THEY'LL VOUCH FOR THAT

(3 of 4)

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.