Colorado will soon begin dabbling in one of the most highly charged and politicized experiments in American education - school vouchers - even though vouchers' ability to help kids is still being questioned years after their inception.

A handful of states are putting public dollars into the hands of parents to pay for private school. Colorado will start issuing vouchers for low-income kids in low-performing schools in fall 2004, in hopes of raising test scores in 11 of the state's 178 school districts.

Colorado's voucher program is drawing national attention because it could be the largest in the United States, eventually bringing in almost 20,000 students.

Colorado is also embarking on a statewide effort. Most other voucher programs, including those in Cleveland and Milwaukee, are aimed primarily at inner-city schools.

The state is also drawing legal fire from advocacy groups opposed to using taxpayer dollars to pay for private schools.

Enrollment in the Colorado pilot program will be capped at 1 percent in the 2004-05 school year and at 6 percent in 2007-08, when the program will be reviewed.

School districts have to participate if at least eight of their schools rate 'unsatisfactory' or 'low.' Eleven districts now fall into that category, including Denver Public Schools, Pueblo 60 and Jefferson County.

Proponents praise Colorado's program because it preserves funding for public schools: Vouchers, or 'scholarships,' are worth 75 percent of what the state and local districts pay to educate elementary students - 85 percent for high- schoolers. The remainder stays with the public schools as long as the student stays in school.

As in Colorado, pioneering voucher plans in Milwaukee and Cleveland faced opposition. A legal challenge to Cleveland ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided last June that school vouchers are constitutional.
But while Colorado prepares to launch its program, nearly every study of vouchers' ability to boost academic achievement has been attacked as being flawed.

'The studies that there are, are based on a very small number of kids,' said Todd Ziebarth, policy analyst with the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.
'And there are different takes on how those kids were performing,' he said.
'So much of the research is infused with ideology,' added Marc Egan, director of the National School Board Association's Voucher Strategy Center - a voucher opponent.

One of the latest statistical dustups over vouchers involved a 2000 study by Harvard professor Paul E. Peterson, a voucher proponent. His research showed that blacks using vouchers to attend private schools in New York City scored 6 percentile points higher than a control group of blacks in public schools.

But in April, Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger challenged the conclusions, saying Peterson used faulty data and vouchers produced no discernible academic gains, according to published reports.

The Indiana Center for Evaluation is conducting the only study many experts believe is comprehensive enough to be a fair gauge of vouchers. The center has been examining the Cleveland program since 1997. Its most recent report says vouchers have made little or no difference.

Not suprisingly, this is giving ammunition to detractors aching to prove vouchers are a dangerous alternative to public schools.
'We've pumped millions into vouchers, and we've got nothing in return,' said Richard DeColibus, president of the 6,000-member Cleveland Teachers Union.

But vouchers have attracted a dogged group of zealous and influential supporters. And even the man heading the Cleveland study, Kim Metcalf, said it is still too soon to properly gauge their impact.

Voucher backers in Milwuakee and Cleveland say they have already brought families peace of mind, religious freedom and a sense of dignity sorely lacking in today's public schools.
'This is no longer an education issue; it's a parental rights issue,' said Chris Suma, a Cleveland mother who has five children using vouchers.

'I can choose everything else in the United States but not my child's education?' Suma said. 'There is something wrong with that.'

Colorado and national decisionmakers have been shuttling to Milwaukee recently to glimpse firsthand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, America's largest and oldest school voucher plan.

'Once or twice a month there's a group coming from somewhere,' said Alex Cranberg, a Denver businessman and school-choice activist.
Cranberg has flown educators and decisionmakers to Milwaukee in a private jet to show them the Milwaukee example.
He also drafted House Bill 1160, which was sponsored by Rep. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, and signed by Gov. Bill Owens to create a pilot voucher program in Colorado. The details differ, but the bill was modeled on the Milwaukee plan, he said.

