Indeed, vouchers are now a political ping-pong ball. The latest examples came last month when voters in Michigan and California rejected voucher plans on ballot initiatives. And next month, George W. Bush can be expected to pursue his plan to offer federal money for vouchers to students whose schools repeatedly fail to meet standards. Such political actions show why the issue of vouchers should be everyone's concern, especially when the Supreme Court is moving fast in its evolving reasoning on church-state separation. Talk about it.
Vouchers seem attractive because they offer a choice for students stuck in bad public schools.
But that freedom of choice must be balanced against the freedom of religion - which includes not letting government favor one religion over another by effectively subsidizing instruction in religiously based schools. In some places, vouchers still are experiments in education, testing not only the Constitution but the social compact that binds communities in caring for the schooling of all children. Many states are choosing to bring more choice into education by funding charter schools that operate within the public system but are free of many bureaucratic and curricular constraints. Meanwhile, experts are trying to design religion-free voucher plans that direct voucher money only to secular nonpublic schools. Vouchers are on the legal frontier in the continuing constitutional and political struggle over how much Americans can mix their government with religion.