I firmly believe that we should neither read nor exercise. <g>
Here's one for you:
The Next Voucher Battleground
Less than a week before classes begin, a judge has struck down Florida's school voucher law. The groundbreaking Florida Opportunity Scholarship program culls mostly poor and minority students from the state's very worst schools and enables them to attend private and religious institutions.
Welcome to the latest battleground of the school choice wars: the states. If Judge Kevin Davey's ruling holds up on appeal, some 9,000 children eligible for the program will have to stay where they are -- in public schools with a state-documented track record of failure. The teachers' unions and the state NAACP hailed the decision, never mind that they lost this debate in the state legislature and that the kids slated for these schools could now suffer.
In June, recall, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Cleveland's voucher program, ruling that public funds can be used to underwrite tuition at religious schools. But that hardly settles matters. Many state constitutions contain provisions that specifically bar tax dollars from going to religious schools, and opponents of choice are now using these clauses to challenge voucher programs nationwide. The results thus far have been mixed, but eventually the Supreme Court must decide whether these state clauses violate our federal guarantees.
The situation in Florida is typical. In his ruling Monday, Judge Davey cited the "clear and unambiguous" language of the state constitution: "No revenue of the state . . . shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution."
In legal circles, this is known as a Blaine amendment or provision. James Blaine was a 19th-century Republican Senator and presidential candidate from Maine. In 1875, hoping to capitalized on widespread anti-Catholicism, Blaine introduced a Constitutional amendment that prohibited states from using tax dollars to benefit any religious sect or denomination.
"The Blaine movement," writes Tony Mauro in Legal Times, "grew out of nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments in the second half of the 19th Century, gaining momentum when Catholics began to object to the pervasively Protestant climate of public or 'common' schools at the time."
Blaine proposed his bill after Catholics began asking states for funds to start their own schools. His efforts failed at the federal level, but state legislatures cottoned to the idea, and by 1890 29 states had Blaine provisions incorporated in their constitutions. Today, every state -- save Maine, Louisiana and North Carolina -- has Blaine language or its equivalent still on the books.
When challenged, some courts, like Florida's, have chosen to interpret their Blaine provisions literally. But others have not. Last month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said a Washington state scholarship program that blocked students from using the money to study at sectarian colleges "facially discriminates on the basis of religion." The state had tried to justify its behavior using the same argument presented in Florida.
School choice programs have also survived Blaine challenges in Arizona and Wisconsin. Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm promoting school choice, says the reform goal now is "to secure a federal precedent: State constitutions that discriminate against religious options violate the federal constitution's guarantee of neutrality."
The precedent will have to come from the Supreme Court. Florida Governor Jeb Bush has vowed to appeal, and Florida's is only one of several cases that could wend its way to the High Court in the years to come.
Meanwhile, it's worth stressing the spectacle of reform opponents -- good "liberals" all -- invoking a century-old relic of religious bigotry in order to keep children shackled to our nation's worst schools. Their methods evoke the poll taxes and grandfather clauses that were hastily employed by states after Reconstruction to deny blacks suffrage guaranteed them by the U.S. Constitution. What lovely moral company the NAACP and the teachers' unions now keep.
Updated August 7, 2002
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