HUMAN EVENTS
August 15, 1997

Conservative Spotlight - Ohio Freedom Forum
By Michael J. Catanzaro

Self-interested teachers unions and other fierce critics of school choice are digging at the bottom of the barrel for anything they can scrounge up to reverse the seemingly inexorable tide toward opening up the nation’s troubled public-schools to market-based competition.

Of course, the farther and harder they scrape, the more ridiculous and absurd their contentions become.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ohio, where in 1995 the first full school-choice program, called the Ohio Scholarship Program, including religious and parochial schools, was created for the Cleveland school system, one of the worst public school systems in the nation.

Despite the voucher program’s considerable successes, the Ohio Court of Appeals this past May overturned a lower-court ruling and found that the program was unconstitutional. In so deciding, the court agreed with the contention of the plaintiffs - among them the American Federation of Teachers, a labor union staunchly opposed to school choice - that allowing parents to use tax-paid vouchers to send their children to the school of their choice, including religious schools, somehow violated the separation of church and state.

Dave Zanotti, president of the Ohio Freedom Forum and the associated Ohio Roundtable foundation, two Cleveland-based public policy institutes that played an integral part in devising the program, was miffed to say the least “You would think that educated people could come up with more intelligent arguments than that,” he says. “We have a profound case of mad-judge disease here in Ohio.”

“The nonsense of it is,” Zanotti explains, “is that in Ohio they [the Ohio appeals court] are saying that the reason the voucher program is unconstitutional is that too many parents who have vouchers are using them for religious schools.” But, as Zanotti notes, the opinion of the court consciously ignored the fact that 350 out of the 2,000 students involved in the program attend distinctly nonsectarian schools. “The court refused to look at that as significant. They chose to create their own math,” he says. Even more bizarre, the court declared trivial the fact that none of the public schools in Cleveland chose to accept students with vouchers, even though the program by design allows them to do so.

Currently, at the urging of Zanotti and his allies, the Ohio State Supreme Court has issued a stay of the lower court order, giving the program sanction to run through the fall.

Ultimately, though, the court and the school-choice foes will have to come to grips with an uncomfortable reality: Students enrolled in the voucher program are doing remarkably well, outperforming their peers in the public schools.

For example, test scores at Cleveland's Hope Central Academy and its sister school, Hope Ohio City Academy, both of which are attended solely by students with vouchers, have been rising. According to a Harvard University study released in June of this year, students at both schools scored 5.5 percentile points higher on reading and 15 percentile points higher on math concepts between September and April of last year.

“These kids are really learning, and their test scores are simply stellar,” Zanotti says.

Convincing liberal educrats of their folly and exposing the narrow-mindedness of their cohorts is nothing new for Zanotti. His fight began 10 years ago, when he accepted the dual presidency of the Roundtable and the Freedom Forum, which began in 1980. Since that time, he and his groups have made the case for a system that offers a clear and workable alternative to a failed public school monopoly.

“We have brought in the most stone-hearted, hard-headed, anti-school-choice people to these schools and they walk out of them singing their praises,” he says.

Zanotti’s drive and determination also extend to a wide array of issues. As head of both groups, he has helped achieve an impressive list of conservative legislative victories at the local, state and federal level, including defeat of the Clinton health-care plan in 1994 and passage of several pro-life initiatives in Ohio. And most recently, Zanotti & Co. successfully quashed Republican Gov. George Voinovich’s business and sales tax initiative by preventing it from appearing on the ballot in November.

But for now, most of Zanotti’s time and energy is focused on the battle over who will decide the fate of Cleveland’s schoolchildren - teacher unions or parents. With graduation rates abysmally low and dropout rates staggeringly high in the public schools, it appears that parents and choice are winning. But the next and final step is indeed a major one: Zanotti and the other school-choice advocates will have to overcome the courts, which have been traditionally aligned with teachers unions in their opposition to voucher programs.

A tough road lies ahead, but Zanotti remains confident. “What we have in Cleveland is proof-positive that parents given the choice can make it, that schools can function doing this, and that kids will grow no matter how at risk they are. This is a phenomenal success story.”