School voucher advocates want right to
choose
This years annual convention
of the National Catholic Educational Association focused on school choice, with
Milwaukees experience with school vouchers celebrated and promoted with a
one-day symposium titled Partner for Justice: Catholic Schools and
Parental School Choice.
Barbara Keebler, director of communications for the association,
said School choice is what brought us to Milwaukee. Its really in
the forefront in terms of issues were promoting.
Milwaukee has one of only three publicly funded voucher programs
in the nation.
It began more than a decade ago, sponsored by a disparate
coalition that included the citys business community, parent groups, and
local and state elected officials. The voucher program was expanded to include
religious schools in 1995 and has survived legal challenges. The need-based
program gives vouchers to 8,500 students in Milwaukee to attend the school of
their choice. Most but not all of these schools are Catholic.
That school choice programs are now being presented as a social
justice issue was clear from the symposium. A video on the Milwaukee voucher
program concluded with the civil rights song We Shall Overcome,
while the repeated references to the right to choose suggested at
times the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement.
Among the speakers at the symposium were Howard Fuller, former
superintendent of Milwaukee schools and president of Black Alliance for
Educational Options, which runs pro-school-choice commercials in television
markets across the country, and Clint Bolick, the leader in the nationwide
litigation effort to defend school choice programs.
We want poor people in Milwaukee to be able to make the same
choices for their children as President Clinton can make for his, said
Fuller in his keynote address.
In an editorial called School Choice: The Turned Tide,
Leonard DeFiori, president of the Catholic educational association, writing in
the associations journal Momentum, said, We are winning the
battle of how the debate is framed.
ever more frequently, the issue is
being framed (correctly) as a moral one. School choice supported by vouchers is
being seen as a justice issue, a fairness issue. Why shouldnt the poor
have the same ability as the affluent to pick a good school for their
children?
DeFiori has called school choice the last civil rights frontier.
Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, who is credited with playing a key
role in the success of the school choice program in Milwaukee, has said
its a right, not a privilege, for parents to determine their
childrens education.
Will marketing school choice programs as a social justice issue
make them more successful? Perhaps. Certainly the election of George W. Bush as
president has brought fresh hope to the school choice movement.
We think its a new day now, said Keebler.
We have a renewed spirit about it. That was underscored by dedicating
such a large portion of the convention to that issue and promoting that
issue.
-- Margot Patterson
National Catholic Reporter, May 4, 2001
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