The lead editorial in today's New York Times comments on the Cleveland school-voucher case that is scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The bulk of the editorial is devoted to arguing against school vouchers on First Amendment grounds. The Times claims they violate the clause that prevents the Congress from establishing a religion. "The Supreme Court cannot permit cities like Cleveland to violate the Establishment Clause in order to improve education any more than it could allow them to deprive citizens of their free-speech rights, if that were seen as a boon to public education," the Times editorial says.
Well, that's just rich, given that the Times has just concluded an editorial campaign arguing in favor of Congress depriving citizens of their free-speech rights, on the grounds that doing so would help clean up elections. The Times calls that "campaign-finance reform." It seems that the Times is in favor of selecting one part of the First Amendment to enforce -- the establishment clause -- and other parts to ignore -- the free speech, petition and press clauses.
The Times's argument in the editorial is even weaker when you consider that the prohibitions in the First Amendment were intended to apply not to the states nor to cities like Cleveland but to the Congress. The Times's First Amendment argument might hold water in arguing against a federal voucher program, though even then it is a weak argument, because it's not at all clear that allowing choice in education is the same as establishing a religion. But it's a stretch to apply the First Amendment prohibition to a city program. Now, Smartertimes.com knows it is going to get lots of letters from liberal lawyers -- valued Smartertimes.com readers -- citing the 14th Amendment and equal protection and due process and various precedents to argue that the First Amendment does apply to the states and to the city of Cleveland. That's an argument that can be made, but the Times editorial, while it has time to traffic in anti-Catholic stereotypes -- "the driving force behind the program was the city's powerful Roman Catholic archdiocese," the editorial says, somehow omitting the freemasons and the trilateral commission -- doesn't make it. Instead the editorial makes a simple First Amendment argument without even dealing with the federalism question.
The Times editorial also claims, "The vouchers do not encourage better public schools." In fact, the New York Times itself ran a news article on February 16, 2001 that reported, "A new study of Florida's efforts to turn around failing schools has found that the threat that children would receive vouchers to attend private schools spurred the worst performing schools to make significant academic strides." The study was conducted by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and was sponsored by the state of Florida.