Schools, Vouchers, and the American Dream.

Schools, Vouchers, and the American Dream by Terry M, Moe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001); 452 pp.; $29.95 cloth.

Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is sometimes referred to as the Baptist Harvard. Its J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, probably the finest institution in the world dealing with that subject, produces the excellent quarterly Journal of Church and State and generates a steady stream of quality books on church-state issues. The institute is named after J. M. Dawson, the first director of the Baptist Joint Committee in Washington, D.C., which does a superb job of lobbying for religious liberty and church-state separation.

The Brookings Institution is a D.C.-based think tank with a liberal reputation. However, over the last decade or so it has published a number of books on church-state issues of the sort that one might expect from the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation or televangelist Pat Robertson's outfit.

Welfare Reform and Faith-Based Organizations is composed mainly of papers presented at a Dawson Institute symposium on charitable choice held at Baylor in 1998. A key feature of the book is a long essay on "The Neutral Treatment of Religion and Faith-Based Social Service Providers: Charitable Choice and Its Critics" by Carl Esbeck. Esbeck is the Missouri lawyer tapped by former senator and current U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to be the main architect of the 1996 welfare "reform" law, with its charitable choice provisions, sponsored by Ashcroft. Esbeck is currently a big shot in Ashcroft's Justice Department.

Esbeck's essay, quite simply, is a detailed legal blueprint for slowly destroying--rather in the manner of a boa constrictor killing its prey--the establishment clause of the First Amendment. And with justices like William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court--not to mention the court appointments being considered by George W. Bush--the strangulation process is already under way.

Fortunately, Esbeck's arguments are effectively countered in pieces by Dawson Institute's director Derek Davis, law professor Alan Brownstein, former Baptist Joint Committee counsel Melissa Rogers, and attorney Julie Segal. The symposium covers both sides of the issue and Davis' concluding essay, "Right Motive, Wrong Method," is one of the best defenses of church-state separation I have read.

As for Brookings' author Terry Moe, I must disclose that I clobbered him in a debate several years ago on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation show on the subject of his 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, a propaganda clunker touting school vouchers. Moe's new book--hot off the press--is more of the same tired nonsense. Far from being a "careful, thoughtful analysis that will stand up to scrutiny," as Moe claimed recently in Education Week, the book is a bizarre, meretricious screed oozing hostility toward public education and church-state separation and hell-bent on promoting school vouchers at the cost of honesty, logic, and fact. It's about what one might expect from a "study" funded by such right-wing foundations as Bradley, Olin, and Walton.

Moe's 452-page, 1.75-pound masterpiece of obfuscation is long on market theory (which has little bearing on what school finance controversies are really about) and exceedingly short on any acknowledged awareness of the ways that nonpublic schools tend to be radically different from public schools. He ignores the important findings of the 1998 U.S. Department of Education study, Barriers, Benefits, and Costs of Using Private Schools to Alleviate Overcrowding in Public Schools, a serious report that makes clear the selective, discriminatory, and pervasively sectarian nature of most nonpublic schools. (My summary of the report, an article entitled "Give Us Your Money" in the Phi Delta Kappan, is available from the American Humanist Association.)

Central to Moe's book is a poorly concocted, misleading 1995 poll that, among its many flaws, conflates public school choice, which is popular, with vouchers, which aren't. Moe tries to explain away the seven two-to-one voucher referenda defeats of the past decade in California, Oregon, Washington state, Colorado, and Michigan--while failing even to mention the nearly twenty similar defeats for vouchers or their analogs over the previous twenty-five years--but it doesn't work. Analysis of county voting results in five of the referenda states of the last decade (conducted by Al Menendez of Americans for Religious Liberty) shows a remarkable consistency of public opposition to vouchers across the socioeconomic, religious, urban-suburban-rural, and ethnic spectra.

Moe has nothing to say about the enormous fiscal or social costs of vouchers and evinces not the slightest spark of interest in what our public schools really need: more adequate and more equitably distributed funding, repair and replacement of worn-out buildings, smaller classes (about fifteen children) in the lower grades, and more attractive teacher compensation.

Edd Doerr is author, coauthor, editor, or translator of nineteen books,

including The Case Against School Vouchers.