Many black leaders compare the push for access to a quality education as the natural evolution of such historic campaigns as voting rights and other key civil rights issues. How to achieve such academic equality is an issue that appears to be dividing that community, however, with young black activists pushing for publicly-financed school vouchers even as other civil rights leaders say the key to success is improving public schools, the New York Times reports.

"It's one of the last remaining major barriers to equality of opportunity in America, the fact that we have inequality of education," Cory A. Booker, a Newark, N.J. city council member, told the newspaper. "I don't necessarily want to depend on the government to educate my children —- they haven't done a good job in doing that. Only if we return power to the parents can we find a way to fix the system."

A few years ago the 31-year-old Booker would have been regarded as a political oddity: a black Democrat who advocates a program traditionally supported by conservative white businessmen. But Booker is a Rhodes scholar who says educational choice is one of his generation's main priorities. And while he supports public school improvement, Booker also believes programs that let poor parents choose where their children will learn represent the best short-term solutions to the problem, the Times reports.

Pro-voucher groups such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) are drawing support from many black families around the nation who see the "white flight" from local schools to the suburbs and/or private schools, and the results this flight has on the local tax base, educational budgets and other issues.

Only three cities -- Cleveland, Milwaukee and Pensacola, Fla. -- offer publicly funded voucher programs, and results from those efforts are inconclusive. This hasn't stopped concerned parents and activists from pushing the cause onto state legislative agendas around the country, the Times reports.

This rush to embrace an unproved strategy promoted by groups formerly considered as antagonists has many long-time civil rights leaders calling for caution.

"Many of the interests that are suggesting privatization of public resources and vouchers are the very forces that have helped to thwart the kind of meaningful education that Brown (vs. the Board of Education) promised," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, referencing the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that desegregated public schools. "Quality education can best be provided with high-quality public institutions. We're committed to their establishment, restoration, revitalization."

In addition to moving attention away from improving public schools, the new voucher programs can lead low-income parents into a "trap" created by too few private school openings or high tuition that isn't fully covered by most voucher proposals, Henderson said.

Another issue is that talk about free-market solutions moves responsibility for social action away from the government, which is more accountable to the public, said Terence Baine of the Newark National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

"I just believe you can't have a financial incentive in public education -— it's scary," Baine told the newspaper. "It's really like a way of government walking away, giving up. Disgusting."

The economic component of the voucher movement, however, is a key part of any future civil rights action, said Omar Wasow, blackplanet.com's executive director.

"The black freedom struggle has fundamentally been about trying to produce a society where black individuals have as much freedom and agency as white Americans," Wasow said. "As long as black people are trapped in failing public schools, we will never achieve the kind of dignity and power that has been the central cause of the black freedom struggle for more than 200 years."

Full text of the article is currently found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/
09/national/09VOUC.html