(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
by Rusty Pugh and Jody Brown
An education expert says the U.S. Supreme Court's decision last week to allow school vouchers in Cleveland will open the floodgates for school choice.
The Supreme Court has endorsed a program in Cleveland, Ohio, that gives parents money to help educate their kids. The Cleveland program provides up to $2,250 toward tuition. Parents may use the money to leave the public schools, even if they choose a religious school instead. The high court's 5-4 vote in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris reverses a decision by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the voucher program violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Andrew LeFevre is education task force director for the American Legislative Exchange Council. He says the ruling is bad news for the education establishment.
“What that's going to do to the educational establishment is take one of their great arguments away from them on why school choice should be not be explored more fully in this country,” LeFevre says. “And it's really going to open the floodgates. I think what we'll see is many states exploring a lot of different options to basically give parents greater power over their children's educational future — and this is something that the educational establishment is firmly against in this country.”
LeFevre says voucher programs provide students a way out of failing schools. More than 95% of the vouchers in the Cleveland program are used to subsidize Catholic or other religious schooling.
Jan LaRue is chief counsel for Concerned Women for America. She says opponents of parental choice hoped the Supreme Court would strike down the Cleveland program for that exact reason. “The teachers' unions and public education lobbies have a vested interest in perpetuating a public school monopoly that has generally failed at education children,” Larue says.
She adds that contrary to “political spin,” school voucher programs actually help public schools. “It leaves them with the same amount of money, but with fewer students to educate, and motivates them to do a better job,” she explains.
Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission calls the ruling on the Cleveland program the most significant Supreme Court decision affecting public education in almost 50 years. “It will empower parents, and it will force public schools to compete, because they will no longer have a captive audience of the nation's poor and working poor,” he says.
He believes a school voucher program like that in Cleveland offers the best educational option for children. “You seldom go wrong when you trust and empower parents to do what is best for their children,” Land says.
