Cleveland focus of voucher debate
CLEVELAND — As Woodland Avenue runs east from downtown Cleveland, office towers, hotels and upscale restaurants give way to liquor stores, boarded-up storefronts and public housing in various states of disrepair in the city's Fairfax neighborhood.
This neighborhood and dozens like it here are ground zero in the one of the fiercest and most significant educational battles in decades: whether parents should get taxpayer-funded vouchers to send their children to private — even religious — schools.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide this summer whether Cleveland's voucher program violates the constitutional separation of church and state. If the court upholds the Cleveland program, it could become the model used by voucher proponents for a proposal in Pennsylvania. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge failed three times to get a voucher program through the General Assembly.
"One of the major objections whenever any type of school-choice legislation comes up is always the question of constitutionality. We hear from a number of legislators who say, 'We believe in school choice, we believe it might work, but we don't think it's constitutional,'" said the Rev. Kris Stubna, secretary of education for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, which has lobbied for vouchers in Pennsylvania.
The Ohio General Assembly created the voucher program in 1995. About 4,500 of Cleveland's 76,000 school students receive a voucher. Parents also can receive money to pay for private tutoring for their children. Including administrative expenses, the program costs about $15 million this year.
Supporters of vouchers say taxpayers should be free to choose their child's school. Critics say that vouchers siphon the best students from public schools and cut the amount of aid received from the state.
The record shows a mixed performance.
A study of the Cleveland program by the Indiana Center for Evaluation at Indiana University found that per-capita income was about the same for families of students who received vouchers and those who did not. Education experts regard family as the greatest determinant of academic success.
The evaluation center found that children who receive vouchers in kindergarten perform marginally better in school after three years than other pupils.
There's no dearth of passion on either side of the debate.
Blaine Griffin, a parent and community leader who moved from the suburbs so his family could be part of Cleveland's urban renewal, said he believes vouchers will destroy public schools, which he called a hallmark of vibrant neighborhoods.
"I think vouchers contribute to a deterioration of the last public right we have, a quality education," said Griffin, a program manager at the East End Neighborhood House, a community center in Fairfax.
Marna Leaks, who said her learning-disabled foster son is getting the kind of education in a small Catholic school that he couldn't even get in an affluent suburban school district, said a taxpayer should be able to choose any school for his child.
"They haven't gotten it right yet, so these children that come through here just have to suffer. People don't want their children to suffer," Leaks said.
Kim Metcalf, director of the Indiana Center for Evaluation, said the success of vouchers may not be measured by whether they are sound educational policy, but by how they fit into the role of public education.
"If the role of public schools is in fact to ensure that we provide a relatively homogenous education to everyone, then providing folks with choice is a bad idea because some people are going to make better choices than others," Metcalf said. "… If the goal of public schools is to give every family the opportunity to do what they believe is in the best interest of their children, then school choice is probably good educational policy."
A STRUGGLING SCHOOL SYSTEM
The voucher program, formally known as the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program, began in 1996, a year after the Ohio General Assembly voted to create it.
Parents can use the vouchers at private schools, including religious schools, which opponents say violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Last year, a U.S. appeals court struck down the program as unconstitutional, and Ohio officials appealed to the Supreme Court. The program is still in place, pending that appeal.
Children in kindergarten through the eighth grade are eligible for vouchers, which pay as much as 90 percent of their tuition, up to $2,250. The vouchers cost $7.5 million, which is deducted from the school system's annual state aid.
"The main problem it creates is pulling millions of dollars from public schools. Every day our teachers struggle to help our students succeed with the resources we receive, and our schools are starved for resources," said Meryl Trimble Johnson, second vice president of the Cleveland Teachers Union.
Griffin, his wife and three children moved here last year from suburban Warrensville Heights. His oldest son, Royce, 7, is a first-grader at Alexander Graham Bell Elementary School, across the street from the Griffins' home.
Griffin likes his son's school, although he said Cleveland's public schools could be better. Classes should be smaller, and parents need to be more involved, he said. He concedes that's a challenge in a neighborhood where two-thirds of children live in single-family households. If inner-city schools are crumbling, it's because the neighborhoods around them have crumbled, too, Griffin said.
The median household income for families in the Cleveland school system is $20,890, compared with about $29,000 statewide, according to the Ohio Department of Education.