'People are curious,' Cranberg said. 'Anywhere people are seriously contemplating some kind of broadening of the definition of public education to include private providers, you want to learn and try to understand where they've made mistakes and had successes.'

The Milwaukee program started with a few hundred students in secular private schools in 1990-91. It later expanded to religious schools and now serves more than 11,000 students in 102 schools. Most of the schools are Christian, but a Jewish school and several Muslim schools also participate.

Thirteen years after its introduction, the program remains a political flash point. Some religious groups choose not to participate. The teachers union is unshakably opposed. School board members continue to stake out pro- or anti-voucher positions.

Some say it is time to accept vouchers as a done deal and get on with educating kids.
'It's like a scab but we've stopped picking at it,' said Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos.

Aspects of the choice plan annoy public educators, but it hasn't destroyed the public schools and may even have spurred them to improve, Andrekopoulos said.

Religious school's example

Cranberg and other wealthy voucher proponents hosted two groups of Coloradans in December and January. Each group spent a full day visiting voucher schools, public schools, and some of the hybrids that have begun to pop up in Milwaukee.
'I was impressed. It works there in Milwaukee,' said Pastor Tamara Quansah, principal of northeast Denver's Love Christian Fellowship Educational Center. She hopes vouchers will help her school grow from 75 students in grades K-12 to 200.

Ron Brady, president of the Colorado Education Association, wasn't impressed. 'It absolutely confirmed my opposition to vouchers,' he said.
'We, of course, connect the dots based on our own experience,' Cranberg said.

Cranberg was impressed with Notre Dame Middle School in Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighborhood. The area is nearly evenly split between families hailing from Mexico and Puerto Rico, with pockets of blacks and Hmong.
Notre Dame has been successful in keeping Hispanic girls in school, a problem in metro Denver.

Joana Lozano, an eighth-grader, said she could have done well anywhere because her parents are supportive. But the small classes and intensive counseling at the all-girls Notre Dame virtually ensures her success, while her friends who stayed in the public system are drifting.
'They really don't care about their education,' she said. 'They don't know if they're going to good high schools.'

The public high school nearest Notre Dame has a graduation rate of 35 percent. The high schools Notre Dame alumnae go to have graduation rates of 95 to 100 percent, said principal Mary Garca-Vlez.

Tuition at Notre Dame is $ 1,100 a year. That is only about a tenth of the school's actual per-pupil costs, yet only 10 of its 84 students can afford it. Most of the rest get vouchers.

Vouchers now provide about 40 percent of Notre Dame's nearly million-dollar budget, with most coming from private fundraising, said Alvaro Garca-Vlez, Mary's husband and the school's president. It is an expensive school to run because it hires teachers to supervise after-school activities and extends counseling to alumnae to make sure they stay on track for college.

There is a weekly Mass at Notre Dame, crucifixes in the classrooms and posters in the halls with slogans such as 'Catholic Schools: an education you can have faith in.'

Parents can request that their voucher students be excused from religious classes, but that rarely happens, Mary Garca-Vlez said.

'Passing the buck on her'

In some cases, a free religious education was too good for parents to pass up. But for others, frustration with the bureaucracy, low test scores and de facto segregation in much of Milwaukee Public Schools drove them into the voucher program.

When Blanca Sanchez got through the fourth grade at a public school reading like a second-grader, her mother, Damari Alverio, decided they had both had enough. She used a voucher to get Blanca into Windlake Elementary, a nonsectarian private school run by a social services agency.
Windlake tested Blanca, diagnosed a learning disability and got her extra help. She gained two reading levels in a single year and is now reading 'Charlotte's Web.'

'They were just passing the buck on her,' Alverio said of the public school. 'To me, compared to the public schools, the teachers here have a lot better control over the kids.' She enrolled two younger children in a similar school.

Superintendent: No threat

Superintendent Andrekopoulos said vouchers didn't harm public schools in Milwaukee and never will.

