On July 23, the House Education and the Workforce Committee held a hearing on expanding educational options for low-income parents through school choice. The committee held a similar hearing on April 16 (see The Source, 4/19/02).
Recently, on June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that a Cleveland, Ohio voucher program did not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The Cleveland program provides a voucher system to enable parents to send K-12 students to private schools. A majority of the schools participating in the program have religious affiliations.
Opening the hearing, Committee Chair John Boehner (R-OH) called school choice the “critical next step in education reform, especially in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the constitutionality of the Cleveland school choice program.” He continued, “We can’t turn our backs on underachieving schools, and we won’t. But we can’t turn our backs on children trapped in endlessly underachieving schools either,” he said. “When schools do not teach and do not change, even after repeated efforts to turn them around, there must be a ‘safety valve’ for the students. That’s what today’s hearing is about,” he added.
Ranking Member George Miller (D-CA) disagreed. “The use of vouchers will drain needed resources” away from public schools and will “drill a hole in that stream of funding we’ve tried to cobble together” to fix the public school system, he asserted. “States are suffering from an economic downturn, and it’s important to keep a critical mass of federal funding within the public schools,” he added.
“The tired arguments against school choice grow less and less relevant every year,” said House Majority Leader Richard Armey (R-TX), who testified before the committee. “School choice works,” he stated. “At its heart, school choice is about giving parents control over the future of their children. It is about giving overlooked, low-income families the same options that more fortunate families already have,” he added. “Congress has a unique opportunity to do what is right, right here in our own backyard,” continued Rep. Armey. He told the committee about legislation (H.R. 5033) he has introduced that would create a “private, independent nonprofit District of Columbia Scholarship Corporation to administer a new federal school choice scholarship program for D.C.” The Corporation would award scholarships to K-12 students from low-income families who reside in the District of Columbia. The scholarships would cover the costs of attending a private or public school in D.C. or in neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia. “My bill could give 8,000 children—one out of every nine of the District’s 77,000 public school students—a chance to attend an institution where they’d learn in a safe, wholesome environment,” he said.
“When asked their opinion of publicly funded vouchers, citizens of the District of Columbia voted 89 percent to 11 percent against them,” countered Linda Moody of the District of Columbia Congress of Parents and Teachers. “To impose a voucher program on a school district that has so emphatically expressed its opposition completely contradicts the principle of local control of education,” she stated.
Ms. Moody told the committee that “according to a summary of H.R. 5300 on Mr. Armey’s website,” only 1,600 vouchers worth $5,000 could be given to children in the District of Columbia each year. With 77,000 children enrolled, “this program guarantees that most of them will be left behind,” she said. “Why not implement reforms that benefit all children?” she asked. Elliot Mincberg of People for the American way agreed. “Despite what some may think, the D.C. public school system is not a laboratory for the nation. D.C.’s children should not be used as pawns by voucher proponents in their zeal to weaken the public school system,” he said. “Additionally, there is no guarantee that any of the voucher recipients will be accepted to the private schools in the surrounding area so that they might use the vouchers,” he added.
Roberta Kitchen, a single mother with five children, testified in favor of the Cleveland school choice program. “For me, the Supreme Court decision means that my daughter can continue to attend a school where the principal knows all the students, where the environment is safe and where she learns and is happy,” she said. “I met a lot of good teachers who cared when my kids were in public schools,” she continued. “The problem is, they’re in a system that doesn’t let them care,” she added.
