By Dr. Vernard Gant, Director of ACSI Urban School Services
Frederick Douglass once said that “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education”1[emphasis mine]. Nearly a century later, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.…” The Court further concluded: “It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.”2 Thus the Court removed the barrier denying Black children equal access to quality education and the hope of success in life.
Now, nearly a half century later, the Supreme Court has rendered another landmark decision affecting the educational and social plight of the disadvantaged. The case centers on the Cleveland City School District, in which:
- The district failed in 27 out of 27 state standards for student performance
- 66 percent of fourth graders would have had to repeat a grade if they had been forced to meet the “reading guarantee”—which the legislature had earlier voted to abandon
- Only 1 in 10 ninth graders could pass a basic proficiency examination
- More than two-thirds of high school students either failed or dropped out before graduation
- Of those students who managed to reach their senior year, one of every four still failed to graduate
- Of those students who did graduate, few could read, write, or compute at levels comparable to those of their counterparts in other cities
Given this critical condition, the state of Ohio intervened to take over the school district. Ohio law provides for tuition assistance to families in school districts under state control to attend the schools of their choice—public, private, or religious. Because most of the families who elected to use the assistance chose faith-based schools for their children, opponents argued that the voucher program violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, otherwise known as the separation of church and state. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court on February 20, 2002.
On June 27, 2002, the Supreme Court ruled: “The constitutionality of a neutral educational aid program simply does not turn on whether and why, in a particular area, at a particular time, most private schools are run by religious organizations, or most recipients choose to use the aid at a religious school.”3 This ruling opens the door for economically and socially disadvantaged children to be able to attend Christian schools that can effectively educate them and equip them with what they need to function successfully in society.
The barrier that skin color represented in 1954, low-income status represents today. Just as White families in 1954 had access to quality education denied Black families, today families of means have educational access that is denied to economically disadvantaged families. The result has been a dual system of public education—separate and unequal. The one system acts as an instrument of social and economic attainment for its students, while the other system functions as an instrument of containment, confining many of its students to the lowest echelon of society.
As in the case of many urban school districts across the United States, the majority of the children in Cleveland City School District are from low-income, minority families. Sadly, these children are being written off as uneducable, under-educable, learning disabled, having special needs along with a host of other labels used to explain why they perform so poorly in comparison with other children. The explanation given is often in reference to factors over which the children have no control. Children, for example, cannot control where they are born, the communities in which they grow up, the marital status of their parents, or the economic conditions under which they must live. Yet all of these are used to explain (and sometimes justify) the low academic performance and negative social behavior of these children.
The bottom line is that urban public schools are continually failing to educate a large percentage of the children assigned to them. According to one published report, “Urban students perform far worse, on average, than children who live outside central cities on virtually every measure of academic performance. The longer they stay in school, the wider the gap grows.” Moreover, “the poorest students are at greatest risk. In urban schools where most of the students are poor, two-thirds or more of children fail to reach even the ‘basic’ level on national tests.”4
What is most alarming are the stakes involved. Two out of three African American fourth graders cannot read at the basic level. That is, these ten-year-olds cannot read at a level that will guarantee them any kind of real academic future. With little hope of an academic future, the chances of a successful social future are equally dim. This same holds true for three out of five Hispanic fourth graders. Add poverty to the equation, and the numbers reach calamitous proportions. Eighty-six percent of poor African American children read below the basic level. One must ask the question, Where are these children going to go and what are they going to do in this society? Given the fact that their current level of education offers few positive options for their future endeavors, the chances are great that negative options will prevail. Perhaps this failure to educate explains why two-thirds of prisoners in state correctional institutions do not have a high school degree.
Discussions on the plight of these children usually start out by focusing on the children’s well-being. All sides assert that they love children and claim that their cause is about the children. Observe, however, what happens in the ensuing dialogue about the educational and social well-being of the children. At some point, the focus shifts from the welfare of children to that of institutions. Upon closer scrutiny, one will observe the subtle tendency to equate the two. The children are discussed synonymously with the institutions that were established to serve them. The well-being of the children is intricately tied to the well-being of a system.
