Commentary on School Choice
In both Ohio and Wisconsin, opponents, led by teachers’ unions, were challenging the programs on the grounds that they violated the separation of church and state. The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld vouchers; a federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against them.
The U.S. Supreme Court took up a First Amendment challenge to vouchers, based on one of the Ohio cases, in February 2002. Robert Chanin, a lawyer for the National Education Association, told the court, “Under the Cleveland voucher program, millions of dollars in unrestricted public funds are transferred each year from the state treasury into the general coffers of sectarian private schools, and the money is used by those schools to provide an educational program in which the sectarian and the secular are interwoven.” Chanin noted that virtually all the students in the voucher program were attending religious schools, rather than secular private schools.
But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the likely swing vote in the case, interrupted to pick up on a point made by a state attorney who’d defended the vouchers. In evaluating Cleveland’s choice program, shouldn’t the court consider not only private schools but also other options available to students, such as public magnet schools and charter schools?
The question caught Chanin off guard. The issue was the constitutionality of private school vouchers, yet O’Connor was evoking public school options. The state pressed its advantage, with its lawyer stressing the limited scope of the pilot: “It didn’t take too much money away from the public schools, but gave enough for a limited program that is targeted to the most needy, to the poorest of the poor.”
