School Vouchers Stir Emotions Nationwide

Oct. 17, 2000 -- Four years ago, Dorothy Farrow was willing to work two jobs in order to send her son to a private school.

Her son Charles, she says, was floundering in a kindergarten classroom of 33 students in a public school in Cleveland.

“I told myself I would do what it took to give my son a better education,” says Farrow, 25, a nurse.That was, she says, until she realized she had another choice.

Farrow learned about the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, a pilot program that takes public school funds and gives them to parents to put toward private school tuition. Using the money, Farrow sent her son to Holy Redeemer, a Catholic school near their home.

More than 4,500 children from families near or at the poverty level participate in the Cleveland program, which is more commonly known as a “school voucher” program. Only two other publicly funded voucher programs currently exist in the United States, in Milwaukee and in Florida.

A Hot-Button Issue

The issue of school vouchers has become a hot political button and an emotional issue nationwide as the country begins to focus more on the problems of failing schools, particularly in the inner cities. Vice President Al Gore is against vouchers. His opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, supports voucher programs and would like to see a $1,500 voucher for every child in a failing school.

In a new ABCNEWS poll released today, Americans say they are split evenly on the general idea of vouchers, but strongly oppose them if they mean less money for public schools.

There are no clear studies yet showing whether vouchers actually improve the learning of kids who use them. All three of the voucher programs — in Cleveland, Milwaukee and in Florida — are being challenged in courts on the grounds that the programs do not adequately meet the requirements of the separation of church and state.

The issue is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court as early as next year.

Some say the issue is enough to make them change political parties — and it could sway some voters in the Nov. 7 election..

“In the black community, it was a given sometimes that we were going to vote Democratic,“ says Taunya Young, the parent coordinator for the Cleveland School Choice Committee, which supports the voucher program. “Not anymore. We are voting on the issues now. Parents are getting savvy about how candidates stand on the issues and they are prodding them on their views of school choice.”

For Farrow, a Democrat, the choice is clear: She says she is voting for Bush.

“[Gore] made it clear as day that he would not support voucher programs, ” she says. “He was automatically X’d off [as a choice].”

Voucher proposals will also make their way to the ballots in two states this November. In California, the voucher plan would give $4,000 to each child in the state. Polls say it’s behind. In Michigan, each child would get $3,300 in districts with high dropout rates. Polls show a close race on it there.

Public Schools Have ‘Failed Us’

To the Roman Catholic cardinal of Detroit, Adam Maida, vouchers are a matter of basic equality.

“The public school system has failed us,” Maida says. “This is the last civil rights question we need to address in our society — the right to education, the right to a good school.”

Maida has spent $1 million to promote Michigan’s voucher proposal. Half the state’s private schools are Catholic. Many schools — like the St. Christine and St. Gemma Elementary School in Detroit, with only six children in its kindergarten — need the students vouchers might bring.

And many parents with children already in these schools would love vouchers.

“Give me $3,000 and I can take a kid and give him a good life,” Maida says. “I mean, it’s a fair bet.”

But across town, the cardinal’s friend, Protestant minister Nicholas Hood of the Plymouth United Church of Christ, parts company with him on vouchers.

“With all due respect to the church, I think the church is trying to find a way to support its educational system,” Hood says.

Hood says vouchers encourage religious divisions and will disappoint many parents who still won’t be able to afford or get children into private schools.

“In theory they have this $3,000 voucher but the reality is if their kid can’t get accepted to the school, then the parent is still left out.”

He argues that many public schools are improving. Children at Gompers Elementary — a public school where 98 percent of the children live below the poverty line — now have uniforms and strong discipline once found only in private schools.

The school’s principal says vouchers would drain money away from her budget.

“It would be devastating,” says the principal, Marilee Bylsma. “We would have to cut. We would have to increase the number of children in a classroom.”

Debate Heats Up in Suburbs

In suburban schools, vouchers are as hotly debated as in the city.

“It’s my money that I am paying for the taxes, and I feel that I should have an opportunity to send them where I want them to go,” says Rachel Pizzurro, a mother who favors vouchers. “I don’t believe the tax money that I pay goes to educate my child, it goes for the good of the whole country.”

In many rural districts, vouchers would make little immediate difference to where kids actually go to school, because there are few private or religious schools anywhere near enough to make them a practical option.

But in rural Armada, Mich., even though the public school has many attractive new programs, some parents still want vouchers anyway, hoping they would encourage religious schools to crop up.

“We have strong churches in this area and I think people would like to have schools that teach moral values,” says Joseph Clark, the father of six.

Voters in Michigan — in city, suburb and country — seem evenly divided on vouchers. If they pass, Michigan will offer by far the largest voucher program in the United States.

For 9-year-old Charles Farrow, private school has made all the difference, his mother says. He no longer takes the drug Ritalin for behavior problems and he gets along well with the other students in his fourth-grade class, which has 15 children in all.

“Your tax dollars go a lot of places that you don’t approve of, but this is a good cause,” she says. “This is for children to better themselves. I should have that choice of schools and it should be because I have no funds.”