From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
One Small Step
Big challenges still lie ahead for school-choice proponents.
Conservative groups are heralding the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Cleveland's educational voucher plan as the greatest advance in civil rights since Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that desegregated public schools. In this view, vouchers will be the tool that makes a reality out of Brown's promise of educational equality.
The Cleveland decision does push the public education monopolists off the constitutional high ground once and for all. But before popping the champagne cork, conservatives above all should recognize that there's still a long way to go before educational choice becomes a widespread reality. The issues will be fought state by state and community by community.
That only five justices joined the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris reflects the deep political rift that runs through the voucher debate. Two years ago voters in California and Michigan overwhelmingly rejected initiatives that would have opened the door to voucher plans. Meanwhile entrenched public-school interests have stalled legislative proposals for vouchers in 20 other states.
And there's still an 800-pound gorilla blocking the schoolhouse door: suburban America, a heavily Republican constituency which wants no part of "educational opportunity" if it seems to threaten their own school systems. Because suburban politicians control most legislatures and statehouses, they will make sure that any voucher plan that emerges from political limbo will be limited to the mostly black, mostly poor urban areas.
That political reality may allow the left to turn the voucher movement into an engine of redistribution. Cleveland's vouchers are worth only $2,250, half of what the state spends per pupil and barely a quarter of the total public-school spending per student. Most urban public-school educators already claim they need more money. The advent of vouchers will likely only increase the calls for more spending. Yet high-priced vouchers may come with a stiff cost: a host of rules, regulations and "accountability" measures that suck the life out of private education.
The state's influential Mackinac Center for Public Policy recommended the tax-credit approach as less likely to invite state intrusion into private and parochial schools. At least six states, including Arizona and Illinois, provide tax credits for parents who pay tuition to private schools. But the idea isn't likely to help poor families, who already don't pay taxes--though most tax-credit plans let individuals and corporations lower their tax bill by donating money to scholarship funds for poor children.
In any case, 29 states, including Michigan, have so-called Blaine Amendments that flatly forbid any sort of taxpayer funding for private and parochial schools. These measures, named after a constitutional amendment that then-Rep. James Blaine of Maine proposed in 1875, were enacted in the 19th century in a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry. The Institute for Justice, a conservative public-interest law firm that represented poor parents in the Cleveland case, says it will now challenge those amendments as a violation of the First Amendment principle that the government must be neutral toward religion." The Zelman decision for the first time allows school choice litigators to switch from defense to offense," says the institute's Clint Bolick.
A Supreme Court that has put great stock in allowing states to do their own thing may be reluctant to overturn important elements of state constitutions, however. And it won't be easy to persuade voters that their neighborhood schools need a stiff dose of competition. Polls consistently show that while parents are ready to believe that other school systems don't perform very well, they seldom think their own kids' school is subpar. The local public school is still a defining element of most communities.
But if school-choice advocates still have some very heavy lifting ahead of them, they also have reason to take heart. Just as Brown v. Board of Education helped change the moral climate in which the debate over segregation took place, the court's decision on vouchers is likely to put a new face on the debate over educational quality. And voters are educable. It took two or three tries in both California and Michigan before controversial limitations on taxes and spending were enacted. In short, the wind may not yet be at the back of the educational choice proponents, but it's no longer directly in their face.
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
