Correspondence: Vouchers, schools, etc.
CORRESPONDENCE To the Editors Thanks, Frank! I am grateful to Commonweal and to Paul Baumann for the obituary of Frank McConnell [February 12], a writer who touched an extraordinary range of...
...Web weaving What a handsomely bangled web you weave [www.commonwealmagazine.org...
...What van Beeck's "intuition" really points to, it seems to me, is the imbalance that is rooted not in fallen nature, as often seems to be implied, but in "natural history," that is the long-term historical development of the human race as a whole...
...And that without a pope to set the standards for belief and praxis...
...It reminds us that nonsense said often enough almost sounds like common sense...
...To the contrary, lovers of liberty have never apologized for being passionate about the separation of church and state—from Baptist Roger Williams to Catholic John F. Kennedy...
...We at the Baptist Joint Committee heed Madison's warning and take alarm at any proposal that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools...
...But this is countered by the somewhat rambling musings of van Beeck, which shift back and forth—as evident in the very title of the piece—between two essentially unrelated subjects: "The Women in My Life" and "An Intuition about the Celibate Male Priesthood...
...Assessing schools Schools are not very different than they once were, except that they now also try to educate children formerly pushed out, dropped out, or refused in...
...Then—more than fifty years ago—both teachers and students thought the tests significant...
...He should understand that the Bill of Rights is not something to be tinkered with by some legal mad scientist...
...On the contrary, I am in profound agreement that the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a religion or inhibiting the free exercise of religion...
...Gaffney goes on to applaud the use of a state such as Wisconsin as a "laboratory" in which we may test the worth of vouchers in order to provide empirical evidence on which we can then base future arguments...
...However, I am concerned about the potential connection between remembering and resenting, Commonweal 2 8 March 26,1999 or "resentiment" defined by one writer as "the deliberate re-experiencing of an unpleasant experience in order to re-enforce it...
...the full opportunity for parents to make informed choice...
...There is also a basic issue of justice— why should parents who want their children in religious or private schools, not the government one "assigned" to them by reason of residence, have to endure the fiscal penalty of fully supporting a government school...
...Our schools have never done the kind of job any fair-minded democracy should want them to do—truly enlarge the minds and hearts of our youth...
...2229...
...a.e.p...
...We just fought our first losing battle in Virginia to achieve parent choice through tuition tax credits necessitated by the fact that our commonwealth has a constitutional amendment that bans state funds from flowing to the religious sector...
...BISHOP) E. BRIAN CARSTEN Angola, Ind...
...We can all agree that Meier's large vision for "thoughtful" and "powerful" schools in the future is an ideal...
...This does not seem to be a fair, or just, or moral, or human act...
...Et-zioni cites several examples of public events in which the good citizen ought to be informed and involved...
...There was not a time, long ago or not so long ago, when, as Abigail McCarthy claims "a high school diploma was a school's assurance that its graduates were prepared to enter college or to join the work force" ["Better Schools," January 29...
...Congratulations and thanks...
...No arguments about the Creed, nor the mysteries (sacraments) of the church, what they mean, who may receive them, etc...
...Furthermore, there is the unacceptable application of the intuition itself...
...It is precisely this required stability that is captured in the principle, correctly stated, if incorrectly interpreted, by Inter insigniores, that the sacraments are based on natural signs, that is, on natural realities...
...Perhaps only by ultimately practicing an ethic of forgiveness can different people live with each other in a community of equal human beings...
...I will not comment on the historical issues pertaining to the papacy, nor the appreciation or lack of appreciation for that institution by the Orthodox church over the centuries...
...The government needs to acknowledge and facilitate the basic rights of parents to choose where they feel their children will have the best chance of developing educationally, socially, psychologically, civically, etc...
...One, true church As an Orthodox layman, I would like to respond to Jerry Ryan's "Back to the Future" [January 15...
...We're among the top nations in the world when it comes to literacy, for example...
...It seems to me, however, that one thing Catholics do not seem to understand is that we Orthodox, at this point in time, do not perceive a need for the papal office...
...Deborah meier Boston, Mass...
...The author replies: Deborah Meier's objection to my column is so wide-ranging that I can only respond to a few points...
...Department of Education on the nationally mandated reading exams given to a sample of about 31,000 public- and private-school students...
...Newspaper accounts of "collective guilt" as practiced by the Israeli government have included demolishing the homes of terrorists (or suspected terrorists), thereby leaving entire families homeless...
...But first we need a citizenry— and a media—that is willing to engage in that much harder discussion of purposes, and prepared to settle for something more complicated than sound bites...
...In the long run, the parent-choice-in-education movement is about full opportunity: the full opportunity for each child to have the schooling best suited for him/her...
...I am grateful to Commonweal and to Paul Baumann for the obituary of Frank McConnell [February 12], a writer who touched an extraordinary range of subjects and people...
...Van Beeck's intuitions Your recent contemporary theology issue [January 29], with its confusing counterpoint of articles on women by Frans Jozef van Beeck and Rose Hoover, hardly qualifies you as a credible medium of serious theological discussion...
