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- Contents:
- IN THIS REPORT
For the fourth year, this issue of the Freedom Report will provide readers a comprehensive look at the status of parental freedom across the nation. Readers have expressed strong interest in having such a benchmark each year. Also, this Report contains the concluding third part of the Editor's View on the church-state smokescreen, and David Kirkpatrick's identification of leading school choice organizations around the country.
Arizona - A bill which would have given an income tax credit worth up to $500 a year for contributions to a private school scholarship fund was rejected by the Arizona Senate, 16-14, late in February. The bill resurfaced in April, in the final days of the legislative session. As a rider to another bill, SB 1181, the proposal was approved on a 4-2 party-line vote by Republican majority members of a joint House-Senate conference committee. The Arizona legislative session ended April 20 without further action on the bill.
California - A voucher bill (AB 3180), sponsored by Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) and strongly backed by Governor Pete Wilson, was approved on May 31 by the Assembly with a vote of 41 to 35. The bill was part of a Republican-sponsored package of education measures, and was designed to allow students to qualify for "opportunity scholarships," provided that they are students at schools whose test results are in the lowest 5% of state scores. The scholarships would have been worth 90% of the state aid allotted to each pupil, or about $4,500, or the amount equal to the private school tuition at the private school of the parents' choice, whichever is less. In June the Democratic-controlled California Senate obstructed the effort. Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) proposed another bill in place of the one previously approved by the Assembly, which would have cost a total of $120 million a year and would throw $91 million in direct aid to troubled public schools. Lockyer's bill was approved by the Senate on a 23-12 vote, and sent to the Assembly. The Assembly and Senate were not able to reach consensus on either bill.
Connecticut - A last-ditch effort to give Connecticut parents genuine, although severely limited, school choice failed in the Connecticut House in late March. Following the recommendations of Governor John Rowland's School Choice Commission, which were released in February, voucher proponents had attempted to include a provision for genuine school choice in the Hartford public-school-only choice program called "Project Concern." All families would have been eligible to participate in the program, with low-income families given priority, and the value of the scholarships would have varied, depending upon the district. Since a joint committee on education failed to approve the provision by March 22, supporters had one week to obtain the 76 votes in the House necessary to have the proposal considered in this legislative session. The attempt resulted in a shortfall of 12 votes.
District of Columbia - On January 31 the U.S. House approved a compromise D.C. Appropriations bill, which included a limited voucher program for D.C. students. The vouchers would have been worth $3,000 for students below the poverty level and $1,500 for students up to 80% over the poverty level. However, all vouchers would have been distributed at the discretion of the D.C. Council. This effort was killed in the Senate on February 27 & 28. Senate leadership needed 60 votes to safeguard parental freedom (a small part of the District Appropriations bill) from threatened Democratic filibusters. They were able to muster only 54 and 52 votes, solid majorities, but insufficient to override filibusters under the Senate's anti-majority rules. In the U.S. House, Speaker Newt Gingrich battled until March 27 to keep Representative Steve Gunderson's voucher plan (see Educational Freedom Report #28) part of the House's D.C. budget proposal.
Florida - Representative Steve Wise was re-elected this November with 72% of the vote from his district, and he is under consideration for chair of the Florida House's newly organized education committee, the Academic Excellence Council. Rep. Wise considers his re-election and related matters as significant advances for school choice. Rep. Wise's office commented that the Florida legislature is in "great shape" for school choice. (Information provided by Gary Lieffers of Rep. Wise's office.) For more details, contact Gary Lieffers at 904-573-3925.
The 1996 Florida legislative session ended early in the morning on May 4 with the passage of a charter school bill (HB 403) that includes a section of Representative Steve Wise's school choice bill, the Public Education Enhancement Program (PEEP). (See Educational Freedom Report #33.) That section, which was section 2 of PEEP, requires each school district to develop a plan to give parents more choice among public schools through controlled open enrollment. With the passage of charter schools and controlled open enrollment, Florida has taken vital first steps toward this goal. Rep. Wise hopes PEEP will pass next year.
Georgia - This year two pieces of legislation were introduced that would have created school choice programs in Georgia based on the state's already-existing HOPE scholarship program. The HOPE program, funded by a state lottery, offers scholarships to "B average students" attending college. One of the two, drafted by Senator Pam Glanton and sponsored by the Georgia members of the Christian Coalition, would have allowed students with a B average to select which elementary and high schools they attend. Students choosing private schools, sectarian as well as non-sectarian, would receive a stipend from the state. Another, introduced by Representatives Bob Irvin and Kathy Ashe, would have targeted more specifically students from low-income families and from the worst-performing school districts. This second proposal would have offered scholarships worth $2,500 to 5,000 students, and would have been redeemable at public, private or religious schools.
