Vouchers are still very much of an educational experiment, affecting perhaps .1 percent of American schoolchildren. Only a couple of cities–Milwaukee and Cleveland–have large-scale programs. Polls show that most whites are indifferent to vouchers and are satisfied with their public schools. But vouchers are popular with some poor African-Americans and Hispanics eager to get their kids out of bad schools. This year a $200 million foundation set up by billionaire Ted Forstmann offered scholarships to allow 40,000 poor children to attend private school. Nationwide, 1.25 million applied. Numbers like that are provoking a crisis for the black leadership community. It has divided traditional civil-rights leaders, who violently oppose vouchers, from a small but growing band of grass-roots leaders who believe that only competition will force inner-city schools to reform.
Vouchers, their critics charge, will skim off the brightest children and drain desperately needed resources from public schools. Poor kids without involved parents will be left behind. Vouchers can never reach more than a small percentage of students. Shouldn’t the focus be on improving all public schools? All good arguments, but some civil-rights activists also see a plot. “Once people find out who’s really behind vouchers, they’ll see they’re a tool of the religious right,” says the Rev. Timothy McDonald, chair of the African-American Ministers Leadership Council, an organization set up to oppose vouchers. Christian academies, he adds, “are running out of money, so they want vouchers.” Even private voucher programs like Forstmann’s are suspect. Warns Carole Shields, president of the People for the American Way, a liberal lobbying group: “When you put venture capitalists and right-wing fundamentalists together, you can believe nothing good will come of it for the poor.”
Such statements are “paranoid,” says the conservative black writer Shelby Steele, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. So far, he notes, poor kids are the ones being helped most by vouchers. In Florida, a new voucher plan sponsored by Gov. Jeb Bush will award vouchers to students at the worst inner-city schools. Although the Miami chapter of the NAACP has gone to court to try to block the program, at least one local civil-rights leader, T. Willard Fair, chairman of the Miami Urban League, welcomes the Bush plan. He charges that the NAACP is in league with unionized teachers who see vouchers as a threat to their livelihoods. “Are the people stupid?” Fair asks. “Or are the leaders selfish?” The Rev. Floyd Flake, a former New York City congressman who is now pastor of the Allen AME Church in Queens, blames the teachers’ unions for intimidating lawmakers from inner-city areas. “They won’t get elected if they don’t toe the line,” says Flake. “The teachers’ unions give a lot of money.” (McDonald counters that money motivates the provoucher forces as well. He notes that Flake, who runs a church school, stands to benefit from new private-school funding ventures.)
The infighting between leaders does not mean much to parents who have to worry about their children’s schooling. Dianne Flourney, a postal supervisor in Detroit, peeked inside the recent antivoucher rally at Fellowship Chapel but decided not to stay. She sacrifices to afford private school for her son, but she thinks that poor parents who can’t foot the bill should have access to vouchers. With a nod at the gathering inside the church, she said, “I understand all the points they are making. But until they can get public schools to a higher standard, parents like me don’t have any other choice.”
