George W. Bush, in his first legislative initiative as president, unveiled his proposals for reforming public education. In doing so, however, he again proved that he is out of step with the majority of Americans by backing vouchers-- a scheme that would use tax dollars to subsidize public student tuition at private and parochial schools.

Like Bush, most voters have soundly rejected the idea of tax-supported vouchers. Government-funded vouchers or tax credits for private education have recently appeared on state ballots 10 times. In all 10 instances, the voters easily defeated the ballot initiative. In the last election, well-financed measures appeared on the ballot in California and Michigan. Voters in Michigan rejected the proposal by a 2-1 margin. In California, a $30 million campaign was launched to provide $4,000 for any child, regardless of economic status, to attend private school. Only 30 percent of the voters favored the measure. In the face of such rejection, the Bush administration, including the secretary of education, has adroitly stopped using the term “vouchers,” but is pressing ahead with the idea anyway.

“Vouchers are just a Band-Aid to cover just a small section of the problem,” Henry Duvall, a spokesman for the Council of Great City Schools, told the Associated Press. “The public realizes there are better ways to improve public education.”

Vouchers are a cruel hoax. They appeal to frustrated parents with students in urban school systems. In theory, the idea is to prod public schools into better performance by threatening them with the prospect of their students leaving for private schools that will give them the kind of education that public schools have failed to provide. That’s the theory.

In reality, such a move would only make bad schools districts worse by robbing them of many of their brightest and most motivated students. In the process, money would be diverted from strapped public schools to more affluent parochial and private schools.

Students who transfer from public schools under voucher programs usually attend religious-affiliated schools, not the elite prep schools such as the ones attended by George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Moreover, even if private and parochial schools enrolled the maximum number of students from public schools, less than 10 percent of the students would be affected. That means that more than 90 percent of students still would remain in public schools. And the question would still remain: How do we provide a quality education for a majority of our students who will be enrolled in public schools?

The question of whether public tax dollars can be used to subsidize religious schools is one that will be decided at some point by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case most likely to make it to the High Court, Simmons-Harris v. Zelman, emanates from Cleveland. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District ruled late last year that Cleveland’s school voucher program was unconstitutional because it shifted government funds to religious schools, thus violating the First Amendment’s provision for separation of church and state. The appeals court noted that 96 percent of the nearly 4,000 students who received the $2,500 per year vouchers attended church-subsidized schools. A year earlier, another federal appeals court in Boston issued a similar ruling.

Aside from the important legal issues, the success of transferring students from public to parochial and private schools has been exaggerated. Publicly funded voucher programs are in effect in Cleveland and Milwaukee. Privately funded programs exists in more than a half-dozen cities, including New York, Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

An evaluation of the first five years of the voucher program by a professor at the University of Wisconsin showed that once adjustments were made for background and courses taken, there was no significant difference between the accomplishments of private and public school students.

A state-sponsored study of Cleveland’s voucher program for the first year by Indiana University found no significant difference between the academic achievement of students in public schools and those participating in the voucher program. A study of the second year found no significant difference in math, English, science and social studies and only a slight advantage for voucher pupils in language arts.

What has been passed off as the success of voucher programs often has less to do with vouchers and more to do with other factors, such as smaller classes. In fact, public schools can offer a first-rate education to students if they offer smaller classes, modernize schools and have teachers instruct in the areas they have been certified to teach.

“The Gallup Poll on education [in August of 1999] found that three-quarters of Americans would rather improve their public schools than provide vouchers for private and religious schools,” says Bob Chase, president of the National Education Association (NEA). “For a fraction of the cost of a voucher, we can put struggling students in smaller classes, where all of them - not a select few - will learn to read, write and compute at a higher level.”