By:Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
President Bush's support of the Supreme Court's narrow decision approving the use of public funds to pay tuition at religious and other private schools brings into sharp relief the principal public claim of the proponents of vouchers.
That it's a"movement"to help poor African-American children trapped in bad public schools gain equal education opportunity.
The President characterized the Court's ruling as"just as historic"as the 1954 Supreme Court's Brown decision striking down the government-fostered school segregation that was a hallmark of the South before the 1960s.
That may well be true.
However, the President did not note several other things that perhaps link the two decisions. One is that, although the civil rights activists of that era said that their pursuit of school integration was also a quest for quality schooling, the Brown decision was fiercely resisted during the next two decades by whites in numerous communities in the South and the North.
As a result, today the large majority of black schoolchildren-95 percent of whom are in public schools-attend schools that are heavily predominantly minority. Many of those schools, it must be said, are the schools proponents of vouchers point to as reasons vouchers should be supported.
But, while it's certainly true that many black children (and Latino children, too) who attend public schools are being denied educational opportunity, whether school vouchers will help them significantly-or even moderately-is a matter worth great skepticism.
First, let no one doubt that we at the National Urban League have no patience with poorly-performing public schools. We've said that repeatedly and with as much force as we can muster. Poorly-performing schools are morally indefensible. And they're educationally indefensible, too.
We know that poor children of whatever background can learn to perform at the highest levels. We've known this for years; and the evidence proving that it can happen and does happen in public schools as well as in private ones keeps accumulating-and being ignored in the discussion about vouchers.
Last year, for example, we, along with numerous others, wrote about the great climb the Mount Vernon public schools made in scores on the New York State fourth-grade reading tests. The 10,000-pupil school district had once languished near the bottom of all the school districts in the state. But thanks to an inspiring school superintendent and dedicated teachers and parents-and students-the system as a
whole was now among the top third, and several of its schools were at the very top of the list.
Similarly, a recent massive study by the Education Trust, a Washington-based think tank, identified more than 4,600 public elementary schools across the country that enrolled mostly black or Latino youngsters, or enrolled mostly poor youngsters-or both-and scored among the top third of the schools of their state in reading and mathematics.
If we're concerned about providing educational opportunity to poor students, and their parents, shouldn't we devote at least as much attention to what these other public schools have done right as some have to declaring vouchers the answer?
In fact, vouchers cannot be the answer for but a relative handful of poor students for a host of reasons.
Some are financial: the dollars they give poor parents largely pay only for the cost of private religious schools, not private secular schools. So, it's disingenuous to say that the vouchers"movement"isn't directed primarily toward religious schools.
Other reasons stem from the fact that private schools, of course, aren't required to admit any student who applies-even if they have a voucher in their hand; and that many cities and some regions of the country don't have a well-developed private school network.
Finally, for all the pro-voucher talk about quality education, the research on whether vouchers lead to improved student performance is decidedly inconclusive. "If you're interested in parent satisfaction, then vouchers are a good thing,"Doug Harris, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, told the Washington Post. "But if you're looking at test scores, then the results are sketchy. "
Thus, beyond being a boost to individual families-and who can argue with that?-vouchers greatest value may be in ratcheting up the pressure on public school officials and public school communities to improve their students' scholastic performance.
Yes, as plenty of individual public educators and communities have shown, this is a matter of adults committing themselves to the task of educating the children around them-no excuses allowed. But it's also a matter of the society at large, and state and federal governments, seeing to it that public schools have the money and other resources they need to do the job we properly demand of them.
If vouchers are not to be, as columnist E.J. Dionne writes,"a form of cheap grace for those who want to pretend they care about poor kids even as they evade the cost of fixing the deep inequalities built into our educational system,"America needs to put all those pieces of the puzzle together on the scale that's needed.
Now, that would be something historic.
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