Re: 'The Militant' joins liberals in denouncing Supreme Court voucher

["Greg Butterfield" <gregb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's what Workers World had to say on the Supreme
Court's voucher ruling.
Greg Butterfield
----------------------------------

Supreme Court backs school vouchers
Another scam aimed at the poor

By Martha Grevatt
Cleveland

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of school vouchers is
going to hurt the very people it claims to be helping. It
will take money away from the public education of poor
schoolchildren, especially children of color.

The June 27th decision involved a suit by the Cleveland
Teachers Union, but it has wide ramifications throughout
the country.

Several thousand Cleveland students have received vouchers
worth up to $2,250 towards tuition in private and
parochial schools.

The public schools have lost millions of dollars under
this program. Cleveland is already one of the poorest
school districts in Ohio, and has suffered financially
from property tax abatements to wealthy developers.

The Cleveland Teachers Union accuses the court of engaging
in union-busting by funding schools where teachers are
usually not unionized.

The union's lawyers had charged that the voucher program
violates the separation of church and state. Over 95
percent of the students receiving vouchers from public
funds are attending religious schools. One-third of them
were already attending those schools before the voucher
program, and now take advantage of government subsidies.

Right-wing supporters of vouchers around the country have
been waiting for the outcome of the Cleveland case. Now
they have been given the green light to subsidize
religious instruction at the expense of poor students who
don't get vouchers.

In Cleveland itself, voucher proponents want to increase
the number of voucher students, increase the amount of
subsidy per student, and expand the program to include
high school students.

This decision is being called the most significant ruling
on education since Brown vs. Board of Education--the 1954
Supreme Court decision that struck down segregated
schools. This analogy deliberately gives the impression
that the ruling is favorable to African American students.
Voucher supporters say it allows Black parents to make the
same school choices as middle-class parents in the
suburbs.

In reality, it has made the public schools even more
segregated by allowing more white children in Cleveland to
leave them. Those students who don't get selected by the
private schools--and they are the vast majority--suffer
from the resulting funding cuts.

Some leaders and elected officials in the Black community
support vouchers, but many do not. When the case first
went to the Supreme Court, a huge rally against vouchers
was held in a church in the Black community where leading
clergy from Cleveland and around the country spoke. The
NAACP is opposed to school vouchers. After the ruling, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer's leading Black columnist condemned
the decision.

The high court's ruling argued that vouchers don't violate
separation of church and state because parents have the
option of sending their children to secular private
schools. But most parents cannot afford the tuition at
those schools, even with the vouchers, and many cannot
transport their children to the outer-ring suburbs where
the schools are located.

Studies show that voucher students do no better
academically than students in the struggling public
schools. The voucher schools can reject any pupil as
unqualified. There is no proof that this "faith-based"
theft of public education benefits anyone but the
Christian right wing by subsidizing its pro-Bush
propaganda.

Like tax "reform" and welfare "reform," this attack on
public education adds up to yet another theft from the
poorest workers carried out by this pro-big business
government.


Reprinted from the July 11, 2002, issue of Workers World
newspaper

~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.