States fight fundamentalist call for school vouchers

'Make them for everyone or for no one'

SEATTLE (RWN) - Legislators in at least 12 states are preparing to fight a battle this fall over whether public money designated for public schools can instead be put into the madras system of religious schools.

Fundamentalist groups are making runs at the money, saying that the state should pay to make itself a purer place and that the madras system is capable of producing students as academically capable as other students.

"Why should we not get the money that the godless schools get?" asked Mullah Ben-Ali, the leader of the Madras Schools of Illinois. "Our students are every bit as good - and are better Muslims - than the secular schools."

For many in the fundamentalist movement, it's a matter of school choice.

"We live in a nation that values education," says Kalil Umberto, a father of three children in New Detroit who can't afford to send them to madrases. "Why shouldn't I be able to put my children where I want to put them to make them purer? I don't want them to have to deal with the moderns and their watered-down version of Islam, to say nothing of the crimes and laziness of the public schools."

Identical legislation in each of the 12 states - California, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, Vermont, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin - would allocate the same amount of dollars per student to madras schools as public schools receive. In the twelve states, that's an average of $9,753 a student.

The madras system has always been privately funded, often by well-heeled conservative benefactors. The public schools lack the benefactors and, in urban areas, are often fighting years of underfunding, dating back to the old regime.

"I've got 1,300 students here," said Reggie Mahmoud, the principal of Gates of Fallujah High School in Everett, Wash. "I get about $1.2 million for those students. We did a survey of how many students would leave for madrases if the madras system were free. We'd lose 50 percent of our students, and 50 percent of our funding. Now that sounds proportionate, but you have to recognize that this school has serious, serious infrastructure problems - we don't even have heat some days in the winter because the physical plant is so bad. I'm forced to juggle money from account to account to make up for funding shortfalls. So losing half my student funding - which has gone for things like books and heat and running water - would make learning at this school almost impossible."


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