A First Report Card On Vouchers

Are you afraid of the Judgment Day?" Sister Mira Anne Nattoli, clad in traditional Muslim robes, asks her fifth- and sixth-grade English class. Today's text is "The Twins and the Missing Math Paper," but the lesson is as much religion as English. "Whoever cheats," a young man reads carefully, "is not a good student of Islam." The students, about 95% African American, wear loose-fitting shirts and headdresses--skullcaps called kufis for the boys and scarves called khimars for the girls. Cleveland's Islamic School of Oasis is in many ways a typical Muslim day school, but with a twist. Tuition for more than half its students is paid by Cleveland, Ohio, taxpayers.

The Islamic school is part of Cleveland's pioneering school-voucher program. More than 3,700 of the city's students, nearly 5% of the public school enrollment, now use vouchers to escape the public school system. In a controversial move, Ohio chose to include religious schools in the program. Today the vast majority of vouchers are used at more than 50 religious schools--Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Islamic and Seventh-Day Adventist. (The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet decided if tax-funded vouchers for religious schools violate the First Amendment's separation of church and state.) The remaining vouchers are used at a handful of secular private schools, including two Hope academies, founded specifically for voucher children.

Vouchers may be the next big thing in American education. Thousands of students in Cleveland and Milwaukee, Wis., are using tax dollars to attend private schools, and Florida is poised to adopt the nation's first statewide program. Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania may follow. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of introducing vouchers, though his schools' chancellor has threatened to resign if the mayor does. Privately funded voucher programs have sprung up in an additional 39 cities, and this week the largest such program in the U.S., founded by Wal-Mart scion John Walton and financier Ted Forstmann, is scheduled to award scholarships of as much as $1,600 each to 40,000 low-income students across the U.S., a number equivalent to the roll call in a city the size of Rochester, N.Y.

Vouchers' supporters see them as a revolutionary instrument--capable, in the short run, of rescuing poor kids from bad public schools and, in the long term, of forcing that education system to compete in a free market. But critics say vouchers will destroy the public schools by turning them into repositories for America's unwilling, or unwanted, schoolchildren. And they say that voucher programs, especially ones that include religious schools, will Balkanize America by abandoning its common core of teachings and traditions.

For years the voucher debate has been conducted in what-ifs and let's-assumes. But with Cleveland's program wrapping up its third year, hard results and conclusions are coming in--from parents, academics and standardized tests. There has been one clear upside to vouchers: a Harvard study found that two-thirds of Cleveland's voucher parents were "very satisfied" with the academic quality of their children's private schools, compared with only 30% of parents who stuck with public schools. What's not clear is whether they're right to be so happy.

A team of researchers from Indiana University that evaluated the program for the state of Ohio last fall found that vouchers were a mixed bag. Students attended classes that were, on average, smaller by three students. On the other hand, public schools had teachers with better credentials. They were more likely to have done postcollege work and had an average of five more years of teaching experience. In the end, the researchers concluded, class size and teacher qualifications canceled each other out.

The test scores were perhaps even more surprising. Voucher proponents have long argued that if students were allowed to leave failing public schools--for better-run and more disciplined private and parochial schools--their performance would improve dramatically. But the Indiana study found only minor differences between voucher students and public school students on a standardized fourth-grade academic-achievement test. Voucher students scored better than public school students in language and science, but the differences were, the study found, "relatively small." In the other areas tested--reading, math, social studies and "total battery"--voucher students did no better than their public school counterparts. In fact, the only students who really stood out--for their weak performance--were those in the city's two Hope academies. The test scores of these students, who are the poster children for vouchers in Cleveland, were not just lower, according to the study, but "significantly and substantially lower" than those of public school students and of voucher students in other private schools.

Voucher supporters fault the study's methodology, attacking everything from the impartiality of the researchers to the conditions under which the fourth-graders were tested. Lydia Harris, a reading specialist at Hope Central Academy, says the examiners who came to the school "didn't have a clue," and administered the test during children's nap time. She also suspects the State Department of Education, which commissioned the study, may have wanted vouchers to come off badly because its bureaucratic inertia makes it resist systemic reforms like vouchers. Even the study's authors concede their results don't necessarily discredit vouchers. They note that the small edge displayed by voucher students in two of the six test areas could grow over time to a more significant advantage. And they say the Hope academies' weak showing could have many explanations, including growing pains associated with starting a new school.