'The normal public school in the community is the mainstay,' said the former middle-school principal. 'We're still here, we're still operating, and we still have the same number of kids.'
Eighty-two percent of Milwaukee's school-age children go to public school, he said. That is more than in some cities without vouchers.

'I just think they like our school system,' he said.
But parents in Cleveland say vouchers are just the tonic their children need after being burned by a 71,000-student public school system struggling to improve itself.

'My children were not going to wait around and be guinea pigs for a school district always trying to figure out how to make itself better,' said voucher parent Maura Wyrock.

Since the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program started six years ago, the state has spent almost $ 30 million to help more than 5,200 elementary-age students attend private school.
Voucher 'scholarships' pay for up to 90 percent of a student's tuition, which is based on need. Scholarships are capped at $ 2,250 annually, but the average private school tuition in Cleveland for the 2000-01 school year was about $ 1,800.
This and other factors - including parents electing not to use their vouchers - have allowed the program to repay the state $ 16 million since 1996.

But critics like DeColibus, the teachers union president, say parents and taxpayers are still not getting much in return.

For proof, they point to recent findings from the Indiana Center for Evaluation which says that vouchers in Cleveland have made little or no difference in academic achievement.
In fact, public school students are making larger academic gains than voucher students, the study said. The center began the study in 1997.
Center director Kim Metcalf points out that the study is ongoing and the real measure of vouchers in Cleveland will be emerging in the next two or three years as voucher students enter higher grades in the city's 50 or so private schools. He expects voucher students to surpass public school students.

One reason is that voucher parents are dogged supporters of the program and make extra efforts to make sure their children succeed, he said.
'Even if achievement remains the same, if the program allows families to be in schools they are more comfortable with, than that is probably a good thing,' Metcalf said.

Seeking safety in Cleveland

Voucher parents say they are fleeing local schools with a reputation of being mediocre and dangerous.

When vouchers began in Cleveland in 1996, the public schools had not met any of Ohio's 18 minimum academic standards.

Only 15 percent of Cleveland's fourth-graders passed a state proficiency test, and a mere 4 percent of eighth-graders passed algebra, according to school officials. About 7 percent of the district's students reported being victims of a crime.

'It's a good thing we are here, because for a lot students we are the only stable thing in their lives,' said Sister Karen Somerville, principal at St. Francis Catholic School.

The 100-year-old school stands just a block from rows of sagging storefronts and musty bars.
St. Francis is creaky but resilient. Its parking lot is managed by a priest/janitor who carefully quizzes anyone who tries to enter the school's ancient doors.

Hallways smell of bleach cleaner, and its drab yellow walls are decorated with colorful posters made by the school's 242 uniformed students.
Enrollment at St. Francis actually declined once the school began accepting voucher students, said Somerville, a no-nonsense member of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

'We believe parents are the primary educatators for their children and we believe they should be able to choose a system based on their personal beliefs,' Somerville said.

Down the hall from Somerville's office and up the stairs, Victoria Pope helps grade papers in her daughter's fourth-grade class.

Five of Pope's seven children use vouchers to attend St. Francis, lured by its security and discipline.

That is important to Pope, whose home has been burglarized on a city block where drug sales are as common as gossip.

'It's a comfort to bring my children here,' said the soft-spoken Pope. 'With everything else going on in my neighborhood, it's wonderful my children can be in a place where nothing but learning is going on.'

She doesn't like the ragtag nature of the nearby public schools, where classrooms border on the chaotic. 'There is no one holding children accountable for anything,' Pope said. 'Here problems are addressed immediately.'

As with Pope, Wyrock first saw vouchers as a ticket to get her three children to a safer school. This after a fifth-grader at their neighborhood school was jumped and beaten for his tennis shoes.

But the religion stressed at St. Mel Catholic Elementary School helps keep her children there.
"Somewhere they need to teach there is a definite right and wrong," Wyrock said. "And at this school, teachers and students have the ability to express their faith."