Ruling puts to rest the debunkers' claims against vouchers

It is the most important school case, and perhaps the most important judicial advance in civil rights, since Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, 48 years ago. It is Zelman vs. Harris-Simmons.

Is a Cleveland school-voucher program unconstitutional simply because 96 percent of the parents took $2,250 in voucher funds and used the money to send their children to parochial schools? Or because 82 percent of the schools choosing to participate happen to be religious in character? No, said a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court this week in a ruling predicted in this space many times over the last decade. As that great civil rights leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, once thundered while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we're free at last!

My friends on the editorial board at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch responded on cue, decrying the ruling in an editorial entitled "Taxes for churches."

Well, no. As with the hysterical high-court dissenters -- two Clinton appointees and two Republican appointees who are perhaps the worst GOP mistakes of the past quarter-century -- the Post editorial writers just don't get it: As long as the money flows to parents who freely and without the slightest coercion choose the school, there is nothing here that comes close to violating the First Amendment prohibition against establishing a state church.

State money flows into all kinds of private institutions. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, Pell grants go to students who can use them anywhere, and Medicaid funds go to Catholic hospitals. Are these instances of "taxes for churches"? The GI Bill of Rights, perhaps the most successful piece of social legislation of the 20th century, allowed government scholarship funds to go to the recipient for the school of his choice, public, private, or parochial. No one raised a constitutional objection. And public institutions weren't put out of business merely because a recipient could choose to attend Holy Cross or Southwest Baptist, St. Louis University or Yeshiva. On the contrary, our public institutions of higher education were forced to make themselves choiceworthy and able to compete. That's the American way. Our higher education is world-class.

Our K-12 system isn't. It's nearly 20 years since the U.S Department of Education's "A Nation At Risk" report decried a "rising tide of mediocrity," declaring that "if a foreign power" had done to us what we've allowed to happen in our schools, we would deem it "an act of war."

Echoing the teachers unions, the Post's answer remains the same: More money. (In the landmark 1998 desegregation bill, this writer cast a risky vote for more money for Missouri's urban schools. Spare me the lecture.)

Interesting folks, those teachers-union bosses: Studies have repeatedly shown that teachers-union members in large urban districts are far more likely than the general population to have their children in private schools. Would you choose to dine at a restaurant where neither the owner nor the chef nor the wait staff eats?

Even the four dissenters conceded that the record indicates the Cleveland schools "are failing to serve their objective" and that, if anything could excuse vouchers, such failure does.

As forecast in this space five years ago this month, the smokescreen of unconstitutionality is blown away. Time to redouble our efforts on the great civil-rights issue of our time.

Peter Kinder is assistant to the chairman of Rust Communications and president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.