THEY'LL VOUCH FOR THAT

By Richard Lacayo

Jim Lester is crazy about his granddaughter La-Kia, 10. "She's such a little lady," he crows. That's why he was so upset last year when she started attending Vare Middle School in South Philadelphia. It was bad enough that Vare is known for dismal test-score performance. What was worse was how the culture of the streets had seeped inside. La-Kia had been there only a few days when four girls tried to pick a fight with her. When he heard that, says Lester, "I nearly had 10 bypasses."

At his insistence, La-Kia was rushed to the more peaceable hallways of St. Thomas Aquinas, a parochial school costing $1,400 a year. Because La-Kia's mother Yolanda is unemployed, Lester paid the tuition himself. But he's a retired children's clinic administrator, so money is scarce. Help came at a community meeting a few months later. Lester heard Robert Sorrell, head of the local chapter of the Urban League, talk about the new school-voucher program that Sorrell had started with money from the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association. The businesses were providing up to $1,000 in private-school-tuition assistance for about 90 students. With persistence, Lester got $700 of it to keep La-Kia at St. Thomas Aquinas. "You should see her in her crisp uniform," he says with the satisfaction you might expect from a man who may have saved his own flesh and blood. "Just a little lady."

It may not be news that a doting grandfather would struggle for his family. What's surprising is that he discovered school vouchers--cash stipends that can be used to help pay private-school tuition--from a black community activist like Sorrell. For a long time, politically active African Americans and the Democratic Party that most of them belong to have looked upon vouchers as poison apples intended to kill off public education. Even programs financed by private donors are suspect, since those might persuade legislators that taxpayer-financed vouchers would be a good next step. But with inner-city schools in a state of permanent crisis, lower-income blacks are being drawn increasingly to vouchers as a last best hope for getting at least some of their kids into better schools. "We don't want to tear down the public school system," Sorrell insists. "But we need to give parents choices."

It's because of their potential appeal to black voters that vouchers, which are largely a Republican cause, may grow from a small-scale educational experiment to a sizable political issue. Of the 52 million schoolchildren in America, fewer than 8 million attend private or parochial schools. Of those, fewer than 20,000 are using vouchers to help cover their tuition. And only two cities, Milwaukee, Wis., and Cleveland, Ohio, use tax dollars to supply the vouchers. In 30 or so others, funding is provided by private donations. In Washington, for instance, Ted Forstmann, the head of investment firm Forstmann Little & Co., has joined with another investor, John Walton, to pledge $6 million in tuition assistance for 1,000 D.C. children. "I hope this will be the wave of the future," says Forstmann, "citizens taking responsibility for problems."

Privately funded vouchers don't require the approval of politicians. But Republicans are thinking hard about making education an attack point for the '98 congressional election and featuring taxpayer-funded vouchers as a centerpiece of their proposals. Conservatives want them for people of any income who would send their children to private schools. As it happens, that idea gets a lukewarm reaction from a lot of white suburbanites, the same people most likely to vote Republican. They tend to like their public schools, which are generally well funded and supported by lots of parental involvement. A plan to use their tax dollars to send somebody else's kid to somebody else's academy doesn't get them very excited. But vouchers unite two activist segments of the G.O.P. that don't always get along: Christian conservatives who support church-affiliated schools and free-marketers who want to foster competition for the public system as a way to force improvements. What the G.O.P. is also discovering is that vouchers may attract lower-income African Americans, whose votes usually go to Democrats but whose kids often go to the worst public schools.

The discussion of vouchers gets framed by both sides as an issue of fairness. Supporters ask why the poor should not have the same chance at private schools as the better-off. Though it's too soon to tell whether most voucher-supported students perform better academically in a private school, no one needs a study to show that most private schools are safer and more orderly. For inner-city parents, vouchers can represent salvation from a system in perpetual disrepair, even if they offer just a fraction of poor children a way into the lifeboat of private schooling.

To Democratic leaders and most civil rights groups, the main argument against vouchers also boils down to fairness. As they see it, the great majority of poor children will never be able to take advantage of them. States will never have the money for tuition assistance for all the poor children who might want it. And private schools are selective, accepting only the kids who meet their standards, which rules out a lot of kids. If just the brightest or most affluent of the poor escape to private schools, the rest will be stranded in a public system even more starved for money than before. "We can't do something that leaves those with remedial needs behind," says the Rev. Lowell Marshall Shepard Jr., a Philadelphia pastor who opposes vouchers.

