Cleveland is famous for its Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Come Feb. 20, another innovation associated with that city - school vouchers - is likely to rock the education establishment in a way that Screamin' Jay Hawkins would have appreciated.
Five children - Johnietta, Senel, Christine, Arkele and Amy - will have their say before the U.S. Supreme Court.

These Cleveland students were ordered by a federal court to return to failing public schools they had fled with the help of state- funded scholarships - the "vouchers" that teachers' unions so fear.

The education establishment brought suit to send the kids back to schools that even liberals agreed were a failure. The problem, they insist, is that their new schools were - God forbid - parochial.

Educational bureaucrats and their ilk criticize full school choice --by arguing that the concept is untried. Fearing the results, they strive mightily to make sure it stays untried.

After 40 years of using first the stick of desegregation and then the carrot of costly public education reform, 80 percent of Cleveland's ninth-graders failed a basic skills test that only 30 percent of students elsewhere in Ohio couldn't pass. And most public schools were still segregated.

The results of Cleveland's experiment with vouchers were encouraging. Even the federal government, normally a recycling bin for discarded educational theories, noticed that low-income students who participated were more likely to attend an integrated school than their public school counterparts. So much for the argument that vouchers would result in a new wave of white flight.

And a study by Paul Peterson, Jay Greene and William Howell of Harvard University revealed that the Cleveland program produced measurable improvements in voucher students' academic achievement and dramatic increases in parental satisfaction.

The program wasn't just about vouchers; it included charter schools, tutoring and transfers between public schools. But the education establishment challenged the program as a violation of the First Amendment.

The lower court judge who closed the program focused on the fact that parents tended to reject urban public schools in favor of low- cost, inner-city parochial schools. This choice by parents, he reasoned, breached the wall between church and state that is said to appear in the Constitution, but vanishes whenever a voucher foe tries to find it.

Connoisseurs of hypocrisy will appreciate the fact that over half of Cleveland's public school teachers don't send their own kids to public schools. In other words, a good portion of the salaries of public school teachers go to private schools as soon as the paychecks clear. When you do it, it's unconstitutional. When they do it, it's for the children.

The Cleveland program has elicited the support of both black and Hispanic groups, indicating that the party line espoused by old- guard civil rights groups is no longer being parroted by younger people of color.

Forty years ago our nation recoiled in shame as politicians, urged on by angry mobs, stood in schoolhouse doors to keep black children from getting in. Next month the public school establishment and its political pawns will be on the steps of the Supreme Court to try and block black kids like Johnietta from getting out of public schools they can't afford to leave.

The tide of history is on Johnietta's side.

Cornelius Chapman is president of the Coalition for Parental Choice in Education, which joined in an amicus brief filed in the Cleveland case. He is also an adviser to the Pioneer Institute's Shamie Center for Restructuring Government.