c. 2005 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Early in his first term, President Bush proposed a plan to provide federally financed vouchers to give low-income parents across the nation the option of sending their children to private schools, including religious ones.

Faced with strong opposition from Democrats and teachers unions, Bush settled for a $13 million pilot program limited to families in Washington, D.C. That move seemed to sidetrack the issue as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, war in Iraq and political battles took center stage.

But in a little-noticed section of his 2006 budget proposal, Bush is resurrecting his request for a nationwide $50 million “Choice Incentive Fund.” The idea, aides said, is to give private groups across the United States the chance to compete for federal money for programs that give parents more educational choices.

“This is exactly the time to do this,” said Mike Petrilli, associate assistant secretary of education. “The two big reform ideas today are parental choice and accountability, and they work together.”

With opposition still strong, prospects for Bush’s proposal may depend on the success of the pilot effort: Washington’s School Choice Incentive Program, the nation’s first federally financed voucher program. Washington has long had a troubled public school system on many levels.

It will be some time before the congressionally mandated assessments of Washington’s program are completed for the first 1,023 children to get vouchers worth as much as $7,500 each. Interviews with parents and school officials reveal positives as well as potential problem areas.

Some parents said that in the five months since their children entered private schools using the vouchers, they are reading better and, just as important, looking at school not as a chore but as a productive and even enjoyable experience.

Private school principals and administrators said some of their former public school students were two or three years behind grade level in reading and math skills when they first enrolled. But they said they’ve been pleasantly surprised by how fast the students have responded to classroom and individual instruction.

But federal officials were embarrassed when an anti-voucher group uncovered internal Education Department e-mails discussing potential negative reaction to the fact that 187 vouchers went to students already enrolled in private schools.

Katherine Hill, 66, who along with her husband is caring for her brother’s 7-year-old twins, said people shouldn’t pay so much attention to the politics of vouchers, but to “how the children getting vouchers are doing.” She said her nephew and niece are flourishing at St. Gabriel’s Elementary School.

“The big difference is class size. There are only 14 kids in a classroom, and the teacher has more time to work with those who need extra help,” Hill said. “My nephew could barely read, and now he’s reading very well and his handwriting is fine.”

Hill said she can’t understand why anyone would want to deny children an opportunity to better themselves.

“I know we can’t save all the children, but if you can save 1,000 or 2,000, well that’s a lot of kids who don’t have to worry about other kids giving them trouble,” Hill said. “Our kids all don’t want to be street sweepers and dishwashers. Some kids want to go on to college.”

Hill said she has had one major disappointment. Her 15-year-old grandson had to enroll in January in a public high school after she and her husband could no longer afford the tuition payments required above the $7,500 voucher to attend a prestigious Washington Catholic high school.

People for the American Way, a voucher opponent, said one of the problems with the Washington program is that the city’s top schools are still out of reach for many poor families because the vouchers cover only a portion of the tuition, or because of the stringent admission standards.

This, the group said in a report released this month, gives credence to fear that vouchers will cherry-pick the best students from public schools.

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Danny Hollinger, headmaster of the Rock Creek International School, one of the city’s elite private schools, with tuition approaching $18,000 a year, said his school has accepted 29 voucher students. The school takes the $7,500 voucher as full tuition payment with the exception of a one-time payment of $250 to show parental “commitment to the school.”

Critics shouldn’t fault schools like his for maintaining their admission standards, Hollinger said, because it would be unfair to accept students who can’t keep up with the rigorous curriculum. Rock Creek features an instructional day evenly divided between instruction in English and a foreign language such as French or Arabic.

April Walton, whose 5-year-old daughter attends kindergarten at the school thanks to the $7,500 federal voucher, said she’s delighted with her daughter’s progress.

“I have friends and great-nieces and nephews who attend D.C. public schools, and they tell me, `My child is not getting the education we want,”’ Walton said. “The classes are large and the equipment is falling apart and it’s tough to get the right books. I wanted something better for my daughter.”

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By far the largest participant in the new voucher program is the Archdiocese of Washington with its 24 schools. It has enrolled 600 voucher students, 60 percent of the voucher total.

“The perception that we just take the smart kids just isn’t so,” said Mary Anne Stanton, executive director of the Center City Consortium, which operates 13 of the archdiocese schools. “Our kids aren’t any smarter, but they are motivated and their parents are motivated. And that is a blessing and an edge.”

Stanton said the other big concern expressed by voucher opponents is that religious schools will proselytize, or discriminate against children who don’t conform to the church’s religious beliefs. That’s disproved, she said, by the 68 percent of the students at her 13 schools who are non-Catholic.

She quoted Cardinal James Hickey, the retired archbishop of the Washington Archdiocese, as saying, “We have schools because we are Catholic, not because the youngsters are Catholic.”

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