Illinois - The "Educational Choice Act," a pilot school voucher program sponsored by Representatives Peter Roskam and Al Salvi, was removed from consideration in the Illinois House this month, being just short of passage. The bill is still alive and has support from Lee Daniels, Speaker of the House, and Pate Phillips, President of the Illinois Senate. The "Educational Choice Act" would provide vouchers worth up to $2,500 to students whose parents earn an income of up to 150% of the qualifying level for Illinois' federally funded meal program.
Iowa - Iowa has long had a Minnesota-like state tax credit for private school tuition costs. At the beginning of this year Iowa's school choice leaders managed to lift the value of that credit from the original amount, 5%, to 10% of the first $1,000 the taxpayer pays for tuition and textbooks in accredited schools. The maximum credit is $100 per child. School choice leadership led by the Iowa Catholic Conference, and assisted by Tim McCarthy and Bart Rule of the Conference's staff, are now proposing the introduction of a refundable tax credit proposal which would provide $500.00 to Iowa parents who choose independent schools for K-8 students, and $1,000 for grades 9-12. The Catholic Conference is pushing to pass the bill in the Iowa legislature next year.
Kansas - Representative Kay O'Connor, champion of school choice in the Kansas legislature, won her re-election with 80% of the vote this November. Rep. O'Connor said that the Senate in Kansas also picked up several school choice supporters, but aside from that the legislature remains basically the same. The state of Kansas, she believes, is ripe for greater school choice activity, and two things specifically are being done to rouse support in Kansas. First, Rep. O'Connor has been traveling across the state several times a week to speak on school choice. To Freedom Report readers she extends her offer/challenge to speak anywhere in the state of Kansas that she is invited, and at no charge besides perhaps a reimbursement for traveling expenses. Second, Citizens for Educational Freedom (CEF) in Kansas has been taking on new life, and Rep. O'Connor has high hopes for its future. For more details contact Rep. O'Connor at 1-800-277-6368 (ID# 3092), or by fax at (913) 764-4492.
Maryland - A school choice bill drafted by TEACH (Toward Educational Access through Choice) Maryland entitled the "Maryland School Resources Conservation Program" (HB 969), was introduced on February 2 by Delegate John S. Morgan. The bill featured a cash "rebate" to eligible parents or guardians who have elected to use an "out-of-district" public or non-public school, and would have been worth the amount of actual tuition or fees paid, reduced by the cost of any religious instruction provided by the school, up to a maximum of one-half the public school cost (3/4 for students with disabilities) costs in the jurisdiction of residence.
Also introduced earlier on January 10 by Senator Ferguson was SB 31, the "Income Tax Subtraction Modification for Tuition Paid for Private Elementary or Secondary Education," which would have enabled parents or guardians of children attending private elementary and secondary schools to lower the adjusted gross income on which their Maryland income tax is computed by the amount of tuition, up to a maximum of $3,000 per child.
Minnesota - On December 4 Governor Arne Carlson unveiled his education reform agenda, STUDENTS FIRST. In general, the plan aims to increase both parental freedom in education and school accountability. Along with other educational reforms, STUDENTS FIRST would introduce a $150 million tax credit and deduction program. Families with income below $39,000 would qualify to receive a tax credit of $1,000 per child in school. For all families, Minnesota's current educational expense tax deduction would be tripled and expanded to include additional educational costs. Home schoolers would also be eligible for a $1,000 tax credit. The program would also allow for the creation of charter schools, higher education savings accounts, and tecnhology initiatives.
Missouri - Several Missouri Senate bills which would have provided increased income tax deductions for dependents and for tuition and education fees passed Senate Ways and Means Committee, according to the Missouri Citizens for Educational Freedom. The deductions range from $800-$2,500 in the various proposals, and represent the sponsorship of Senators John Schneider (SB 480), Wiggins, Flotron, Scott, and Kinder (SB 484), Wiggins (SB 551), and Kenney (SB 639). Also introduced in the House by Representative Henry Rizzo and co-sponsored by Reps. Auer, Goward, O'Neil, Donovan, Boucher, and Kasten was HB 1037, which would have provided public or private school tuition scholarships to low-income families worth about $3,000 per student.
New Jersey - A pilot voucher proposal, recommended by Governor Christine Whitman's Advisory Panel on School Vouchers, was introduced in the New Jersey Assembly on October 21 by Assemblyman E. Scott Garrett. A. B. #2443 would appropriate $5.5 million to the Department of Education for the creation of the program. Parents with children in grades K-8 would receive vouchers worth $2,500 and parents with children in grades 9-12 would receive vouchers worth $3,500, and the vouchers would be redeemable at participating public and nonpublic schools.
