In a recent letter to the editor in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bishop Joseph P. McFadden, auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia, declared school vouchers would be a good thing for public education because "competition inspires excellence, holds leaders liable for performance, attracts talent and empowers the consumer." This sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone who believes a market model can and should be applied to education just as it is applied to other businesses.
Except that the analogy to other industries is a straw-man argument concealing the real reason the archdiocese wants to acquire school vouchers. They could care less about "improving" the public schools. They just want the cash.
In 2002, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that tax-supported school vouchers of about $2,500 could be awarded to poor children in Cleveland, Ohio’s, struggling public schools to attend the school, public or private, of their choice. In doing so, the Court reversed an earlier ruling in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing, which declared vouchers to sectarian schools violated the First Amendment prohibition against using taxes to support religious instruction of any kind.
So Ohio awarded about 4,000 tuition scholarships to the poorest children of Cleveland’s public schools. When their parents went shopping for schools, however, they found the only schools, public or private, willing to accept their children were in the cash-strapped parochial school system and a few other religious schools in the city. What was intended by the Court to be a neutral application of school vouchers ended up supporting the majority of religious schools in Cleveland. The remainder of the public school children of Cleveland, of course, stayed in their home schools.
They called it a Pilot Scholarship Program, which means the same as a foot in the door. Certainly it did not force changes in the public schools due to competition. It did not drastically improve the achievements of the poor children who were accepted into the program. It did nothing for the children left behind.
What it accomplished was to rescue some of the parochial schools of Cleveland from closing. Regardless of the intention of the Supreme Court justices who voted in favor of it, the voucher program did in fact support the religious indoctrination of all the children involved. None of them were excused from religion class or services.
We all know why the Archdiocese of Philadelphia wants vouchers. Catholics are leaving the city in droves and taking their wallets with them. The majority of new Catholic families are poor immigrants who would love to send their kids to the parochial schools but hardly have the tuition. The scheme is to get the state to pass a voucher law, hope there is no challenge or, if there is, it gets decided along the lines of Zelman, and the money problem is eased.
I do not blame the Church for wanting to get assistance, but I think officials are forgetting a few things. They are already tax exempt. They already receive federal money for things like school lunches, Title One books, health screenings by a registered nurse, access to special education services for their students, and even crossing guards paid by the City. Our taxes, therefore, are already applied to benefits for all children in Philadelphia.
But it is never enough. People feel entitled to ask for any assistance in making their private educational choices, in fact, expecting taxpayers to support multi-tiered systems, secular and sectarian, whether open to everyone or not.
Many people say to the latter argument, "So what?" They do not particularly care if all children are qualified for admission to their parish schools. They want that discrimination to exist, just as long as their kids get in and the bill is paid. They are not particularly concerned about the quality of the education either. As long as they feel their kids are in a safer environment, they don’t much care what else happens.
Again, there is a myopia here. Vouchers would not help those children already in private school. They would only be awarded to families too poor to pay the tuition and whose children are transferring from public schools. It would have no impact on the tuition bills of the majority of Catholic children already attending parish schools.
The state might be able to force the parish to accept the exact amount of the voucher, but it could not force them to accept every child who applies. With plenty of new students from which to choose, the parishes could once again become choosy as they become more solvent.
Forget the competition model. The public schools in Philadelphia always have a shortage of classrooms and teachers for all the children who want a seat. They still have to heat their buildings even if fewer children attend. They are not going anywhere, except with less money than before. They will still have all the needy children the private schools cannot handle.
But it is the taxpayers who will get the brick thrown at their heads. They will be asked to support yet another tier of education, in addition to cyber schools, charter schools and their regular neighborhood schools. They will be asked to support a religious education for children who may not even be Catholic.
Let’s just stop pretending it is anything other than milking the public.
Gloria C. Endres is a frequent contributor to the Letter of the Editor section.
