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The U.S. supreme court blew out the cornerstone of racial segregation with Brown v. Board of Education, its monumental decision in 1954. The Court's new decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris will do the same to state-sponsored anti-religious bias.

The 5-4 court majority upheld a Cleveland voucher program that gives tax dollars mostly to impoverished parents, who in turn can use that money at any participating school: public, private, or parochial. With this decision, the Court has redefined the meaning of public education in America and effectively ended the monopoly of secular government schools. It's about time.

The ideas of Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, and others laid the intellectual foundation for a government-run school system 160 years ago, but religious and ethnic prejudice energized that movement. When European Catholic immigrants began pouring into Boston and New York in the 1840s, local and state governments were troubled—what would happen to "America" if such people, most of whom attended Catholic schools, were encouraged to keep their culture? Governments decided to organize schooling to promote a common culture—meaning, in essence, a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant culture. They defined Catholic schools, among others, as private, "sectarian" affairs undeserving of public support.

Not until the 1960s, when the secularism of Thomas Dewey and other educational theorists made its way into curriculum across the country, did Protestants begin to feel Catholics' pain. This was no sinister plot, but the logical outcome of a school system run by the government in a democratic society: The perceived assumptions and prejudices of most Americans became the basis for making decisions about what should go on in the public classroom.

And when educational bureaucrats get into their minds some notion they imagine is the wave of the future (e.g., the full acceptance of homosexuality—see "Get Our Kids Out," p. 15), the

system ends up teaching a pagan approach to ethics as normative for all students. In short, our current system seems hardly conducive to respecting the rights and desires of religious minorities. The system undermines one of the very principles it seeks to promote: genuine pluralism. It is no wonder that many Americans resent the educational monopoly.

Most parents instinctually understand that they (not the State) are responsible for training their children (Prov. 22:6; Deut. 6:4-9). They also understand that education has to be founded on a coherent worldview. To have students learning relativistic secularism in the classroom makes it that much more difficult to impart transcendent values at home, and it teaches children to compartmentalize, rather than integrate, their knowledge (as if one set of intellectual rules apply at school and another at home).

This monopoly has other problems. It's no secret that too many of the nation's public schools are failing to provide an adequate education for the most vulnerable children. Since 1983, over 13 million children have reached the 12th grade not knowing how to read at a basic level. Over 27 million have reached their senior year unable to do basic math—not to mention the 30 percent who drop out of school before the 12th grade.

Cleveland's situation a few years ago was telling: only 1 of 10 Cleveland ninth-graders could pass a basic proficiency exam, two-thirds of high school students dropped out before graduation, and the district as a whole could not meet any of the 18 state standards for minimal performance. Inner-city parents thought that private schools of whatever religious stripe could do better. The point of vouchers was simple: to give parents genuine choice—to allow some of their tax dollars to support schools that they believed would meet their educational goals. The Supreme Court agreed: "Our holding thus rested not on whether few or many recipients chose to expend government aid at a religious school but, rather, on whether recipients generally were empowered to direct the aid to schools or institutions of their own choosing."

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August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9