Our Brown v. Board

When Norman Rockwell drew his celebrated illustration of a black girl being escorted to school by federal marshals (see below), he ensured the focus would be on the child by showing no other face but hers. We hope that when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Cleveland's voucher program tomorrow, the justices once again focus like Rockwell on the children.

For in the nearly 50 years since Brown v. Board of Education, that decision's promise has been betrayed. Back when Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP brought that case before the court, segregation made African American children like Linda Brown second-class citizens in public schools. Today millions of them are still separate but unequal, but now the villains are the public bureaucracy, teachers unions and politicians who believe that as long as suburban voters are content with their schools, they can treat the fates of urban black and Latino students as so much collateral damage.

"The Problem We All Live With," by Norman Rockwell (1964)

For those who think we exaggerate, the circumstances that bring Zelman v. Simmons-Harris to the high court tomorrow speak volumes. Vouchers did not come to Cleveland because some right-wing cabal raised the Jolly Roger. They came because in 1995 a federal court, citing "emergency" conditions, ordered the state of Ohio to take over one of the worst school districts in America.

Looking over the educational and moral wreckage, the state decided on a modest experiment: Give parents the escape route of a voucher. Seven years later some 4,195 students now use these vouchers -- worth up to $2,250 -- to escape a school system so dysfunctional that nearly three-quarters of its children will never see a high-school diploma.

The protectors of the status quo then sued, because most of these parents used their vouchers in the only existing alternative market: religious schools, mostly Catholic. Never mind the research (on Milwaukee's voucher program by Harvard's Caroline M. Hoxby) showing that vouchers not only improve public schools, but that the improvement is greatest in schools that have the most students eligible for vouchers. Never mind, too, that the supreme courts of both Ohio and Wisconsin have upheld the constitutionality of their respective programs.

None of this matters to those opposed to the Cleveland experiment, because their driving force is not education but an inflexible secular orthodoxy. They insist that, because most Cleveland voucher kids ended up in the only schools open to them at the price, the state of Ohio is guilty of an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

The legal answer here is straightforward: The state isn't choosing religious schools, parents are. But the moral context ought to be equally compelling. In Brown, that argument centered on a separate-but-equal fiction that forced Linda Brown to walk 20 blocks to the all-black Monroe School when there was a perfectly good (but whites only) public school only a few blocks from her home. As loathsome as that system was, however, at least Linda Brown could learn to read and write at the Monroe School.

That isn't true in Cleveland. The most recent ratings show the city's public schools meeting only four of the state's 27 performance standards. Only about one-third of its fourth graders are proficient in math, reading and science. With whites having exercised their own choice by moving out to the suburbs, moreover, the Cleveland school system has essentially resegregated itself.

And it's not for lack of money. At about $8,000 per pupil, Cleveland's spending remains comfortably above the state average. The recent state "report card" showed that only a quarter of the school districts rated "excellent" were in the top 10% category for spending.

This is a pattern, of course, that has been repeated all over the country. According to the well regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress, two-thirds of African-American and Latino fourth-graders are functionally illiterate. Talk about disparate impact: That is twice the percentage for whites.

What makes this so alarming is that a child who isn't reading at level by that age most likely never will. Which leaves us with a public education system that is essentially writing off vast swaths of these children to futures outside the American Dream before they've even reached puberty.

Whatever this is, plainly it is not what the Court envisioned in Brown when it struck down the Jim Crow laws denying black children access to a quality education. The critics cry that upholding the Cleveland program would spell the end of public education. But the evidence coming in from the cities tells us that for today's Linda Browns, public education died long ago. Vouchers may be the only way to revive it.

Updated February 19, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST