Pro-choice Victory: Supreme Court OKs School Vouchers

The narrow ruling is also expected to give new life to President Bush's proposal to make school choice part of national education policy. The decision drew harsh dissents from the court's four leftists.

The case involved a school voucher pilot program in Cleveland that a lower court had deemed unconstitutional. Thursday's Supreme Court ruling reversed the lower court.

Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said, "We believe that the program here is a program of true private choice" because parents could choose to use the vouchers to send their children to secular or religious schools.

"Any objective observer familiar with the full history and context of the Ohio program would reasonably view it as one aspect of a broader undertaking to assist poor children in failed schools," Rehnquist said, "not as an endorsement of religious schooling in general."

The chief justice acknowledged that 82 percent of the schools participating in the Cleveland program are religious schools, "but it is also true that 81 percent of private schools in Ohio are religious schools."

Rehnquist conceded that 96 percent of the students participating in the private school portion of the voucher program go to religious schools.

That figure does not take into account those students who are financially helped by the program to enroll in non-traditional government schools such as magnet schools, or those offered tutoring in regular government schools through the program.

Including those students bring the religious school students down to 20 percent of those being helped by the program, Rehnquist said.

"In sum, the Ohio program is entirely neutral with respect to religion," the chief justice said later in his opinion, because it allows a choice between private and government, religious and secular. "The program is therefore a program of true private choice."

Rehnquist and fellow conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were joined by two key swing votes, moderate conservative Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy.

O'Connor and Thomas also wrote separate concurring opinions.

Leftist Justice John Paul Stevens dissented.

Stevens asked rhetorically, "Is a law that authorizes the use of public funds to pay for the indoctrination of thousands of grammar school children in particular religious faiths a 'law respecting an establishment of religion' within the meaning of the First Amendment?"

He failed to mention the government schools' "indoctrination" of millions of children in secular equivalents of religion, such as one-sided environmentalism and

Claiming the majority's ruling was "profoundly misguided," Stevens cited religious strife across the globe. "Whenever we remove a brick from the wall designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of our democracy [sic]."

The United States, of course, is a constitutional republic, not a "democracy" – a fact most government schools fail to teach.

Stevens's fellow leftists, Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissented in separate opinions.

Souter called the decision "potentially tragic."

In the case decided Thursday, everyone agrees that Cleveland's government schools were utter failures in the early 1990s, so much so that a federal judge placed the city's school district under the control of the state superintendent in 1995. In response, the Ohio Legislature enacted a pilot program of vouchers.

Only the Cleveland area was eligible under the program's provisions.

For poor families, the program provided up to $2,250 a child, a fraction of the amount spent per pupil on government schools. If there was money left over, higher-income families were granted $1,875 a child, as long as that amount covered 75 percent of the tuition.

In the 1999-2000 school year, 56 private schools participated in the program; 46, or 82 percent, were religious schools. Of the 3,700 students participating in the program that school year, 96 percent attended religious schools.

Several parents and government school students filed suit against the Ohio program. They said it violated the First Amendment's ban on congressional establishment of religion.

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against implementation of the program. The Supreme Court eventually stayed that order.

The judge then ruled for the challengers. A federal appeals court upheld the judge. It pointed out that the program mainly helped students attend religious schools and said that the restrictions on funding made religious schools the only type of private institutions that could afford to participate.

Cleveland then asked the Supreme Court for review. After hearing argument in February, the Supreme Court majority sided with Ohio officials Thursday.

The majority decision reverses the appeals court.

(Nos. 00-1751; 00-1777 and 00-1779, Zelman vs. Harris etc.)