The Ohio Pilot Scholarship Program

The first 200 words of this essay...

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court favorably decided a case so fundamentally about freedom that its very adjudication was hard to believe.

It involved an experimental Cleveland program offering low-income children scholarships to attend either public or private schools. Your education, your choice - what could be more straightforward? Yet it was not just opposed, but vehemently so, by the public education industry. This opposition raises two questions: Why is the public education industry so opposed to this particular experiment and why are they so generally liberal?

The answer to both questions has more to do with economics than education.

Begun in 1996 because of unrelenting mismanagement in Cleveland's public schools, the Ohio Pilot Scholarship Program offers low-income children up to $2,500 annually through eighth grade to pay either a private or on an out-of-district public school's tuition. No out-of-district public schools chose to participate, so in the 1999-2000 school year all 3,761 students participated attended private schools. Because 96 percent of program students chose to attend church-affiliated schools, it was hauled before the courts on the grounds of violating the Constitution's establishment of religion clause under the First Amendment.

The federal government's