...Ducking the issue It is unclear whether Peter Feuerhard ["The Voucher Canard," February 12] is worried about all students from dis-advantaged families or only those smart enough to compete for those very exclusive state schools that he so admires...
...There are now tests galore...
...When first I practice to retrieve—it works...
...The way to create more such opportunities is to help poor parents pay their modest tuition...
...If we learned to live harmoniously with this principle, we would not view state legislators and governors as "mad scientists" when they conduct experiments in funding mechanisms that remain within the nondiscriminatory principle...
...JAMES MORGAN Olympia, Wash...
...Right now, the Roman church appears to be beleaguered on many sides by what I would call liturgical and theological civil war, if not anarchy...
...The author replies: I applaud the result in the Milwaukee case, but most emphatically not because, as Walker fears, I am "quick to condemn a principle that has benefit-ted both church and state for more than two hundred years...
...Supreme Court since 1947, when the Court began to focus on the education of children in religious schools...
...It was, of course, not my intent to indulge in "beating up on public enterprises," but simply to report on the nationwide concern about the schools demonstrated in the last election and the efforts at improvement being made in several states...
...What distinguishes religious schools in our ghettoes from these fancy government enclaves is their surprising ability to educate children who are not so smart...
...we do tOO...
...Perhaps concerned parents and teachers working at improvement will bring it about...
...This latest round of testing madness has been picking up steam for more than twenty years, just at a time when McCarthy has been noticing that our schools are in decline...
...Gaffney is too quick to condemn a principle that has benefited both church and state for more than two hundred years...
...No state in the whole union used to require a test to graduate, so they couldn't have had "significant test scores...
...First, the notion of "collective guilt"—or "communal responsibility"—remains, for me, a very tricky and troublesome concept...
...EDWARD MCGLYNN GAFFNEY, JR...
...We would do well to remember the wise admonition of the father of our Constitution, James Madison...
...So the problem of disunity is largely a Western phenomenon...
...Walker and I disagree over the application of the general principle of nonestablishment and free exercise to the specific matter of how best to fund the general education of all children, a matter that the First Congress never contemplated because the government didn't operate schools then...
...Our apologies and regrets, the editors people do nothing is precisely at the heart of Andreassi's reflection...
...Truth comes out of the closet Anthony Andreassi's "Better Late Than...
...The quality of his attention at the border between conventional biblical studies and conventional literary studies prompted me, as a total stranger, to write and ask him if he would read early chapters of the work I eventually published as God: A Biography...
...We appear to have survived the past millennium unscathed by the horrible battles and viruses afflicting the West during this period of history...
...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor articulated a clear one when she wrote in Agostini, the case that reversed Aguilar in 1997, that there is no impermissible financial incentive to advance religion when "aid is allocated on the basis of neutral, secular criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion, and is made available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscrimi-natory basis...
...The writer is general counsel to the Baptist Joint Committee...
...Last Word, February 26] was one of the better commentaries on the subject I've come across in many years...
...I had begun this writing in great hesitation...
...School choice In his article concerning school vouchers ["Some Testing, Please," January 15] Edward M. Gaffney, Jr., decries the Supreme Court's historic condemnation of the use of government funds to subsidize religious schools...
...On the standardized tests as a tool of improvement, our memories and information differ...
...I agree that we have our Nestorians and Mono-physites, but they are closer to Orthodoxy than most Protestants are to Rome...
...And if this be true, then van Beeck's intuition advances rather than detracts from Hoover's reasoning...
...The forthright language of the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion) makes clear that this fundamental freedom was never intended to be subjected to experimentation...
...Wouldn't it be lovely if that's what was worrying us...
...He is pleased that the Court refused to review last year's ruling of the Wisconsin Supreme Court which upheld the constitutionality of vouchers for sectarian schools...
...Uniforms, retention, tests, prayer—even smaller classes— are stand-ins for nonexistent thinking about what it is that really ails us and what is it that schools might do about it...
...On the one hand, you present Hoover's well-reasoned argument that showed teeth by its theologically acute awareness of the diverse meanings of tradition and its corresponding freedom from invective against the past—qualities I find too frequently absent from self-consciously feminist writings on the subject...
...However, it might mean for us that the Catholic church of the West would have to recover the attitude of the first Gregory, whom we all honor as a saint...
...Here, one thought in reading, is a substantive, focused, and objective argument demanding serious attention...
...Full opportunity Peter Feuerherd's contribution to the Last Word column makes me think of the Ronald Reaganism, "There you go again...
...The writer is professor of law, emeritus, at Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley, and the author o/Private Wealth and Public Education (Books on Demand...
...Among Frank's works is an edited volume, to which he himself makes a brilliant contribution, titled The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (University of California Press...
...We also agree that the state constitutions and the Fourteenth Amendment prohibit the states from establishing a state religion or inhibiting the free exercise of religion by state laws...
...But longing for a nonexistent past won't bring us to such a future...
