The Movement Widens

Second Quarter 1999

SCHOOL CHOICE

"The question is, What is the truth?'"Thus spoke Fannie Lewis, the 70+ year-old black activist who led the fight for vouchers in Cleveland. "It is a lie," she said, in response to a teachers' union official who charged her with wanting special favors from government for her religious preferences.

Ms. Lewis was a panelist on one of four panels that made up a day-long conference sponsored by The Federalist Society and the Stranahan National Issues Forum, held in Toledo, Ohio on March 26. The program was "Education Reform at the Crossroads: Politics, the Constitution, and the Battle over School Choice."

When Fannie Lewis moved from Kentucky to Ohio years ago, it was to seek fairer treatment because of her skin color. She sent her children to the neighborhood schools in Cleveland with great hope for their future. What she received, however, was not what any mother would want for her children. When her own daughter ended up dependent on drugs and unable to care for her children, Ms. Lewis, at age 67, took in her daughter's five children. And the fact that she now sends them to a Christian school is because it is the best she can do for them. Every parent should have such a choice, she said.

It was not the teachers unions that led the fight to improve the schools, said Ms. Lewis. "The teachers unions are the reason for the schools' failures." So she took action. She rallied the neighborhood and organized seven buses for the trip to Columbus to fight for the right of poor parents to have the chance of sending their children to schools that would work. She ran for the city council five times before she got elected, and now that she holds a seat on the council, she is fighting all the harder for the truth. The truth is that the present school system does not work, and it is a shame that the teachers and officials who control the system do not listen to what the parents are saying. The Cleveland voucher program is barely a beginning, but it should be supported wholeheartedly, for the sake of the children. Parents need choices.

The Toledo conference featured several speakers besides Fannie Lewis who are directly involved in the campaigns for and against school-choice reforms in Cleveland and Milwaukee and other parts of the country. These included pro-voucher activists Clint Bolick, who defended the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Mrs. Bert Holt, director of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program. Critics included Prof. John Witte of the University of Wisconsin, Steven Shapiro, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Elliot Mincberg from People for the American Way.

Essentially, the debate boils down to fundamentally different conceptions of who is responsible for placing kids in school and whether religious convictions have equal standing in the public square. In the contest for power, the debate is over who gains and who loses control of public schools and all the jobs and funding involved. Pro-voucher lawyers and activists, such as Prof. Eugene Volokh from UCLA's law school, argue that government's equal treatment of parental choices of religious and government-run schools is essential and legitimate. Government does not thereby establish religion. It supports the education of all children and respects parental choice. It is the only way to be fair to all.

Anti-choice representatives such as Steven Shapiro speak of public education as necessarily secular and charge that even a voucher that passes through parental hands to a religious school implicates the government in establishing a sectarian religion, which by his definition is unconstitutional. As the Center for Public Justice has argued for many years, Shapiro is wrong here, and Volokh is right.

The encouraging thing about this conference was to see how many different kinds of people are beginning to see that real reform will require changing the system as a whole and not simply channeling partial support to only a few poor families.

The amazing thing to me, as I observed this event, is the extent to which the defenders of the status quo refuse even to listen to the arguments about the failure of the present system to do justice to the poor. They are defenders of unions over against parents, or of an ideal of equality over against the reality of enforced inequality. They are radical privatizers of religion who resist all 'sectarianism' in public life except their own, or they are indifferent to those who have no choice of schools while raising no objection to the choices the elites make for private schools.

Tapes and some papers are available from the conference. For information, contact The Federalist Society about the Toledo conference at 1015 18th St., NW, Suite 425, Washington, DC 20036; 202-822-8138; fax—202-296-8061;  website.

—The Editor