THE US: A ruling by the US Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the hugely controversial school voucher system is set to reignite an educational battle across the US that conservatives feared they had lost, writes Patrick Smyth from Washington.
The court ruled 5-4 on Thursday, dividing along traditional conservative-liberal lines, that the system, under which some states give parents vouchers up to a certain value to pay for their children's education in the schools of their choice, was not a violation of the prohibition on state endorsement of religion if parents had a genuine choice of schools.
The decision, one day after a lower court robustly upheld the separation of church and state in deeming the Pledge of Allegiance reference to God unconstitutional, marks an important victory for precisely the opposite point of view and has been hailed as the most important Supreme Court education decision since desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education).
"This allows the school choice movement to shift from defence to offence," Mr Clint Bolick, vice-president of the Institute for Justice, a non-profit group that is a leading voucher supporter, told the New York Times.
"I have been arguing this issue for 19 years," Mr William J. Bennett, Education Secretary under Mr Ronald Reagan, said. "When you went to an audience, the objection you heard most often was, 'Isn't this unconstitutional?' That was what kept coming up. And I would say, 'We don't know.' Today we know it's not unconstitutional."
But Mr Carl McCall, a Democratic candidate for governor in New York, called the court's decision a "devastating blow to New York's public school children". Democrats have bitterly opposed vouchers, which, they say, divert badly needed cash from the underfunded state school system.
In 2000, voters in California and Michigan, by overwhelming margins, defeated initiatives that would have provided for the use of school vouchers. But leaders of the voucher movement said they would move immediately to try to pass such programmes in sympathetic states.
Under Cleveland's programme - that considered by the court - some 3,700 of the district's 75,000 children use vouchers of up to $2,250 to attend private schools, with 96 per cent attending religious schools. That concentration in religious schools, the local court found, meant the reality was that the state was "promoting sectarian schools". Critics say the low ceiling on vouchers means that "choice" is notional as most parents can only afford the church schools.
Justice Stephen Breyer, for the Supreme Court minority, said voucher programmes differed "in both kind and degree from aid programmes upheld in the past" - such as tax breaks for education expenses - because they provided public money "to a core function of the church: the teaching of religious truths to young children".