Why Religious Neutrality in Education Requires Vouchers
Written by Lancelot Finn (Spring 2002)
The case of Cleveland’s voucher program, which has recently reached the Supreme Court, is frequently compared to Brown vs. Board of Education. Race relations and education are once again the stakes in what may prove the most influential case since the 1954 landmark decision which outlawed school segregation.
The public schools of Cleveland featured in writer Jonathan Kozol’s chilling 1996 expose, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Facilitaties are falling apart. Teaching is abysmal, learning is squeezed out by crime. Dropout and crime rates are high and rising. Schools are recruiting grounds for gangs. Desperation to escape failing public schools fueled support for Cleveland’s Scholarship and Tutoring program. The program provides vouchers for poor children to attend private schools.
It is no exaggeration to say that stagnant public schools are the root of racial and class inequality in America. Americans take improvement—better gizmos, rising productivity—for granted. Some sectors progress faster than others, of course. Electronics has advanced much more than haircutting has—yet even the barber now uses electronic clippers along with his scissors. Education is a gaping hole in this record of improvement. There has been public anxiety, indeed, that average SAT scores (a narrow indicator, but easy to measure and compare across time) are even falling.
Public school stagnation should not surprise Americans. We won the Cold War because the Soviet command economy could not achieve sustained systemic improvement. America’s command economy in education shows the same, inevitable, Soviet characteristics—fads and five-year plans, ineffective top-down directives, persistent and worsening under-performance.
The burdens of stagnation are unevenly distributed. Some suburban schools are well-funded and high in quality, while many inner-city schools, such as Cleveland’s, utterly fail in their mission. One reasons is that public schools are funded by property taxes, which generate ample revenue in pricey neighborhoods but nil in the slums. But the problem goes beyond money.
The upper-middle class largely means the knowledge class. Well-educated parents act as role models and mentors for their children, creating advantages not only for their children but for the academic environment of their children’s schools. Pushy parents are a partial substitute for market pressures. A rigid public school system—as opposed to the genuinely “open society” of capitalism—allows these schools to close their doors to inner-city minorities. Meanwhile, the middle class supplements stagnating public schools with summer camps, SAT courses, and college.
College is the norm, and graduation a given, at many suburban public high schools. In inner-city high schools, graduation is a rarity, college a pipe dream. High dropout rates among blacks, too often seen as a symptom of culture, are better viewed as a rational choice—where schools are miserable to attend, facilities inadequate, intellectual role models absent, and hopes for college education and its benefits scant, staying in school is not worth it.
Catholic schools show that another way is possible. Established by ethnic groups such as the Irish and Italians, inner-city Catholic schools were left behind as these grew richer and moved to suburbs. Ironically, many inner-city Catholic schools now serve mainly black students, hardly any of them Catholic, though they are often devoutly religious. Others, appropriately, serve mostly Hispanic students. Academic achievement in these schools, though modestly better than in the public system, disappoints some voucher-pushing economists. But there are more important kinds of efficiency. Catholic schools have much higher graduation rates than public schools, and far less crime. (The last is the least surprising. A comparison of Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton illustrates, in a word, the superior credentials of the Catholic Church to the U. S. government when it comes to moral education.)
Too often, this bleak picture evokes the oft-chanted refrain, “fix the public schools!” When will we face the fact that it can’t be done? Fixing the public schools is like carrying water in a sieve. Just as a sieve does not have the structural features necessary to carry water, a public school system does not have the structural features—competition, customer choice, entrepreneurship, hard budget constraints—to achieve improvement.
Suburbanites’ willful blindness in insisting on “fixing the public schools” may reflect the fact that the failure of inner-city schools is convenient for them. As long as minorities are trapped in failing public schools, they won’t compete with suburban youngsters for places in colleges; better yet, they will remain in the underclass, available to wash dishes and drive garbage trucks. Cleveland has had enough. You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Large majorities of young blacks nationwide reject teachers’ unions’ propaganda and support vouchers.
Class, race, a poverty trap and the hope of escaping it are the motivating forces behind the Cleveland vouchers case. But religion is the hang-up. Opponents of vouchers argue that providing public funds to religious institutions is a violation of separation of Church and State, which requires religious neutrality. They have it precisely backwards.
Why? I’ll start with the familiar creation—evolution debate. I want to state first of all that I am no seven-day creationist. I am an incorruptible freethinker, who would sooner cut off my hand than believe something merely because the Bible told me to. However, many Americans do believe in the literal truth of the Bible, and it is absurd for schools to assert the principle of “religious neutrality,” then turn around and teach them evolution, which directly contradicts their beliefs.
Advocates retort that evolution is “fact.” This begs the question. Some think evolution is fact, while others think it is falsehood—that is what is at issue in the first place. Anyway, if evolution is fact, then some people’s religions oblige them to deny fact, and fact is therefore not religiously neutral, so take your pick—“fact,” or religious neutrality?
A “religiously neutral” curriculum is a meaningless concept, a non-idea. Any attempt to compile and propagate the basic truths that the young need to know (a curriculum) contains a worldview, mores and moral attitudes, and an interpretation of history and the human condition (a religion.) In the case of the public schools, this religion has been aptly described as “secular humanism.” Like everyone else, secular humanists believe—this is almost a tautology—that their beliefs are true, i.e. “fact,” but unlike other faiths, they expect the courts to force their opinions on the public. I disagree. The idea of courts deciding what is the truth reminds me of the Inquisition—indeed, “inquisitorial” is a good description of the rigor with which God is excluded from public education.
If there is no such thing as a religiously neutral curriculum, how are we to implement mass compulsory education without violating the separation of church and state? This is where vouchers come in. Citizens would vote via voucher for the kind of education they want their children to receive. Vouchers amount to direct democracy in education. They take existential questions away from the courts, and allow the state to achieve true religious neutrality.
Will the Court see this? Probably not, but it may make progress.
The Court may succumb to elite opinion and rule against the state of Ohio. Once in power, justices are often heavily influenced by the intelligentsia, which has a vested interest in the current system since it has the opportunity to enforce its own creed. Such a decision, like Plessy vs. Ferguson, might set back the causes of minority rights for a generation. More likely, it will take the middle road by recognizing that, considering that public money goes to religious hospitals, charities and universities, purchasing social services from religious institutions is constitutional.
The boldest decision, which would join Brown vs. Board of Education in the annals of courageous judicial activism, would be to declare the right to education their children in a way one deems consistent with one’s beliefs should not be reserved for the rich. If the state sees fit to finance schools imbued with a secular humanist creed, it must be ready to provide education for schools that follow other creeds—otherwise, by biasing one creed over the others, the state is “respecting an establishment of religion.”
Like Brown vs. Board of Education, which was not fully implemented until the Nixon Administration, this decision would take effect only over the course of years or decades. Eventually, the public schools would probably come to look like the university system, with high levels of choice and achievement, and a religious profile predominantly secular but also representing the whole range of degrees and varieties of religiosity. It would be a system far more appropriate to a diverse, dynamic America.