Justices Back School Vouchers, Making Way for Vast Changes

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday. June 28, 2002 | JUNE KRONHOLZ and ROBERT S. GREENBERGER

[TroutStalker]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled that taxpayer money can be used to send children to private and religious schools, a decision that clears the way for the most sweeping change in America's public schools in generations.

By a single vote, the court ruled in favor of a school-voucher program in Cleveland, giving legal blessing to similar programs in a handful of states that offer vouchers to help pay for private-school education. The decision ensures that the voucher movement, which started a decade ago, now will ripple out to state legislatures, 12 of which have considered vouchers in their most recent sessions, and into Congress. The decision also appears to back school tax credits, an increasingly popular way for states to help parents move their children out of public schools.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Let the tidal wave begin.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I'd say the teachers union is down for a ten count.

[ppaul]

If it's constitutional for "some" families,
it's constitutional for all!

Okay everybody!
Line up at the feeding trough!
There's gonna be a feeding frenzy.
And, let's leave the bones of the government school carcass for the ACLU buzzards to feed on.

[concerned about politics]

Writing the 5-4 decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said that Cleveland's school-voucher program didn't breach the Constitution's wall between church and state because it offered "true private choice" among religious and secular schools and because it provides vouchers directly to parents rather than to religious schools. Public money "reaches religious schools only as a result of the genuine and independent choices of private individuals," he wrote.

That's exactly what pro-school choice supporters have been saying for years. PARENTIAL choice - something the public schools have been trying to remove from public schools as well!
Indoctrination cannot be 100% successful with parents in the way.
The greatest tool of the liberals is public education. It has become their training center.
What we need now is open school choice for everyone, so that no person is discriminated against because their local school district test scores managed to "get by", religion, or economic status.
This is one great, wonderful step in the right direction.
We can be truely thankful for this ruling. May God open all the doors to the freedom to chose the teachings WE feel are best for our children.

[concerned about politics]

BUMP

[WriteOn]

Not at all. If anything the local fights will become more intense, but they still have a tremendouse voting bloc.

[Lizavetta]

Question: If there's all of a sudden a huge supply of government money coming towards private schools, aren't those same private schools going to raise their tuitions as high as the market will allow? If this is the case, vouchers will not help people afford private schools, unless it's written into the voucher that the school cannot do that, which is called price controls and we all know how fab those are.

Question Two: What about the schools that refuse to take vouchers because they don't want the govt. rules and regs that go along with it? Suppose tuition is $3K a year, and the vouchers are for 2K. The voucher schools will cost parents 1K, the non-voucher schools will cost parents 3K. Which schools will thrive and which will die? When the voucher schools' competition is gone, they will raise their tuition because they can. Not only that, but the caliber of private schools left will be the government approved kind, the kind that bent over and accepted the government's requirements to make it an "approved" school.

[SuziQ]

By a single vote, the court ruled in favor of a school-voucher program in Cleveland

To me, this is the MOST important piece of information in the story; BY A SINGLE VOTE! It highlights the importance of Bush having won the election and even more, the necessity of getting Republican majorities in the House and Senate in the fall! This will give the President the ability to appoint Conservative judges to be able to turn back some of the more liberal rulings of the last 30 years!