New York - Although United New Yorkers for Choice in Education (UNYCE) reported in June the addition of another sponsor of the Maltese-Hikind bill, (See Freedom Report #30) they have since reported the loss of two supporters, one on account of the November elections and one, sadly, due to a sudden heart attack. Moving into 1997, school choice advocates count on a base of four senators and fifteen assembly members. During the 1996 session Senator Maltese, at the request of Attorney General Dennis Vacco, had introduced a bill to amend the statewide education law in order to include a "pilot project scholarship program," which would establish a school choice pilot in one school district in each county across New York.
North Carolina - Two school choice bills were introduced into the North Carolina House this year, but both died in committee. They were: H.B. 781, a "tuition grant" bill, and H.B. 954, a tuition tax credit bill.
Ohio - As approved by Ohio's legislature and local-court judiciary, the Cleveland Scholarship Program is underway. It provides up to 2,000 low-income K-3 students with vouchers worth up to $2,500. Vouchers can be redeemed at one of 51 participating private or religious schools. Parents must pay 10% or 25% of tuition at the schools, depending on their family income. More than 6,000 applied for the vouchers, and about 1,855 of students are participating in the program. The Cleveland Voucher Program is a two-year pilot program.
On Wednesday, July 31, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Lisa Sadler ruled that the legislatively-approved Cleveland school choice program does not violate the Ohio or Federal Constitution. The case pitted the state affiliates of the 2.2-million-member National Education Association, the 900,000-member American Federation of Teachers and the American Civil Liberties Union against the state of Ohio and the low-income families represented by the Washington-based Institute for Justice. Judge Sadler's ruling was mostly devoted to First Amendment issues, noting that the religion clauses of the Ohio Constitution are not more restrictive than the First Amendment.
Immediately after Judge Sadler's ruling, opponents sought an emergency injunction in the Ohio Court of Appeals, but on August 12, the three-judge panel delivered a one-sentence unanimous decision rejecting the injunction. The next level of appeal for an injunction is the Ohio Supreme Court.
South Carolina - In May Governor David M. Beasley introduced into the South Carolina Senate a constitutional amendment which would have provided tuition vouchers for kindergarten students in the state. The amendment was defeated on a vote of 27 to 13 on May 2. During the first year of the program, $1,765 full-day vouchers or $882 half-day vouchers would have been available to poverty-level families; during the second year, families between 100% and 185% of the poverty level could have received the vouchers; during the third year, all students would have been eligible.
Vermont - On August 29, the town of Chittenden filed a lawsuit, seeking a preliminary injunction to ensure that state funds will continue to flow into the town's school budget. Chittenden hopes to send 93 high school students to schools outside their town, including 15 students who wish to attend a religious school. Alleging constitutional problems, the State of Vermont has refused to allocate any general funds to Chittenden for education, even though the tuition of those who have chosen religious schools represents only 2% of the town's education funding pool. The Institute for Justice, representing Chittenden, hopes for a prompt resolution in the Vermont Supreme Court.
Virginia - Governor George Allen, whose "Commission on Champion Schools" recommended last January a limited opportunities grant program for parents with children in nonpublic schools, has appointed several people to the State Board of Education who are in favor of school choice.
Washington - Ballot initiatives 173 and 177 were defeated in the state of Washington during the November elections with sixty percent of Washington citizens voting against both initiatives. I-173 would have authorized tuition vouchers for non-sectarian private schools in the state, and I-177 would have authorized the creation of charter schools. Ron Taber, sponsor of I-173, does not consider these results a setback, since "political campaigns don't facilitate discussions over new concepts. Initiative 173 is a new idea, and it simply takes more time to explain it than we have in a political campaign."
Wisconsin - On March 29, the Wisconsin Supreme Court announced its 3-3 stalemate decision regarding the expansion of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to include religious schools—a measure approved by the Wisconsin legislature last June. This split decision sent the case back down to the Dane County Circuit Court, which had been bypassed in August at the request of Governor Tommy Thompson. Dane County Circuit Court Judge Paul Higginbotham then ruled on August 15 that the expansion of MPCP to inlcude religious schools is unconstitutional, which disallowed all religious schools from participating in the program for yet another year. Once Judge Higginbotham has finished with the case entirely, it will return to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, whose configuration has changed since the stalemate decision.
Announcement
¨ Marquette Univeristy,
and thus the Blum Center, will be closed the entire week of December 23-27
for the holidays. We would like to wish all of our readers a Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year!
Recent Acquisitions
¨ As noted in the November/December
issue of the Heartland's Institute's Intellectual Ammunition, Eugenia
Froedge Toma of the University of Kentuky published a significant study
in The Journal of Law and Economics, April 1996, entitled, "Public
Funding and Private Schooling Across Countries." The report concludes that
in five countries - Belgium, France, New Zealand, Ontario (Canada), and
the United States - public funding being used for private schooling had
not diminished the quality of the private education.