This tendency to place institutions on par with people or to place the institution above the individual is not a uniquely modern phenomenon. Perhaps there is a natural proneness to make persons subservient to the very institutions that exist to serve them. This was certainly the case regarding the institution of the Sabbath day during the life of Jesus Christ. In one incident, the Bible records: “And behold, there was a man who had a withered hand. And they asked Him, saying, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’—that they might accuse Him. Then He said to them, ‘What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value then is a man than a sheep?' " (Matthew 12:10–12a).
It was in this context that Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The parallels are uncanny. The keepers of the Sabbath institution reversed the God-ordained order of things. To them the Sabbath system did not exist for the people; rather, the people existed for the system. Moreover, they exercised a double standard. The system took precedence over the man with the broken condition, yet it did not take precedence over the welfare of their own animals. In much the same vein, this is how the discussion progresses (or regresses) in reference to economically disadvantaged children and public school systems.
The parents and grandparents of urban children simply want what any loving parents want for their children. They know the role a quality education plays in the child’s future. They simply do not have the financial means to secure such an education and are bound to accept what is offered in their assigned schools. These parents have no choice. To compound matters, they are told, from the public’s standpoint, that they should never have a choice because if they did, it would hurt the public school system. In other words, the important issue is not the best interest of the child, but the well-being of a system. Moreover, to add insult to injury, they are told this by politicians, teacher union representatives, and school officials, all of whom exercise choice about where their children go to school (see chart above).7 Because they have the economic means, these officials naturally act in the best interest of their own children. Yet they insist that the children of economically disadvantaged families be sacrificed on the altar of a system that acts in its own best interest. In other words, the keepers of the system certainly would not sacrifice their own children to benefit the system, but the children of others must be sacrificed in order to keep the system alive and well.
The ultimate issue is not the merits of private education over public education. Instead, the reality is that, when parents are empowered to choose the schools they feel best meet the needs of their children, the children have a better chance at succeeding. Practically all families of means realize this and exercise the freedom to place their children in the kind of learning environment that is best suited for them (be it public, private, or home school). Unfortunately, many poor families don’t have that option and are limited to the neighborhood school whatever its academic track record. And if these families do exercise school choice, they must rely on the luck-of-the-draw for a privately financed voucher program or on the benevolence of strangers for their children’s education.
Those who oppose school choice like to make the distinction or draw the line between public and private education as though these are in opposition to one another. Actually, the terms, when applied to children, are misnomers. First, there is no such thing as a public child. Another Supreme Court ruling more than 75 years ago established this fact from the standpoint of the Constitution. The Court ruled in no uncertain terms that “[t]he child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations” (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 US 510, 535, 1925). Moreover, in practical terms there is no such thing as a private education. All education is designed to equip an individual to function in the public arenas of life.
The expressions “public” and “private” usually refer to access and use. Public institutions, for example, are open to and accessible by the general public. Even here, however, the terms are not quite accurate because public education is not exactly public in the truest sense of the word. Public schools are not open to the public in the same way that public libraries, public parks, and other public facilities are. While these public institutions invite and admit the general public regardless of income, social status, intellectual ability, or place of residence, public schools do not. Quite the contrary, public schools are residence based, and practically all public education is income-based. Or to state it more simply, education in America is largely ability-based. Those who have the ability (usually financial ability) can choose a quality education for their children. Those who do not have that ability must accept the schooling and education dictated to them by the system.
This dual system of education for the haves and the have-nots is not much different in practice from the dual system of schooling maintained for Blacks and Whites under the Jim Crow system of segregation. One group enjoyed public privileges because of their skin color. Today another group enjoys public educational privileges because of their income.
