the better private schools and the Cleveland suburban public schools have chosen not to accept voucher students.   Of the 51 schools that do participate, the vast majority are religious schools (85%), most of which are Catholic (60%), and these schools have additional sources of funding.  Further, 99.4% of students who currently receive vouchers in Cleveland go to private religious schools.  So it is clear that public tax dollars, mostly from property taxes and state income tax, are going to fund religious schools.  Most of these funds have come from Cleveland's portion of the state's Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid program -- money originally designated for public schools.

      What about racial and ethnic integration?  Introducing voucher students into the private schools has increased their diversity such that they more closely resemble the demographics of the greater Cleveland area.  Around 70% of voucher participants are from racial or ethnic minority groups.  However, this percentage is much below that found in inter- city Cleveland where the voucher program functions.  Metcalf reported that Cleveland's voucher students were disproportionately white (30%), relative to non-applicants (17%), and this increased over the course of the two year study.  African Americans constitute 71% of students in Cleveland public schools, but only account for 53% of voucher students.  While the voucher schools are more integrated than the inner- city schools, they exclude people with learning disabilities, special language needs, low academic achievement, and those who might not meet a religious criterion -  minorities who have no chance to participate in voucher schools.  The voucher system does function to expose many children to required religious rituals and teachings.  Unlike the Milwaukee program, Ohio laws do not require Cleveland's voucher schools to allow students to opt out of attending religious services and classes.

      All sides in the voucher case agree that Justice O'Connor will be the key deciding vote on the Supreme Court.  Proponents, who targeted their arguments specifically toward Justice O'Connor, were heartened to hear her repeatedly agreeing that the benefit to religion is much less pronounced when the voucher program is considered together with traditional government funding for public and charter schools as well as for tutoring in the public schools.  "Do we not have to look at all the choices?" she asked.  O'Connor seemed to accept the principle that there were a number of options available, even though virtually all voucher children in Cleveland attended religious schools.

      Prior to the Cleveland case, two previous Supreme Court rulings make the constitutionality of vouchers unclear.  In the 1983 case of Mueller v. Allen, the court approved Minnesota's  state tax deduction for educational expenses incurred by parents of students at both public and private schools. The court ruled that the deduction was constitutional even though most of the benefits went to parents who were paying for students to attend religious schools.  Parents here were being indirectly compensated for their choosing private schools and this was not seen as the government sponsoring religion.

      In the 1973 case of Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, the court struck down a law that provided voucher reimbursements to parents for tuition at religious schools in New York.  Justice John Paul Stevens stated that the current case is the same, but proponents argued that New York did not include provisions for vouchers to be used for tutoring or for use in suburban public schools.  It didn't seem important to them that the voucher money really wasn't being applied in this way or that the suburban public schools had refused to participate, only that these possible choices did exist.

      Voucher advocates convincingly argued that the large number of religious schools result from the low amounts of money available and the short duration of the program.  Indeed, in Milwaukee, where a voucher program has existed for 12 years and much more money is available, the number of non-religious private schools has been increasing since the 1998 inclusion of religious schools.  Still, unlike public schools, voucher schools are exempt from many state and federal laws, can discriminate, are not held to the same levels of accountability, do not need to abide by open meetings and records laws, do not need to utilize state achievement tests, nor even hire certified teachers.  It is certainly clear that expanding the number of  such schools will undermine quality public education.

      Public schools are not just providers of technical skills; they serve a vital public function as being one of the few sites of development of a shared identity.  As voucher schools proliferate, segregation will be advanced and already financially strapped  public schools will be further harmed.  The vital function of public schools as the unifying foundation of equal opportunity that is open to public scrutiny and adaptable to the changing times should be retained for the greater good.  Intercity public schools are certainly struggling to provide opportunity for students, however funneling money into religious schools will hardly solve these problems.  There is no doubt that when the voucher program in Cleveland was started many of the inner city schools were literally falling apart, but so were many of the private religious schools that now receive vouchers.  But Cleveland's vouchers do not provide access to the best, integrated high schools in the U.S., like Shaker Heights High, just outside downtown Cleveland.  Something better has to be done.
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      The newly formed religious schools who get vouchers are worse than the existing parochial schools.  For instance, the Golden State Christian Academy was formed as a school whose educational program replaced teachers with showing videos and using workbooks produced by the Pensacola Christian Academy.  The school had no fire safety  or health certificate, lacked immunization records for all of its students and failed to post emergency procedures.  The school's voucher privileges were revoked for gross non- compliance after two years.

      And in the worse case, an Ohio state audit found that the Islamic Academy School of Arts and Sciences, was allowed to operate for two years in a 110- year old building -- with no fire alarm or sprinkler system, with lead-based paint levels eight times the accepted level.  Eight of the 12 teachers at this academy lacked state teaching licenses and one had been convicted of murder in a 1964 shooting.  The school was closed at the end of the 1998- 1999 school year because of misappropriation of voucher money.  However, by early 2000, a group of anonymous voucher supporters repaid nearly $70,000 of misappropriated tax dollars and an additional $11,000 in unpaid utility bills to the Ohio Department of Education.