No doubt Federal Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. thought he was killing Cleveland’s four-year-old voucher program when he ordered it halted one day before school started in the city. But he clearly underestimated the value Cleveland families place on the tickets to a private or parochial school education their state has provided for their children these past four years. Indeed, the day after his halt order, the local paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, undertook to determine how many of the city’s 4,000-odd students had given up hope and enrolled at public schools.

It found two.

At press conferences, interviews and impromptu meetings throughout Cleveland, the affected families - the majority of whom are blacks living at or below the poverty line - made it clear what they thought of the judge’s assertion that the voucher program deprived families of the right to "an educational choice." Indeed, with the pilot program now in legal jeopardy, most of the talk centered on finding an alternative way to subsidize tuition costs. "Finally, I have a chance to give my children hope of succeeding in the school system and they try to take it away," a furious Roberta Kitchen, guardian of her goddaughter’s five children, told the Associated Press.

But parents were only a part of the Cleveland uprising. Many of the private and parochial schools that had been serving these students vowed to continue doing so, even though the funding wasn’t certain. "Business as usual," Carol Sperry, principal of Westside Baptist Christian School, which has 46 voucher students, told the Plain Dealer. On Wednesday the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, which serves half the voucher population, told students they were welcome to continue at the parochial schools. As columnist Kevin O’Brien put it, "By waiting until the last possible second to yank 4,000 voucher-supported kids out of private school and in essence order them deported back to the educational Third World, Oliver betrayed the desperation of school-choice opponents."

Philanthropists, too, are stepping in to help. Ted Forstmann and John Walton, co-chairman of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which funds education for 40,000 poor children nationally, said that if asked they would "partner with local communities to make surethat every one of the 4,000 children is able to go to the school of their choice." Voucher opponents who are the plaintiffs in the Cleveland case are now arguing against an emergency stay, of Judge Oliver’s ruling. Cynically, they cite all those who have stepped into the breach they have created as evidence that they’ve done no real harm.

Plainly the nation has turned a corner here, with the rebellion by Cleveland parents and schoolchildren reflecting the increasing national agreement that vouchers and school choice are necessary to future education. A Gallup Poll released Thursday in the Los Angeles Times showed that 51% of parents surveyed favored the idea.of state money for parents to "send their school age children to any public, private or church-related school they choose," vs. 47% who opposed it. In 1994, the paper reported, those surveyed opposed the idea 54% to 45%.

Indeed, what is finally compelling about the images we now see in Cleveland is the sense that we have been here before: Black children and their families walking to a new school in the teeth of opposition from narrow-minded authorities. The enemy may not be Jim Crow, but the choice revolution today is picking up some of the momentum that propelled the fight against officially mandated school segregation. This time what the chil- dren want is a real education, and may they overcome.