Schools: Though most leaders oppose the ballot measure, many frustrated parents want more options for their children.

In South-Central Los Angeles, which has some of the lowest performing public schools in a district that has careened from crisis to crisis, preschoolers at the private Marcus Garvey School were completing a lesson on the solar system.

Down the corridor, another teacher was preparing to introduce her kindergarten class to the periodic table of elements.

In buildings painted red, black and green--the colors of black liberation--Garvey's African American students take on calculus in fifth grade.

Sixth-graders work from textbooks written for high school seniors, and Garvey's seventh- and eighth-graders--supervised by a professional technician--built the computers in the school's online lab.

And Garvey is not alone. Students at the West Angeles Christian Academy on Crenshaw Boulevard routinely score two or more grades above grade level on standardized reading and math tests. Graduates from Price High School on the South Vermont Avenue campus of the Crenshaw Christian Center often have their pick of top universities.

That so many students do so well at these small, overwhelmingly black private schools while so many others do so poorly at public schools a stone's throw away has opened fissures in the African American community over school choice.

In California, Proposition 38 on the November ballot will ask voters if the state should provide parents $4,000 in taxpayer-paid vouchers to help send their child to the private school of their choice. A Field poll last month showed that support for the measure has declined, with 36% of voters saying they support it, compared to 39% in June.

One black organization, the Los Angeles-based National Alliance for Positive Action, says it is "outraged at the campaign by the conservative, Republican sponsors of Proposition 38 . . . to target blacks in their school voucher drive."

The results of a 1999 national survey, however, show that Proposition 38 backers might find fertile ground from which to harvest support for their initiative in black communities.

A whopping 76% of African Americans between 26 and 35--a group including many who have school-age children--support a voucher system under which the government would give parents money to send their children to the public, private or parochial school of their choice, the survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found.

But black elected officials and civil rights leaders, with very few exceptions, oppose vouchers, seeing them as a threat to public education.

It is unclear however, whether those officials run any risk at the voting booth by opposing vouchers because the age group where support is strongest doesn't vote in big numbers, said Joint Center pollster David Bositis.

"Elected officials tend to listen to people who vote as opposed to people who have opinions," he said. "Black senior citizens are not big supporters of vouchers, and they are the key voting bloc among African Americans."

Given that voting pattern, Bositis said, "it's much more understandable why a lot of African American officials don't support vouchers. They may very well be reflecting the majority opinion among black voters."

The Joint Center poll, with a margin of error of 3.5%, found that 60% of blacks overall supported vouchers, up from 48.1% in the center's 1998 poll.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Day Higuchi, whose union strongly opposes vouchers, said the Joint Center poll does not surprise him.

"It's pretty clear that we have two educational systems in this country: one for most folks and another for inner cities," he said. "Student achievement in inner cities is completely unsatisfactory. The question is whether the answer is vouchers."

Fed Up With the Status Quo

The answer may not be vouchers, but black parents are unwilling to continue with the status quo, pollster Bositis said.

"My interpretation is not necessarily that there is support for vouchers, per se," Bositis said.

Among African Americans, he said, "there is substantial dissatisfaction and frustration with the status quo. If you basically say anything is better than the status quo, then you're willing to try any alternative that comes up. That's really what school vouchers represent."

Many parents are angry. They see children as having a narrow, critical window between kindergarten and third grade when they either get a solid grounding in basic academic skills or spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up.