"The public school is nothing more than a microcosm of the community around it," said Robert Bermetich, a fifth-grade teacher at Forest Hill Parkway Elementary School in Cleveland's Glenville neighborhood.
The Cleveland Municipal School District is twice the size of the Pittsburgh Public Schools. Over the past three school years, Cleveland's graduation rate has averaged about 34 percent, compared with about 81 percent for the state of Ohio.
In 1995, a federal judge took control of the district from its locally elected school board and handed it over to the state government, citing a budget deficit of nearly $30 million, deteriorating buildings and employee dissension. Two years later, the state turned control over to Cleveland's mayor.
The district's average scores on state achievement tests have improved over the past three years, but test scores lag far behind the average for the rest of Ohio. The state considers the Cleveland school district to be in an "academic emergency."
The program gives preference to children whose family income is at or below double the federal poverty level. That means a family of four, with two children, would have to earn about $36,000 or less annually. If money is left over, then families who earn more than that become eligible for vouchers.
PARENTS' CHOICE
Johnson, the union official, said it is hard to quantify how the voucher program cuts into classroom programs, but she said the average teacher in Cleveland is paid about $45,000.
Based on that figure, the money spent on the entire program could pay the salaries of two extra teachers at each of Cleveland's 121 schools, or four teachers at each of its elementary schools.
"We could use that money to make smaller classrooms," said Kelli McCorvey, a teacher at Gracemount Elementary School in the Lee-Harvard Seville-Miles neighborhood in the city's southeast corner.
Gracemount has 654 children. Kelli McCorvey's class has 24 pupils, which is small compared with some of the school's other classes. Her son, Quentin, is in a class of 30.
"I just don't really care for the Cleveland public schools. They're overcrowded; that's my main concern," said Yee Wu said, the mother of two pupils at Corpus Christi Elementary School. "There's not enough individualism. A lot of times with the smaller classes and the smaller schools, they have an advantage."
Corpus Christi is a Catholic school in the city's Old Brooklyn neighborhood, south of Downtown. The school has 103 students in kindergarten through the eighth grade. The kindergarten class has 11 children.
"I like the way they help me, and there's not too many kids in the classroom," said Deante George, 14, an eighth-grader at Corpus Christi. He's in a class of 14 students.
Deante is the foster son of Marna Leaks and her husband, Emanuel. They received a voucher to send him to Corpus Christi, a racially mixed school. The couple moved to Cleveland's Hough neighborhood almost two years ago from Shaker Heights, an affluent suburb. They moved to Cleveland to take advantage of a city program that offers generous financial incentives for people to build homes in Hough, which was ravaged by race riots in the 1960s.
In Shaker Heights, school officials wanted to stick Deante in a class with other learning-disabled students, Marna Leaks said. At Corpus Christi, he takes classes with typical students and earns B's and C's.
"Shaker Heights is purported to be one of the best (school districts) in the country. We're doing better in the Catholic schools," Leaks said.
Emanuel Leaks is a social worker with Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, and Marna Leaks lost her job in November as a technical trainer with Ernst & Young, a Big Five accounting firm. Without a voucher, they could not afford to send Deante to Corpus Christi, which costs about $2,800 annually.
Forty-five Corpus Christi students — almost half — receive vouchers.
"The vouchers go back to parents' choice, and I think that when you take that choice away, you're impinging on a parent's rights," said Rose Witmer, principal of Corpus Christi.
Voucher critics say the people who benefit the most from vouchers are parents who would have sent their children to private schools even without public assistance. Only 21 percent of voucher recipients during the 2000-01 school year previously attended Cleveland public schools, while 33 percent had attended private schools before receiving vouchers, according to Policy Matters Ohio, a Cleveland think tank.
The other 46 percent had entered the voucher schools as kindergartners or moved from another school district.
Johnson said vouchers are propping up Catholic schools that otherwise would be losing students. Corpus Christi, for example, used to have 170 students, until the parish raised tuition two years ago, Witmer said.
But for Witmer, who sent her own children to Catholic schools, the issue is about choice, and nothing else. The parents of Catholic schoolchildren pay taxes, too, and that gives them the right to choose the school they think is best for their children — and use tax dollars to pay for it.
Children need help now, Witmer said, and they can't wait for the Cleveland school district to fix its problems.
"These kids might be in college by that time, or they might be parents themselves by the time it's all done. I still believe parents have a choice."
