A photo in a newspaper showed Courtney Jones, home from elementary school, with a smudge of ashes on her forehead. A priest put them there. Courtney is a Baptist. She attends Catholic school as part of the school voucher program. "I need my daughter to get a good education, to learn to read and be able to go to college," Courtney's mother told a reporter. "I want a structured environment."
Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will confront the problem of whether Cleveland's tax-supported voucher system violates the separation of church and state. It could be a second Ash Wednesday for Courtney's mom if her hopes for her daughter go up in smoke.

Why was the voucher program invented? It wasn't a plot by the Roman Catholic Church to get more money into the Vatican vaults. It was a desperate attempt to rescue Cleveland children from the debris of a public school system that was failing them even when it passed them.

I remember a television show I hosted back in the '80s. It featured a young man who had just graduated from a Cleveland high school. He brought his diploma with him.

"Read it," I said.

He couldn't.

There is no civic shame in our city worse than the decline of the once nationally celebrated Cleveland public school system. Ask those who graduated from Glenville, John Adams and West Tech before the mid-'60s, and they will tell you that they never felt short-changed by their education. The adults in charge simply wouldn't have allowed that.

Then a great many things went wrong. There was the failed experiment of busing, which lined lawyers' pockets and chased black and white parents to the suburbs.

There were the school boards full of political hacks with private agendas, whose raucous meetings on the 11 p.m. news looked like outtakes from "The Gong Show."

There was the climbing divorce rate. The growing number of children born out of wedlock and left to fend for themselves.

There was the nutty pop-psych madness of "social promotion," which was supposed to elevate a kid's self-esteem by giving him a grade he did not earn, then tossing him into the real world where self-esteem is earned, not passed out like Halloween candy.

Many of these things - busing, divorce, lower standards - were invented by adults to accommodate the wealth, whims and wants of adults. The deceitful pretense was that they were done in the name of the children, a.k.a. the victims.

In search of an answer, the state began the voucher program, which diverted tax money to allow some Cleveland students to attend private schools. Most private schools are Catholic. That unleashed the civil libertarians who think that walking past a picture of Jesus on the way to English 101 is more perilous than illiteracy.

Others claim the voucher program undercuts public schools. Of course it does. Not that there was much undercutting left to do after the lawyers and the political hacks finished their whittling and gouging.

If the Supreme Court abolishes vouchers, it better have another idea. Courtney Jones' mom couldn't wait for another idea. She did not want her daughter to grow up and graduate disadvantaged as so many innocent children have done during the long years of chaos.

You can wipe the ashes off a little girl's forehead with a sponge. Marks left by an inferior education are indelible.

Contact Dick Feagler at: [email protected], 216-999-5757