CLEVELAND'S SCHOOL-VOUCHER PROGRAM WORTH MAINTAINING
By David Owsiany
Columbus Dispatch On-Line, January 28, 2002 

Since 1996, the Cleveland school-voucher program has given children from low-income families the opportunity to opt out of the city's failing public schools and attend private schools. Teacher unions and the education establishment have challenged the program in state and federal courts, arguing that it violates the First Amendment because many voucher students attend religious schools. Next month, lawyers from the Ohio attorney general's office and the U. S. Justice Department will defend the program before the U. S. Supreme Court. Under the voucher program, students may receive scholarships of up to 90 percent of tuition to attend the private school of their parents' choice. The scholarships are capped at $2,250 or the amount of tuition, whichever is less, and participating private schools may not charge more than $2,500 for tuition.

The program also allows suburban public schools to accept vouchers. These schools would receive the scholarship amount plus the normal amount of per-pupil state aid, for a total of about $6,500 annually per voucher student accepted. In the 2000-2001 school year, 4,195 students received vouchers. While no suburban public schools participate, 46 religious and 10 nonsectarian private schools accept scholarship students. Without the assistance these vouchers provide, almost all of the students in the program would attend Cleveland Public Schools, which are among the worst in the state. In 2000-2001, the schools met only four of 27 minimum-performance standards set by the Ohio Department of Education and the district was deemed in "academic emergency. '' Several studies and surveys have demonstrated the benefits of the voucher program:

A 1999 Harvard University survey found that voucher program parents were far more satisfied with their children's education than were parents whose children remained in the Cleveland Public Schools.

A 1999 Buckeye Institute study found that children in the voucher program attended schools that were much more racially integrated than the Cleveland schools.

A 2001 evaluation conducted for the Ohio Department of Education by the Indiana Center for Evaluation found that students enrolled in the voucher program perform "slightly, but statistically significantly, higher" than public school students.

After the Ohio Supreme Court rejected the unions' First Amendment claim in 1999, the opponents of vouchers then went to federal court, where the program was found unconstitutional by a U. S. District Court judge in Cleveland and, on appeal, by the U. S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. The effect of these court orders -- throwing voucher students out of the participating schools -- has been stayed until the U. S. Supreme Court rules on the program.

Opponents of school choice have argued that because students can use the vouchers at religious schools, the Cleveland program violates the First Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion. This argument fails to appreciate that the Cleveland voucher program, as set up by the General Assembly, does not establish or endorse religious schools.

The U. S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld education programs where government aid ultimately reaches religious institutions if the aid (1) is disbursed according to neutral criteria without regard to religion and (2) reaches religious institutions as a result of a genuine, independent private decision. The Cleveland voucher program clearly meets these two requirements.

First, scholarships are available to all Cleveland schoolchildren without regard to religion. The only priority given is to students from low-income families. The program does not disburse aid directly to private schools, and both suburban public and private schools -- whether religious or nonreligious -- are eligible to participate. Second, voucher aid reaches a religious school only after parents have made independent choices where to send their children to school. The check is made payable to the parents of the voucher student and is sent to the school the parents have selected. Any link between the state and the schools is determined entirely by the individual choices of the parents.

The Cleveland program allows families who could not otherwise afford to exercise choice (moving to another district, enrolling in private schools, undertaking home schooling) to decide what constitutes an appropriate education for their children. This was a legitimate public-policy goal for the legislature. The fact that no public schools have chosen to participate or that many parents and students choose religious schools in no way delegitimizes the goal of providing better alternatives for children from low-income families.

As 6th Circuit Judge James Ryan wrote in dissent, to invalidate the Cleveland voucher program would be to sentence "4,000 poverty level, mostly minority, children in Cleveland to return to indisputably failed Cleveland public schools'' from which they escaped as long as five years ago. Ryan correctly concluded that to do so would be "an exercise in raw judicial power having no basis in the First Amendment. ''

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David J. Owsiany is president of the Ohio-based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

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