¨ The Iowa Catholic Conference has released a video aimed primarily at Catholic audiences, "School Choice: A Goal for Education in Iowa." It is extremely well done and worthy of attention from school choice advocates in any state. For copies of the video, please contact Bart Rule at the Iowa Catholic Conference: (515) 243-6256.
- In Part Two of this church-state smoke screen trilogy
we saw how religious values rightly enter the democratic political arena:
not as a church seeking to displace the state but in the hearts and minds
of citizens who happen to be believers. To see this is to see clearly the
truth of things: citizen-believers who judge that a political policy is
abhorrent to them have the same right to seek its abolition as does any
citizen. Citizen-believers who judge that a prospective policy is good
have the same right as any citizen to seek its enactment. When such
believers-as-citizens act accordingly, they are simply exercising their
political rights. To say those citizen-believers are somehow in that act
a "church" seeking to "impose" itself on society is, in truth, just an
effort to deprive believers-as-citizens of their political rights and capacities.
There is no clearer illustration of this perverse attack on citizen-believers' rights than the effort to block parental freedom in education on the grounds of "church-state violation." Having lost all rational, objective efforts to defend the indefensible educational finance monopoly (EFM) on educational grounds, EFM's defenders and their anti-religious allies end up saying (the Witters, Mueller, and Zobrest Supreme Court precedents to the contrary not withstanding) "Well, it's all moot, anyway, for school choice violates the Constitution's guarantee against church-state entanglements." That is the smoke screen of last resort. For in the effort to end finance monopoly and enhance parental freedom via school choice there is no church-state issue anywhere present. There are only these two contestants: on the one hand, EFM's defenders, guarding the funding spigot; and America's parents, deserving educational freedom to determine their children's educational environment, on the other. School choice, as practiced in enlightened democracies around the world, simply enables parents to fulfill their responsibilities. EFM, by contrast, says parents should be held fully responsible for their children — but deprives them of the ability to fulfill that responsibility. That is a radical injustice.
Parental freedom via school choice without financial penalty has no church-state dimension. It puts spending authority in the hands of parents, who are its beneficiaries. Where the parents decide to assign those dollars is entirely their choice, not the state's. If they choose a Waldorf or Montessori school, or a Baptist, Lutheran, Jewish, or Catholic one, they, not the state, are the actors and definers. If those schools incidentally benefit from the free acts of parents, so be it. In this they are indistinguishable from, for example, the incidental beneficiaries of social security check spenders or government pensioners, who may decide with their checks to enrich the local church, or the local grocery store — or the local pub. When those governmentally-dispensed dollars are freely assigned by the social security recipient, we do not say "but not to your church," or "not to your pub," because we know that government's aim was to help the citizen, by expanding his economic freedom.
And that is school choice: expanding parental freedom by relieving them of the severe financial penalty attaching to the choice of an independent school. That is not a "church" program. It is a program to enhance parents' freedom, secure their rights, and, in the process, end a humanly-destructive educational finance monopoly. Religiously-sponsored schools are, in reality, just part of the educational pluralism a freedom-loving society will produce if educational funding serves parents instead of EFM. To say that parents should not be free to choose such schools is to be actively discriminatory toward parents who happen to be believers. It is a kind of ultimate deceit, for what it says contrary to all rationality is that religious beliefs are unacceptable motives for action. The often implied reason: religious beliefs give rise to extreme conduct. But that is an insulting, gratuitous attack on religion and religious believers. If a person of religious convictions undertakes extreme action, and attempts to justify it by appeal to religious rights, the extremism should be stopped and punished, as should extremism of any sort from any source. But the enemy there is not religion. The enemy is extremism, whatever its source and defense. And to label religious motive a priori as invalid is simply to succumb to one of the worst prejudices known to man. As a wellspring and motive for a citizen's action, religion has the same validity and legitimacy as does any other motivation. Indeed, it is often more benevolent than many others. Democracy invites us to articulate our interests, including our interests flowing from religious motives, offer them in the public forum, and urge others, from whatever motivating inspiration, to join with us in framing a suitable policy adaptation.
The diverse social elements, or multiple constituencies, gathered around school choice are exactly that kind of political alliance of free people. To attempt to blind them and innocent bystanders with church-state smoke screens is to be guilty of anti-religious prejudice. Citizens who are religious believers have every citizen's right to bring those religious values fully to bear on American politics in every state and the nation. They do that whenever they say a given policy — school choice, for example — satisfies their priorities, and in so doing they are fulfilling the citizen's obligations as well as exercising his rights.n
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The Blum Center grants full permission for all of its documents to be copied, in part or in whole, to extend the reach of the Center's messages and information. We appreciate it when our readers keep us apprised of state and national developments in the area of school choice, particularly legislative developments. Any Blum Center documents not available on our web page may be obtained by contacting us by telephone, fax, or mail. Virgil C. Blum Center for Parental Freedom in Education |
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