The U.S. Supreme Court came down on the side of America's children in its landmark ruling Thursday that upholds Ohio's voucher experiment in Cleveland.

The 5-4 decision is important not only because it gives about 4,000 elementary school students an alternative to the Cleveland Public Schools. It is also a huge victory for the wider school choice movement.

Critics of the Ohio voucher program contended that it violated the constitutional mandate to separate church and state. They based their attack on the fact that nearly all the Cleveland voucher students were attending Catholic or other religious schools.

The court's majority, however, focused on what we see as the essential point: students and their parents made a free choice about where their students went. They were under no coercion from the state to choose a religious school, nor were they pressured (except by the appalling conditions) to leave the public schools.

The Ohio voucher plan is, as Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist concluded in the majority opinion, "a program of true private choice.''

Because this case has become such a national symbol, Thursday's decision is generating heated verbiage from all sides. It's important, however, to understand Ohio's voucher program for what it is - and isn't.

At least in its current form, it is not simply a subsidy for Catholic or other religious schools. It is, rather, a quite limited experiment - one that, if anything, has been costly to many of the participating schools.

The law authorizing it was passed in 1995 with strong backing from then-Gov. George Voinovich, a former Cleveland mayor. It was designed as an option for low-income families who had the desire but not the means to find an alternative to that city's miserable public schools. The desire was certainly there: in 1996, when the program began, more than 7,000 students (or about 10 percent of Cleveland's total school enrollment) applied for the 2,000 available vouchers.

The vouchers are needs-based. The maximum award this year is $2,250; the average is $1,618. Vouchers are given to the parents, to be used at any participating school. Those schools must accept the voucher as the family's entire payment (though they are free to use their own resources or seek independent funding to cover the remaining cost).

The fact is, you cannot educate a child for $2,250 a year. That's less than half the average per-pupil expenditure in public schools, and pretty much explains why only a handful of secular schools and not a single adjoining suburban district agreed to accept Cleveland voucher students.

With the constitutional basis now in place for voucher programs that include religious schools, lawmakers will have a freer hand in designing and refining such programs.

Still, as welcome as Thursday's ruling was, it seems unlikely to trigger an avalanche of voucher programs, either in Ohio or across the nation. These "choice'' programs appear to have the most utility in low-performing districts with high concentrations of poverty, and even then are only a partial response to the educational needs of children.

As ever, the focus must be on improving the public schools that will continue to serve the majority of the nation's children.  

Publication Date: 06-28-2002