THEY'LL VOUCH FOR THAT

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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%.