Now, as a result of the Court ruling of June 27, an effectual door of opportunity is being opened for the urban poor. Perhaps Justice Thomas summarized it best in his concurring opinion:
While the romanticized ideal of universal public education resonates with the cognoscenti who oppose vouchers, poor urban families just want the best education for their children, who will certainly need it to function in our high-tech and advanced society.…The failure to provide education to poor urban children perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty, dependence, criminality, and alienation that continues for the remainder of their lives.
And his conclusion:
If society cannot end racial and social discrimination, at least it can arm minorities with the education to defend themselves from some of discrimination’s effects [italics mine].
All indications are that low-income minority children benefit greatly from school choice in general and Christian schooling in particular. Independent studies on the effects of vouchers conducted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research8 and the Program on Education Policy and Governance of Harvard University indicate that African American students who were the recipients of privately funded vouchers to attend the schools of their choice posted considerable academic gains over their public school counterparts who applied for but were not chosen for the vouchers.
The findings were so compelling as to lead one group of researchers to conclude:
If the trend line observed over the first two years continues in subsequent years, the black-white test gap could be eliminated in subsequent years of education for black students who use a voucher to switch from public to private school.9
Moreover, according to a follow-up by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988,10 (see chart below) low-income children who attend private schools are nearly four times more likely to complete college than their public school peers. The vast majority of children in private schools attend religious or faith-based schools. This is especially true for low-income families because the normal cost of attending a Christian school is considerably less than the cost of tuition for other private schools. According to the NCES, percent of private school students attend faith-based schools. What these schools are demonstrating and what the research shows is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the children. The same children who have basically been written off as uneducable, under-educable, learning challenged, and learning disabled in public schools are achieving and excelling academically in the private school setting. They are behaving, they are going to college, they are graduating, and they are becoming productive citizens.
Frederick Douglass rightly noted that the greatest benefit that can be bestowed upon a disadvantaged people is to provide them with the means of an education. And there is no education like a Christian education. For with a Christian education, we educate children not only for life but also for all eternity.
Notes
1 The blessings of liberty and education: An address delivered on September 3,1894, in Manassas, Virginia, The Frederick Douglass Papers 623 (J. Blassingame and J. McKivigan, eds. 1992).
2 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 493 (1954).
3 Zelman, Superintendent of Public Instruction of Ohio, et al. v. Simmons-Harris et al. U.S case
No. 00-1751 (2002).
4 Education Week on the Web. 1998. Quality counts 98: The urban challenge. Retrieved
April 10, 2002.
5 U.S. Department of Education. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. National Center for Education Statistics. The nation’s report card: Fourthgrade reading 2000. NCES 2001–499, by P. L. Donahue, R. J. Finnegan, A. D. Lutkus, N. L. Allen, and J. R. Campbell. Washington, DC: 2001.
6 U.S. Department of Education. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. National Center for Education Statistics. The nation’s report card: Mathematics 2000. NCES 2001–517, by J. S. A. D. Lutkus, W. S. Grigg, S. L. Santapau, B. Tay-Lim, and M. Johnson. Washington, DC: 2001.
7 The president’s about-face on school choice. Washington Times, October 4, 1996; Teachers choose private schools. Milwaukee Journal, November 14, 1993; Jennifer Garrett. Another look how members of Congress exercise school choice. The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder.
No. 1553. May 22, 2002.
8 Greene, Jay P. The effect of school choice: An evaluation of the Charlotte Children’s Scholarship Fund program. Civic Report. No. 12. New York: The Manhattan Institute, August 2000.
9 Howell, William G., Patrick J. Wolf, and Paul E. Peterson. August 2000. Test-score effects of school voucher in Dayton, Ohio, New York City, and Washington, D.C.: Evidence from randomized field trials. Retrieved July 23, 2002 from The Program on Education Policy and Governance.
10 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The condition of education 2002. NCES 2002–025, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002.
The Meantime Volume 2 Number 1