Time to Tackle That ‘Other’ DC Crisis

The latest chapter in the District of Columbia’s tuition voucher tug of war began in late November with a Journal Report interview of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

After reading ”The President’s Agenda,” I wondered what it would be like to be a member of the White House media advisory crew with direct access to our chief of staff. If I were, I’d call his attention to the broader context--at the risk of turning my first year into my only year with Team Obama. (Hey, sometimes you gotta live dangerously, right?) Here’s what my memo would say:

To the chief of staff from rjg:

You sure corrected the record in a hurry, Rahm, when that Wall Street Journal interviewer started out by listing health care, climate change, and financial regulatory reform as Obama’s top domestic legislative priorities, seeking your reaction.

You hastily informed him you’d add “education reform” to that. Good point.

Frankly, I thought our health care debate was lasting so long that education would fade out of sight. But you brought the president’s full agenda back to light. After all, he prodded Congress last spring to earmark $90 billion for improving schools.

But Congress then voted to end a thriving, five-year-old tuition voucher program for youngsters in Washington, DC. And for no good reason: There were 1,700 students prospering academically in that program in Catholic and other religious and private schools.

Unfortunately, our beloved president remained aloof from it all, voicing no objection to Congress’s decision. That hefty congressional fund, destined for government schools, allowed our president to redefine “education reform” to mean more federal control of education by directing where all tax funds are to flow. That isn’t what’s needed. What we need is to open more doors to allow more parents to get more involved in their kids’ schooling.

Forgive me, Rahm, for suggesting that these two instances of federal usurpations of power from parents and local authorities are far from being a way to “transform America” in any presumably positive way, to borrow a favorite Obama phrase. It is a nasty little scandal on the part of both White House and the congressional leadership.

Parents and students in the DC voucher program hit the streets with a massive protest May 6 that prodded Obama to respond. Yet all he did was ask Congress to allow students already in the program to complete high school before ending it. That left other families out in the cold and still ends the program. It’s why the activist group DC Parents for School Choice launched a tenacious push ever since to reignite a voucher plan that was working well. They don’t need any more Washington doubletalk to explain away that program’s demise.

Remember: The DC Opportunity Scholarship voucher plan was meant to benefit low-income African-American and Hispanic families--just the kind of people many Americans thought their president had in mind when he started talking school reform.

And it was working. A study by the U.S. Department of Education itself showed reading skills decidedly improving under the voucher plan. The orderly atmosphere in their new classrooms was helping students, many of whose previous schools were plagued by a disruptive atmosphere.

A little history might shed some light here. The tuition voucher idea got its biggest shot in the arm when a handful of Catholic activists banded together in St. Louis in the late 1950s to form Citizens for Educational Freedom (CEF). Its purpose was to defend a longtime church principle holding that parents are their children’s primary educators and should have a right to choose religious and other private schools if they wished.

CEF’s arrival on the scene was hardly a coincidence. Many U.S. Catholics were familiar with the anti-Catholic bias in those infamous Blaine amendments that invaded so many state constitutions after the Civil War. The nativist Know Nothing movement had done its best to isolate Catholic immigrants and their schools from the rest of America. They were labeled “sectarian.” That term of contempt wasn’t leveled at other religious groups, nor even at Protestant religious practices used in some public schools.

Spurred by President Ulysses S.Grant’s flawed guidance, those state amendments generally barred the use of tax funds to sectarian (read “Catholic”) religious schools by forbidding communities to use tax money on nonpublic schools. Grant assumed the U.S. Constitution did not routinely ban such funds for use in religious schools.

The Supreme Court agrees. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, the court held not only that a tuition voucher plan in Cleveland was constitutional but also ruled parents could choose religious schools if they wished, since Cleveland’s program stayed neutral toward religion. One result of the Zelman case has been an upswing in the number of voucher programs showing up around the country since then.

There is some sentiment in Congress to extend the DC program after all. When an omnibus bill passed in December brushed the voucher issue aside, bipartisan groups in both houses of Congress began pushing to review and revive the DC plan by the end of January or shortly after.

It’s time for congressional legislators to recognize those DC voucher students are as much a part of the human family as their own children, and deserve the same chance at a good education. The DC plan is also a golden opportunity to help end the stereotyping of certain schools as “sectarian,” a label meant to obscure the anti-religious bigotry still lingering among many rigid church-state separationists in the school-choice debate.

The Wall Street Journal just ran an editorial praising Virginia and New Jersey for naming two strong school choice advocates to run their states’ education departments. If you recall, GOP governors were just elected in both states by reversing the voter support our president earned there in late 2008. Rahm, it’s time we got the big picture and realized the people want choice.

As our in-house expert, you’re good at turning a crisis to our advantage. Isn’t it time to show Obama why this ongoing DC voucher scandal is a crisis too terrible to waste? Reviving that voucher project could create a whole new benchmark for school reform to help families all over America.

Richard Goldkamp is a freelance journalist based in St. Louis.