|
|
March 19, 1999/2 Nisan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 25
What's right with vouchers
2 Sides
Jews ought to support vouchers, tuition tax credits and other programs that would expand school choice. Yet organizations such as the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which do not oppose Jewish education or separate Jewish schools, have been firmly opposed to government programs to support education in religious schools - even when the support goes to parents who then can choose what schools are best for their children.
There seem to be two main grounds of opposition. On the one hand, there is skepticism that many more Jewish parents would send their children to separate Jewish schools, even if some form of public funding made them more affordable. On the other hand, there is concern that government aid to - or "entanglement" with - religious schools would foster a more religious atmosphere in the country, which would be, in practice, a Christian atmosphere, hence marginalizing to non-Christian groups. Many Jewish organizations are staunch advocates of public education, seeing it as a guarantor of a common public culture, which ensures tolerance for religious minorities.
These assumptions and concerns are, I believe, misplaced in contemporary America. But they still need to be confronted. It may be useful, however, to start with some common ground on why the encouragement of Jewish schooling would be a good thing for the Jewish community on its own terms.
Demographic trends showing decreasing Jewish knowledge and practice and increasing rates of intermarriage are so disturbing that even the traditionally liberal Jewish advocacy organizations have recently begun demanding programs to preserve "Jewish continuity." Studies show that the most effective program is Jewish education. Children who receive a more thorough Jewish education are far better equipped to participate in Jewish religious practice. When they grow up, they tend to take their religious obligations more seriously and to play a more active or committed role in the Jewish community, and more of them tend to marry Jews.
So why shouldn't Jews support public policies that would allow more Jewish children to attend Jewish day schools and become more committed Jews?
The day school movement is expanding, despite tremendous financial burden. The growth of Orthodox day schools has been extraordinary. In 1945 there were only 69 schools; by 1975, 425; and today, 731. And, although their enrollment is much smaller, non-Orthodox day schools represent a dramatic success story in their own right.
Prior to 1957, when the Conservative synagogues encouraged the creation of their own Solomon Schechter Schools, the only Jewish day schools were Orthodox. Since then, the number of students in non-Orthodox schools has risen to about 50,000. In addition to the Schechter Schools, which seem to serve the large majority of non-Orthodox day-schoolers, there are now Reform day schools and a network of some 80 "independent" schools not affiliated with any synagogue or denomination.
Yet most parents outside Orthodoxy do not now send their children to Jewish day schools. Voucher subsidies might help tip the scales in favor of a Jewish day school.
They might ease the tuition burden for parents and may allow schools to expand their enrollments and improve their facilities. A survey of very traditionalist schools in New York found twice as many students enrolled in first and second grade as in 12th. Why the decline? Cost is clearly a factor, along with some dissatisfaction at small schools and inadequate facilities. A voucher of significant size would enable parents to keep their children in these schools longer.
What is more, the schools themselves would enjoy the added resources that could make them all the more attractive as a viable educational alternative. The larger the school, the more it can spread its costs and improve its facilities. Size, moreover, gives an impression of reassuring vigor, just as half-empty classrooms may reinforce a sense of fragility. And particularly for non-Orthodox parents, Jewish day schools would become more attractive if they fed into more, good Jewish high schools. With voucher subsidies to defray tuition, those high schools would be more likely to attract more students and be more inviting to hesitant parents.
Many Jews will readily accept the argument up to this point. But they will still insist that public assistance to religious schools, even in the form of vouchers to parents, is wrong because it threatens public education's ideal of the common school.
The argument is often phrased in explicitly negative terms. Some Jewish advocates worry that an expansion of religious education will promote an expansion or proliferation of religious attachments. Only last year, an official of the American Jewish Committee remarked at a Baltimore conference on church-state issues that government aid to religious schools is improper because such schools "tend to proselytize."
When we are talking about private schools, where attendance is entirely voluntary, reasonable concerns about religious indoctrination in public schools simply do not apply. Nor is it easy to grasp how indirect government aid to such schools can be seen as "endorsement" of particular sectarian doctrines, when rival doctrines of many sects are equally eligible for such assistance. At bottom, then, the concern seems to boil down to something like this: even if sectarian education is good for the Jews, it might also be good for the Christians and therefore is bad for the Jews.
But in recent decades, the Catholic Church and major Protestant denominations have gone to considerable lengths to eliminate or revise traditional teachings that seemed hostile to Jews. In most American churches, anti-Semitism is not simply a social taboo but a denial of current religious doctrine. In contemporary America, there is no body of reliable evidence to substantiate the concern that Christian religious education will foster intolerance.
Still, public education continues to inspire much Jewish sympathy, as the foundation of a broader public culture in which Jews can fully participate. This attitude is understandable-but sadly anachronistic. The public schools that trained earlier generations of American Jews were the expression of a different America.
The sociologist Nathan Glazer captured the point quite well in a personal reminiscence of his experience in the public schools in New York City during the 1930s and early 1940s:
"Not a whiff of cultural pluralism was to be found. Americanization was strong, unselfconscious and self-confident. Although probably two-thirds of the students in New York's public schools were Jewish or Italian, no Jewish or Italian figure was to be found in our texts for literature, for social studies, for history. All cultures but that of the founding English and its American variant were ignored, and students were left to assume, if they thought about the matter at all, that the cultures of their homes and parental homelands were irrelevant or inferior."
In retrospect, one might wonder whether this sort of relentless "Americanization" was an entirely good thing for the American Jewish community. But the era of "strong, unselfconscious, self-confident" Americanization is, in any case, long gone. In the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, public schools were attacked for promoting a false view of America, in the interests of an oppressive white elite. And schools were quick to adapt to new views. Glazer emphasizes the continuing gap between racial minorities and other Americans as a principal factor in fueling demands for "multiculturalist" approaches. Despite his own concerns about fragmentation and social division, Glazer has emphasized the "inescapability" of the new approach in public education. In fact, in "We Are All Multiculturalists Now," he acknowledges that "the victory of multiculturalism in the public schools of America" has been "complete."
Since this ideology of public schools is already promoting limitless lifestyle options and respect for all differences, it is hard to refute demands for greater choice by reviving 19th-century slogans about promoting a common culture.
Jewish parents who support public education for their children will still find many excellent, conventional suburban schools. But the question is whether the Jewish community has a stake in "protecting" public education by blocking government vouchers to private and religious alternatives.
How much deference should be given to the vision of a common school, when school authorities around the country are now licensing more and more diverse school options? Can it really be in the Jewish interest to see that every sort of diversity has its claim on public support-except religious diversity?
Jeremy Rabkin is a professor of government at Cornell University.This article first appeared in the January-February 1999 "Policy Review," a journal of the Heritage Foundation.
|
