Sunday, April 25, 1999 in Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Doug Cumming
It was like winning one of those TV sweepstakes. Zenovia Andrews, 31, a single mother, and her son, Donovan, a fourth-grader at Mary Lin Elementary School in Atlanta, were flown to New York last week to be part of a joyous celebrity-filled kickoff for a $ 170 million giveaway of private school tuition for low-income families.
The mission of the Children’s Scholarship Fund is to give needy families who are unhappy with their public schools the wherewithal to escape, or at least up to $ 1,700 a year for four years at a private school, provided they pay a fair share of the tuition — an average of $ 1,000 — based on their income.
It is not certain that this scholarship will exert the healthy pressure on unsatisfactory public schools that backers say it will. But one thing is becoming clear: Once regarded by civil rights leaders as a further threat to inner-city schools already reeling from an earlier form of school choice — that is, white flight — the concept is turning out to be enormously popular with minority and low-income families.
It seems to strike a deep chord, as the 1.25 million national applicants for 40,000 CSF grants indicates. “The middle class and upper classes have those choices,” said former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a stalwart of the civil rights movement now on the CSF board. “It’s only the poor that can’t choose.”
Andrews was one of 380 winners out of 13,798 applicants from Atlanta — and the only Atlanta winner to be part of the media event. It was her first visit to New York and Donovan’s first airplane flight. It was also the first time either had met Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights leader and a CSF advisory board member whose office as Southern Christian Leadership Conference president is right around the corner from their apartment.
What Andrews remembers most, in the swirl of events, was Donovan’s smile. He likes his public school, she said, but his smile turned huge “when he realized he was going to go somewhere and make something of his life.”
This concept is not new. In 1992, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, launched a similar scholarship program for the five- county metro area, with $ 1 million from a businessman.
The Children’s Education Foundation selected 200 low-income children from about 25 times as many applicants. It pays half their tuition for up to $ 3, 000 through the eighth grade, according to Jim Kelly, an Alpharetta lawyer who administers the program and lobbies for tax-funded tuition vouchers for the needy.
That scholarship never expanded beyond the first crop of scholars, failing to find enough other donors from among Atlanta’s business and foundation leaders, Kelly said.
Although their academic achievement was never studied, those who have been getting the tuition grants express a deep gratitude for the help. They have been enrolled at 39 private schools and one public school, where the parent must pay tuition because the family lives out of that school’s district. Most of the students attend Catholic or other church schools with tuitions in the $ 2,500 to $ 4,000 range, but some are at selective schools such as Trinity School and Woodward Academy, where tuition tops $ 10,000.
Marie Lambert has her daughters, Stacy, 11, and Dominique, 10, enrolled at Pathway Christian School, a K-8 school in East Point for about 90 children, thanks to the Children’s Education Foundation. Lambert said she could not possibly afford private school without the help,, since she makes only $ 17, 000 a year as a second-grade teacher at Pathway Christian. (The school waives the other half of the $ 3,200-a-year tuition for each daughter as a fringe benefit for Lambert.)
She knows her daughters are getting an academically superior education, she said. Stacy has been accepted for next year at Marist, an academically selective Catholic school. Her daughters have been in private schools from the beginning. But Lambert said the public school students she teaches as a library volunteer and Sunday school teacher are too often not able to read or write anywhere close to their grade level.
Scholarship families say they seek private schools because of smaller classes, a more orderly atmosphere, more respectful teachers and stronger academics. But they say religion, the one thing public schools cannot instill, is one of their highest priorities — a preference reflected by studies of private school choice.
People who pay taxes should have a right to educate their children in their own faith with some of that tax money because it serves the common good, said Estill Covington, two of whose children receive the Atlanta foundation scholarships at Southwest Christian Academy. The principle is the same for all religions, he said, though he added, “We’re biased — the more Jesus, the better.”
Lambert, as a teacher, has become increasingly critical of the public schools in her neighborhood. She observed a class at Dean Rusk Elementary, a school where test scores are at or above the state and national averages despite having 95 percent of its children qualifying for lunch subsidies.
“What bothered me,” Lambert said, “was the lack of accountability of the teachers to really give a good delivery, to teach a good lesson, because of the problems that exist between kids in the class. For example, I found one kid to be very disruptive and the teacher was constantly trying to get him under control and teach at the same time.”
She said she doesn’t think any privately funded scholarship will be big enough to force the public schools to be more responsive to parents. She is lobbying for a bill in the Legislature, called Early HOPE, that would provide state education funds to a private school for any low-income student who chooses that school as an alternative to a low-performing public school. Similar bills have been introduced in Florida, where they are close to passage, and several other states. Milwaukee and Cleveland have been diverting tax dollars to private schools chosen by families for several years.
The Georgia bill is languishing because of strong opposition, especially from black Democratic representatives. That’s why Lambert said she will vote against her state senator, Vincent Fort, the next chance she gets.
“I think we should put our money into strengthening the curriculum, motivating our kids and holding the schools accountable,” Fort said in response.
“I think we’re in a movement toward that,” he added, referring to a commission the Gov. Roy Barnes will chair this year to study those issues for a major school reform package in the next legislative session.
Meanwhile, Andrew Young has a suggestion: “Why doesn’t Roy Barnes take some of that discretionary lottery money and expand the opportunities for low- income children?”