All the same, support is picking up among blacks, especially those in poorer households, and among younger voters, who don't share the automatic faith in government of the generation that fought the civil rights struggles. A recent poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which focuses on issues of concern to blacks, showed support for vouchers among African Americans up 10 percentage points since last year, to 57%. For blacks ages 26 to 35, the figure was 86%.

Sensing the shift at ground level, a few black leaders are getting onboard. Seven years ago, Polly Williams, a Democratic state legislator in Wisconsin, set in motion the process that brought Milwaukee the nation's first publicly financed voucher system. Earlier this year, when the Texas state legislature came within one vote of establishing a publicly funded voucher program, the supporters included Ron Wilson, a black Democratic legislator from Houston. In Philadelphia, the logic of vouchers has hit Dwight Evans, a black state legislator who plans to run for mayor in 1999 and who has his own poll that shows strong black support for the idea. "We need to stop making the argument that we shouldn't be looking at options [besides the public system]," he says.

For the most part, the rest of the old-time liberal coalition is not budging. Last month the N.A.A.C.P. joined with the liberal People for the American Way to organize an antivoucher demonstration in Philadelphia. "The N.A.A.C.P. is out of touch," says Congressman Floyd Flake, a New York Democrat. "The next wave of the civil rights movement will be demand for choice in schools." All the same, when the House voted earlier this month to approve a Republican proposal for a $7 million voucher plan for Washington--a basket-case system where by some calculations 40% of the kids drop out before high school graduation--just one black member supported it, Oklahoma Republican J.C. Watts. The D.C. project, which offered up to $3,200 in tuition assistance apiece to 2,000 of the city's 78,000 public school students, had been approved earlier by the Senate. But there it fell two votes short of the 60 it would have needed to block a filibuster threatened by Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Even if the proposal makes it all the way to the President's desk, Bill Clinton is likely to veto it.

The President supports the creation of more charter schools, which are public schools free of some of the bureaucratic rules that might put a drag on classroom performance. It so happens that charter schools are also acceptable to teachers unions, important Democratic allies that oppose vouchers in part because the private schools they foster generally pay lower salaries than public systems. Democrats hope they can defeat any drift toward vouchers among blacks if they can just make plain the implications. A recent poll conducted by Gallup for Phi Delta Kappa, an international education fraternity, found that most citizens oppose vouchers when the issue is framed as a matter of tax dollars subsidizing private-school tuitions. That finding is supported by a recent TIME/CNN poll that posed the question that way; support for vouchers was just 40% among whites and 36% among blacks.

Republican pollsters have also found that in focus groups, where people examine all their feelings on an issue, support for vouchers breaks down quickly over just how the vouchers should work. And among blacks, promoting vouchers, as Republicans often do, as a weapon against the obstructionism of the teachers unions doesn't always work. In many urban school systems, blacks make up a sizable part of the teaching force. Insult teachers, and you insult black voters, their families and neighbors.

Some black leaders support vouchers as a tactical ploy, a way to get attention from public schools they still hope to save. They see what can happen at a place like Giffen Memorial Elementary School, an underachieving school in Albany, N.Y. After Virginia Gilder, a wealthy donor, singled out Giffen students for private-school-tuition subsidies that she pays for, the school was suddenly lavished by its district with a new principal, nine new teachers and $125,000 more in taxpayer funding. "I'm all for public schools, but we need a needling in the system," says Augustus Baxter, a former member of the Philadelphia school board who is now part of the pro-voucher movement.

Republicans know better than to think that vouchers alone will bring them a lot of black voters. There are too many other issues, such as affirmative action and welfare reform, where the twain don't entirely meet. But they also know that in some closely contested congressional districts, the G.O.P. needs to carve off only part of the black vote to win. That's what wedge issues are for. So they are listening closely to people like Jim Lester, La-Kia's grandfather. "The Democrats use us, and the Republicans abuse us," he says. "I don't care if it's Democrats, Republicans or chickens--I just want what's best for my grandbaby."

--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington and Tamala M. Edwards/Philadelphia

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY/WASHINGTON AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS/PHILADELPHIA