WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Senate gave final approval Jan. 22 to a bill that includes the nation's first federally funded school-voucher program.
Senators voted 65-28 to approve the massive appropriations package, which comes four months late and includes funding for seven federal agencies. In November, Republican leaders in a House-Senate conference committee attached a provision to the bill creating a publicly funded scholarship program for low-income students in the District of Columbia.
The students could spend the scholarships at private schools, including religious ones.
The pork-laden bill was unamendable, so opponents of vouchers were not able to bring the issue to a vote separately from the other appropriations in the package.
Opponents of D.C. vouchers immediately lambasted the proposal in a Capitol Hill rally following the vote.
“We rally in opposition to the cynical and misguided action of an element in the Congress today to impose voucher legislation on the District of Columbia,” said Jeffrey Haggray, executive director-minister of the D.C. Baptist Convention, who emceed the rally.
Haggray is the father of two children in D.C. public schools. He also is chairman of the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, which opposes religious-school vouchers as a violation of the separation of church and state.
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), the District's non-voting delegate to Congress, derided the decision as a back-door way for pro-voucher legislators to impose an experiment on Washington schools that they are unwilling and unable to impose on their home school districts.
“If [the District] would have had representation in the Senate, this thing never would have gotten off of the table,” Norton said.
Norton was joined at the rally by Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who vowed to introduce legislation in the Senate to repeal the voucher provision, thus forcing a vote on the issue by itself.
“Today, a major battle has been lost,” Durbin said. “The real goal is to hold public education to a standard it cannot meet.”
The House narrowly approved a similar D.C. voucher plan — by a single-vote margin — in September. However, because of the controversy and a filibuster threat from Democratic voucher opponents, Senate Republican leaders removed the measure from the D.C. appropriations bill that passed separately Nov. 18.
Although conference committees are designed to hammer out differences between legislation passed by the House and Senate before both chambers give final approval, congressional leaders have wide latitude to insert extraneous measures into such spending bills.
The $13 million voucher measure provides per-pupil scholarships of up to $7,500 a year for low-income students in Washington. It also would provide $27 million in additional funding for traditional D.C. public schools and the District's many public charter schools.
The bill would authorize the voucher program for a period of five years. Supporters describe it as a “pilot” program, but Norton and other voucher foes say that is disingenuous because there would be no way to evaluate the voucher schools' effectiveness.
Because the program would not require the kinds of testing and evaluation of students in private schools that the government requires of public schools, Norton said, “even before this bill is implemented, there is no way to compare the children in the program to children in public schools.”
But voucher supporters — who have been attempting to create a voucher program in the District since 1995 — say the experiment is the only option to help students in a troubled school system.
“There is no question that D.C.'s moms and dads want and need this program,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Washington-based Center for Education Reform. “This is the biggest education accomplishment in this city in 20 years, and its leaders should be congratulated for being willing to stand up against enormous establishment pressure to keep business as usual in the schools.”
The vote also was a victory for President Bush, who has made support for vouchers a significant part of his education policy.
“I am pleased that the Senate has passed the omnibus budget bill, which fulfills important commitments like AIDS relief, education and D.C. school choice,” Bush said, in a Jan. 22 statement released by the White House. “I look forward to signing this bill into law.”
Although the majority of elected officials in D.C. oppose the voucher proposal, it gained momentum last year when Washington Mayor Anthony Williams (D) reversed his long opposition to vouchers and threw his support behind the legislation. He was joined by the city's school board president and a key city council member.
Williams is now the subject of a recall effort by a group of District residents, who cite his flip-flop on vouchers among their grievances against the mayor.
At the rally, Norton also said that anti-voucher groups were looking into mounting a court challenge against implementation of the program. She declined to say what legal grounds might be used to form such a case.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of an Ohio voucher program that included religious schools. However, voucher proposals have been met with consistent defeat at the ballot box in recent years.
The Washington program becomes the nation's first voucher scheme to be funded federally. Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Colorado already have state-funded voucher programs.
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