Valerie Johnson shoots a smile across the table. But her mistrust of the public system is dead serious. As a child she saw her brothers struggle in a school that she says belittled and ignored them. One was murdered at 19. She sees even greater peril for her own children. Test scores and graduation rates in her inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood are among the lowest in the city. At the nearby public high school, metal detectors flank doorways and truant students loiter outside. “What parent would choose to send their child into that?” says Johnson.
Many poor parents have no choice. But Valerie Johnson and her husband, Robert, a garbage collector, have latched onto a controversial alternative, a program that uses public money to help low-income families send their children to private schools. The Johnsons receive “vouchers” that cover the full cost of the roughly $3,000 a year, per child, they spend to send their kids to Roman Catholic schools. The decade-old Milwaukee voucher program, which now reaches 8,000 kids, was followed by a similar program in Cleveland in 1995 and a fledgling plan in Florida last year. Vermont and Maine also have programs.
Voucher experiments are catching the attention of presidential candidates as well as educators. Al Gore opposes them as a drain on the public-school system. George W. Bush advocates vouchers for poor kids in failing schools. Both are sensitive to political considerations: the teacher unions, mainstays of the Democratic Party, regard vouchers as a threat to their livelihoods, while some conservative Republicans see vouchers as a way to fund religious schools. Meanwhile the programs are under fierce legal attack, blocked by lawsuits in the five states that have tried in various ways to experiment with the idea. Last week a Florida state-court judge struck down the voucher program instituted in 1999 by Gov. Jeb Bush. The Florida plan, which gives private-school vouchers to students in any public school rated “F” by the state two years in a row, is a model for the nationwide program proposed by his brother, George W. And the Supreme Court may soon hear an Ohio case testing whether vouchers violate the separation of church and state.
The bickering means little to Valerie Johnson. A Pentecostal Christian who answers her phone “praise the Lord,” she says no one is proselytizing her non-Catholic children. The schools, she says, stress moral standards and general religious principles rather than rigid doctrine. At daughter Jessica’s school, the Johnsons have found a commodity hard to come by in inner-city schools: diversity. Long ago segregated by white flight, public schools in the family’s neighborhood are almost entirely black. At St. Joan Antida girls’ high school, veiled Middle Eastern girls slip out of class during Ramadan to pray in the school’s chapel. An Afrocentric depiction of the Last Supper with a black, dreadlocked Jesus hangs in the main hallway, and Jessica, a 17-year-old junior, gossips to her Latina friends in fluent Spanish as she winds though the halls. And 85 percent of St. Joan students go on to college. In the Milwaukee public schools fewer than half of ninth graders will graduate.
One of the most striking contrasts between voucher schools and the public schools is the degree of flexibility the private ones have in tailoring curricula and setting high expectations. The downside to such freedom is lack of accountability. A few fly-by-night educators have been able to collect public funds just by hanging a shingle. Three of the 91 participating schools in Milwaukee were recently found to have no academic accreditation and no standardized tests to measure student progress. In Cleveland’s voucher program, three schools were shut down for similar violations. One school, which had a convicted killer on staff, was found guilty of padding voucher enrollment numbers to bilk the state for money.
The defenders of school vouchers argue that the marketplace will work quickly to weed out the worst offenders. Other complaints are tougher to answer. Roughly a quarter of the voucher recipients in Cleveland and nearly a third of those in Milwaukee, including the Johnsons, were already enrolled in private schools, with the help of scholarships and grants. More important, voucher opponents warn that ardent supporters will be happy only when every public-school student, regardless of income level, qualifies for vouchers. If that happens, they say, families that can afford to pad the vouchers with their own money will have the better schools, and poor students once again will be left behind.
Still, even the most vehement opponents concede one fact: vouchers have scared some public schools into action. The Hartford Avenue School, a once high-achieving school on Milwaukee’s middle-class east side, spiraled into chaos through the ’80s and ’90s. White parents yanked their kids out as black students were bused in. Good teachers left. Performance plummeted. At its worst point the school went through three principals in three years. The district threatened to shut it down.
In 1998 the district decided to give the school one last shot. Cynthia Ellwood, a former district administrator, was put in charge. She overhauled the teaching staff and revamped the curriculum, creating a magnet school focusing on urban issues and social justice. Young teachers are competing to work in the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, and there is a waiting list of students. “The debate has loosened some of the chains that the central office and unions have traditionally imposed upon us,” concedes Ellwood. “We are freer to do things we’ve been pushing to do for years.”
Ultimately, Valerie Johnson would like to see public schools rise to the challenge. But while her children are young, she can’t afford to wait. “I’m not anti public school. I’m anti bad school. To have my children go to a good neighborhood public school would be my ultimate dream.” The political and legal wrangling will go on. Meanwhile, the Johnson kids have homework to do.
