Spot the Religious Bigot This NYT editorial pretty much re-bleats the anti-voucher party-line, but a few egregious lines compel comment.

In theory, Cleveland's voucher program allows children to use state stipends to go to any school they want. In practice, the choice it offers them is between a failing public school system and the city's parochial schools. This is not a choice that the Constitution intended public tax money to underwrite.

I really don't know where to begin or end with this, but I'm curious to know what kind of education the author thinks "the Constitution intended" public tax money to underwrite. He or she later makes the argument that public schools have a claim on the resources, good students, and involved parents that the voucher system will siphon away, so obviously it's not the limitation in choice of types of non-public schools that's the real issue here. Since the public schools in question were failing long before vouchers could provide this escape siphon, one concludes that this editorializer believes that "the Constitution intends" that public tax money should underwrite failing public schools.

The majority argues that the Cleveland program does not, as a technical matter, violate the First Amendment because it is parents, not the government, who are choosing where the money goes. But given the reality of education in Cleveland, parents do not have the wealth of options that would make their selection of religious schools meaningful.

Does that last sentence mean anything at all? I bloody well bet that the parents choosing those oh-so-offensive parochial schools find their choice "meaningful".

This ruling does as much damage to education as it does to the First Amendment. A common argument for vouchers is that they improve public schools by forcing them to compete for students. What is holding the public schools back, however, is not lack of competitive drive but the resources to succeed. Voucher programs like Cleveland's siphon off public dollars, leaving struggling urban systems with less money for skilled teachers, textbooks and computers. They also skim off some of the best-performing students, and the most informed and involved parents, from public schools that badly need their expertise and energy.

You knew you weren't going to get out without having to listen to this particular argument, which I already commented on above. Put aside for the moment the highly questionable "it's all about money" line. I've heard many variations of the above, and the really ugly thing about them all is the insistence that ambitious low-income parents must be made to sacrifice their children's chance at an education and a future to somebody else's troubled or neglected children, or somebody else's ideology. I'm sure you've come across this variant - that it is terribly unfair that only the children of the "uninvolved" parents will be left in the failing schools. In other words, we know the schools are bad, even the previous presence of concerned parents didn't change that, and since, with this new system, some kids are still going to be flushed down the toilet, we will fight it tooth and nail and demand that involved parents give us theirs to flush into the sewer, too.

This next bit, from the last paragraph of the article, is so bigoted, and its bigoted argument so utterly unsubstantiated, that it's laughable:

Yesterday's decision also undermines one of the public school system's most important functions: teaching democracy and pluralism. In public schools, Americans of many backgrounds learn together. In the religious schools that Cleveland taxpayers are being forced to sponsor, Catholics are free to teach that their way is best, and Jews, Muslims and those of other faiths can teach their co-religionists that they have truth on their side.

There you have it, folks. First, note how "taxpayers" and "parents" or "religious believers" are apparently assumed to be two mutually exclusive classes of citizens. (And no conservative Christian, Jewish, or Muslim taxpayer, of course, is compelled to subsidize, in public schools, the ideology of the education establishment.)

Then observe how it is stated outright that the millions of American children (myself included) who were educated at private or parochial religious schools were and are never taught the value of pluralism and democracy. I guess the author believes that home-schooled children are also raised to be enemies of the republic, though I doubt he or she would bring this charge against the children of the wealthy, whose parents send them to highly non-diverse schools, both public and private. (I suspect that there was greater socioeconomic diversity in the parochial school I attended than can be found in most public schools.)

I assume that these nefarious Jewish, Christian, and Muslim educators believe their religion is true, else they wouldn't be what they are. But where the hell does this writer get his or her ideas about parochial schools? Apparently all the Jews, Methodists, Episcopalians, and unbelievers who sent their children to the parochial and Catholic private schools I attended were unaware that the evil nuns were busily shoving Roman Catholicism down the throats of non-Catholic students - no doubt in the time the saved avoiding the subject of democracy and tolerance in the history classes.

In the abstract I am highly sympathetic to an anti-voucher position. I think it's a crying shame that this country does not or cannot provide a good education at everyone's neighborhood public school, with competitive, first-rate specialized high schools for superior students. But I can't help but believe that the most vociferous voucher opponents are the same people who have been working steadily to dumb down and trivialize the public school curriculum, and to weaken the institutional authority and discipline that are necessary for student achievement.

Posted by Moira Breen at July 01, 2002 01:42 PM