The Supreme Court has ruled that it is constitutional to force public taxpayers, who already fund public education, to also have to pay for private, parochial, and religious schools. It held that such funding - because it is not funding religious schools directly, but indirectly through a parent’s choice - does not violate the Constitution’s establishment clause separating church and state.

It’s now the law of the land, and the battleground will fundamentally shift from courtrooms to the White House and governors’ mansions; from the Supreme Court to Congress and state legislatures; from the law to politics.

And let’s hope by taking this issue from legal suites to the streets we do not return to the heated and emotional days of the Philadelphia ‘Bible riots’ where people were assaulted and churches burned over the issue of whether the Protestant or Catholic version of the scriptures should be read in public schools. This 5-4 ruling declaring school vouchers constitutional is the worst decision in the last 50 years involving church/state issues. It’s a sad day in America.
One must understand the history of race in America to fully understand this case. After the 1954 Brown desegregation decision, which was directed mainly at Southern Jim Crow public schools, White Protestant private religious academies sprung into existence to avoid integration. When Brown finally came North, White southerners found political kinship with those engaged in ‘white flight’ from cities to suburbs.

White flight left mainly previously White Roman Catholic inner-city schools empty and the church starved for money. But it is not my understanding that our constitutional system envisioned having taxpayers pay to keep religious institutions from failing - whether Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. The political voucher movement primarily grew out of this racial dynamic, and was designed to get public taxpayers to pay for their historic, private race habits.
The case before the court was Cleveland’s voucher program - where 96 percent of voucher funding goes to the Roman Catholic school system for teaching mainly non-Catholic African- Americans desperate to escape disastrous public schools. Our public schools also have been abandoned by our political leaders BECAUSE they are disproportionately Black, Brown and poor.

The Court and Ohio authorities say the fact that only a handful of secular schools and no suburban public schools have signed up to accept voucher students - i.e., Black, Brown, and poor students - is not the fault of the program itself. The underlying political foundation and dynamic of the ‘privatization of public schools’ movement is avoidance of racial integration. The school voucher debate has long exploited the legitimate concerns of parents, students, and educators. Our system of public education does not need a debate about public funds going to private schools.

It needs a debate that will spark the political will to guarantee every student a clean and safe learning facility, with smaller class sizes, well trained and properly compensated teachers, and the tools to keep pace with the demands of the future. The question at the heart of the voucher controversy is not separation of church and state. It’s how to provide a public education of equal high quality for the more than 50 million children in 85,000 schools in 15,000 school districts.
Ultimately, we need to cure what ails public education by going to the Constitution. Attorney General John Ashcroft says the Constitution grants every American the right to protect themselves with a gun. I believe we need the constitutional right to protect our families with an education!

In these times, when corporations ranging from telecommunications and energy to entertainment and health care, seem to be abandoning their responsibility to consumers, employees and stockholders, our best defense is a sound, educated mind. I have proposed an amendment (H.J. Res. 31) that guarantees every student a public education of equal high quality. No matter where an American lives, who their parents are, what they look like, or how they worship, they should be entitled to a high quality public education.

The amendment’s ‘equal high quality’ standard raises the bar in every school district without lowering the standards of well-performing schools. Its high educational standard is one that every generation of Americans can define in a living Constitution. We need to take the money, creativity, activism, and political will of the voucher movement and turn it on reforming and improving the nation’s public education system with the aid and guidance of my amendment.
If President Kennedy could challenge the nation to put a man on the moon in a decade - long before microwave ovens and palm-sized cell phones were commonplace - we can certainly guarantee every student a public education of equal high quality.