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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (54761)	9/5/1999 12:34:00 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

So true, check out this article. IMO this issue separates the conservative politicians from the liberals in the clearest of ways. And it's a trend which has profound implications on the nation in the next two decades. Liberals and teacher unions fighting this movement will lose. It's only a matter of time. Intellectually and argumentatively liberals haven't a leg to stand on. I say let the debate rage on for the 2000 election, especially since Bush and Gore are on totally different sides of the fence. The great middle class care much more about this issue than the inside the beltway crowd believes. Michael _____________________________________________________________________ Cleveland's voucher system a model for California By Dan Schnur Aug. 30, 1999 I remember when Cleveland was nothing but a punch line. They used to call it "The Mistake By the Lake" and by the '70s and early '80s the biggest city in Ohio had become an embarrassing symbol of all that was wrong with crumbling, decrepit, moribund, urban America. But in the 1990s, while Los Angeles poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a hypothetical subway system, while San Jose turned its roadways into the world's most prosperous parking lot, while Sacramento spent years trying to figure out what to do with a six-block stretch known laughably as the "downtown mall," and while homeless people flocked to San Francisco like pilgrims to Mecca, Cleveland made a comeback. Cleveland reinvented itself. They redeveloped the city's waterfront, highlighted by a new baseball stadium, the National Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a commercial and tourist presence that has brought night life, energy and a growing tax base to the city's once-destitute downtown. And once saddled with some of the worst public schools in the nation, Cleveland started a school voucher program. Vouchers, which provide the families of low-income or otherwise disadvantaged students with financial aid to attend private or parochial schools, have for years been the hot-button issue in the education-reform debate. Union leaders and other education establishment types have fiercely fought the use of public dollars for private-school education, arguing that the loss of funds will negatively effect the public schools the students would leave behind. Implicitly, this argument suggests a belief that a school's existence is more important than the success of its students, a charge that voucher opponents would vehemently deny. But last week, when a federal judge in Ohio chose the day before the beginning of the school year to shut down Cleveland's voucher program and leave thousands of children without classes to attend, it became apparent that the interests of the students didn't matter much at all. Cleveland's program has been in operation for four years, with good but mixed results. The test scores of participating students have risen, but three of the participating schools are in danger of shutdown due to safety and competency issues. Supporters of the program correctly point out that similar problems have plagued public schools for years and that improvement, rather than perfection, should be the standard for measuring the program's success. But the educational and constitutional apocalypse predicted by the opponents of vouchers has not materialized in Cleveland. There are no private schools run by witches, as the advertisements run against Proposition 174, California's unsuccessful voucher initiative, charged in 1993. There is no evidence that Cleveland's schoolchildren have been poisoned by religious zealotry from the left or the right. There are no reports of teachers speaking in tongues, or of principals biting the heads off live rattlesnakes. The judge shut down the program anyway. Although he decided a few days later to allow students who had previously participated in the program to return to their schools, he continued to block several hundred others who were prepared to enter the program from receiving their tuition grants. As he prepared a lawsuit on the constitutionality of vouchers, the judge made it clear there was "no substantial possibility" that he would reverse his decision, meaning that the students were receiving a temporary reprieve at best. By the beginning of the spring semester next January, if the judge has his way, the students will be back in the same public schools they thought they had escaped. The constitutionality of school vouchers ultimately will be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Ohio state Supreme Court has ruled against the program, but made its decision because the program was created as an amendment to the state budget instead of by independent legislation. The court specifically stated that Cleveland's program did not violate the separation of church and state. A similar decision was reached in Wisconsin last year, where that state's Supreme Court ruled that participation in Milwaukee's voucher program and exposure to religious instruction were a voluntary result of parental choice. As these test programs move forward, popular support for private-school choice continues to grow. Florida has passed legislation that would award "opportunity scholarships," tuition grants available to those students enrolled in the state's worst-performing schools. A new Los Angeles Times poll shows that a majority of respondents favored the use of public money for sending children to private or parochial school, including 60 percent of those parents with children enrolled in public schools. Californians will have a chance to decide this issue next November, when another voucher initiative is likely to appear on the general-election ballot. Unlike the campaign six years ago, in which the initiative's proponents were out spent by millions of dollars, the new ballot measure will be funded by deep-pocketed supporters out of Silicon Valley. Californians are used to blazing trails, politically and culturally, for the rest of the country. But maybe this time, Cleveland will be the trend setter. Maybe Drew Carey has it right: Cleveland rocks.