Prochoice on schools.

The demands of justice, and the opportunity for success, call for strong Catholic action to promote educational choice. There are three parts to this argument.

The first is that the American church has an enormous and wholly legitimate self-interest in voucher-type aid to parents. Much of the character of that church is manifested in parental and church desire to offer to children educational environments informed by Roman Catholic values. The commitment to that ideal produced the great American Catholic school system, now being crushed in the educational vise of escalating costs, on the one hand, and the policy of public financing monopoly on the other. A brief look at the Statistical Abstract of the United States shows, for example, that in the last quarter-century the Catholic school population has fallen from approximately 11 percent of the total American school population in 1965 to approximately 5 percent now, even as the Catholic population increased as a percent of national population. And the greatest collapse in the Catholic school system, of course, is in the center of the major cities, where the only good education often is from such schools, and where the poor look most hopefully to religious schools for relief from the bleak horizon they otherwise have.

Many groups for many reasons have a large stake and interest in expanding educational choice and breaking educational monopoly financing, but no group has a greater stake than the American Catholic community. Insofar as it does not actively pursue it and insist on educational choice and a just distribution of state funds, the American Catholic community is actually betraying its obligations as a distinct element of American pluralism to speak clearly and strongly for its interests.

In addition to enlightened self-interest and knowledge of the injustice done to themselves, there is a second reality which should spur Catholics vigorously to seek educational choice. The great Catholic interest parallels an equally great national need for change. Finance monopoly in education has a deleterious impact on education itself, on its quality, and on the international competitiveness of the American educational product. It directly leads to the schools' inability to offer anything like rigorous ethical instruction or context. Public finance monopoly, moreover, is greatly responsible for escalating school costs and the property taxes which typically pay for them. And especially it deprives the poor of the freedom to educate their children in a chosen environment, a right now reserved only to those wealthy enough either to pay for it in the form of private school tuition, or to relocate to localities which provide more favorable educational experiences. Parental choice via vouchers, for example, would be the single greatest empowerment of the poor that one can imagine.

So, if Roman Catholics and their leaders would think about it, there is a powerful set of self-interest and general welfare political motivations calling them to join the struggle for political change in educational financing. Understandably, they should want the dollars now devoted to education to follow the parents and children to public or private schools of parental choice, rather than being assigned a priori to public institutions operating in a monopoly environment with predictably negative results.

But that is not all. Indeed, that is not what makes the issue so urgent at this time. The virtue of prudence tells responsible people that in deciding a course of action, they not only test abstract priorities, but also feasibilities. Is there, at present, a chance for educational choice to be enacted and achieved? Have circumstances surrounding the issue changed the likelihood of its achievement, made it more possible? That feasibility assessment provides the third and clinching reason for elevating educational choice from the crowd of issues.

There is growing awareness of the many problems which flow from current policy, as described above. There is growing recognition of the inner-city crisis, and the educational crisis at its core. There is growing concern for the long-range competitiveness of the American economy, weakened by poor educational achievement. The social constituencies interested in educational change are increasing. The constitutional obstructions, by which church-state fears have been used to block government aid to students and parents who want religiously based education, are now falling. The Supreme Court's Witters and Mueller decisions of the 1980s mean, as Laurence Tribe has put it, that any decently drafted voucher plan can today pass the constitutional tests. The Bush administration encourages change and is overtly dedicated to programs of educational choice. (Let no one imagine this to be a partisan plea, for the Democrats would be most welcome to outdo Bush and company on this vital matter. Indeed, the surest way to encourage Democratic motion in that direction would be for Catholics to express their expectations.) It is these changes which, cumulatively, strongly suggest that there is today a great opportunity for effective action. If Catholics become politically engaged, and link their strength to that of the other constituencies identified above, there is an excellent chance in the next five or six years to break the public monopoly of educational financing in the fifty states, and to achieve justice for Catholics and all others, especially the poor, with a stake in educational quality.

Quentin L. Quade is Raynor Professor of Political Science at Marquette University.