...In our little Orthodox jurisdiction, we are home to a number of folks in the gay/lesbian community (though we are not, heaven forbid, a "gay church" or any other kind of single-issue gathering...
...Inflicting a Lenten penance of our own, however, we misspelled her name...
...Feuerhard says it looks, walks, and talks like a canard, but I fear it is he who delivers a duck...
...No argument about the meaning of Scripture for the church, nor about whether Christ actually was born of a virgin, or if he rose from the dead...
...Thomas Jefferson never said that reversing such a foolish decision as Aguilar would be "sinful or tyrannical," and Madison's famous "Memorial and Remonstrance" was aimed at the teaching of Christian religion, not at impartial remedial reading and math...
...JACK MILES Pasadena, Calif...
...I hear many versions of Andreassi's experience, and I bless him for bringing the real issues out of the closet...
...Lots of eighteen-year-olds neither went to college nor were prepared for jobs that required knowing the Constitution...
...According to the report, the scores in reading skills showed improvement for the fourth, eighth, and twelfth-graders tested...
...It's a matter of justice and equity, and clearly taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n...
...We Orthodox do not seem to be visited by these demons...
...Frank was a man of enormous sympathy, taking that word to combine understanding and generosity...
...I recommend to you a book by Richard Rothstein, titled The Way We Were...
...Continued on page 28) Commonweal 4 March 26,1999 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 4) In fact, that's what has changed since the good old days...
...He responded to what I sent with great enthusiasm, enthusiasm that kept me going when I might have stopped...
...When I was in high school, we prepared earnestly for the tests called the Minnesota State Boards, and contemporaries of mine recall vividly the rigors of the New York Regents' exams...
...The Court's tortured results are not reasoning...
...As to Meier's assertion that there is no evidence that tests help, it would seem to be at odds with the report issued February 10 by the U.S...
...Meier says "no state in the whole union used to require a test to graduate...
...These are encouraging signs that we are beginning to move in the right direction," said Vice-President Al Gore in announcing the results...
...Are we searching for a genuine principle of constitutional law here...
...It's learning to use good judgment and taking responsibility for one's ideas and one's practices that lie at the heart of being a well-educated citizen...
...Similarly, I wonder about the relationship between forgiving and forgetting...
...WILLIAM J. TOBIN Falls Church, Va...
...The reason I applaud the result in the Wisconsin decision is that it is more principled than the scatter-patter of decisions in the U.S...
...Without this abiding natural significance, grace would have no fixed reference point in nature and hence would be at the mercy of human vagary...
...To argue that the church's restriction of priesthood to men may be based on the "provisionality" of the sacramental order, so that "the sacrament of orders is [sexually] lopsided precisely because it is a sacrament" is to subject the "already" dimension of the sacraments to their "not yet" dimension so as to deprive them of the possibility of any stable meaning...
...But beating up on public enterprises is sufficiently easy to do these days that no one need worry if the data do not add up...
...Abigail McCarthy Collective guilt I had several contrary reactions to Amitai Etzioni's otherwise excellent essay ["Kristallnacht Remembered," February, 12...
...In the only consistent standardized scores that we have, the kids are doing just as well/badly as they ever did...
...wall Orlando, Fla...
...These are "presupposed and perfected but not destroyed" by the word of faith that constitutes the form of the sacraments, and point unambiguously to the grace reality bestowed by the sacrament, for example, water as a sign of spiritual cleansing and rebirth in baptism, bread and wine as a sign of spiritual food in the Eucharist, etc...
...All the diploma ever meant was that you had completed, in some fashion or other, four years worth of Carnegie credits...
...they are irrational...
...All the evidence—from Jim Coleman to Tony Bryk to Jay Green—tells us that the best place for the unremarkable lower-class child is an inner-city religious school chosen by parents...
...and the full opportunity for private and religious schools (most of which have clearly demonstrated their ability to achieve more for students with less resources) to compete for the educational dollar...
...Aguilar (1985) held that little children in Harlem could not be taught to read or to count by public school teachers inside a religious school, but could do so in trailers parked outside...
...That is the basic point of the school-reform movement...
...While well intentioned, Ryan's suggestions would fall on deaf ears in the Orthodox world, I fear, since we already have that unity of faith that Rome is seeking to promulgate...
...That old truism about evil conquering when good Correction ¦ In the February 26 issue, Lyn C. Isbell generously shared her insights on charitable giving...
...I agree that Christian disunity is a scandal, but most of the problems of schism in the West appear to have begun around the time that the papal claims for universal jurisdiction and final appeal began to be inflated...
...He gleefully exclaims, (Continued on page 4) Commonweal 1 March 26,1999 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 2) "this debate will now have to be informed more by facts than by predilic-tions fueled by passions about the separation of church and state...
...john e. coons Berkley, Calif...
...J. BRENT WALKER Washington, D.C...
...He will be missed by many...
...I pray that unity may one day come...
...Century Foundation, 1998...
...I found the article I was looking for quickly and easily...
...Granted, we all should strive to learn the lessons of the past so as not to repeat them...
...Far from encouraging experimentation, Madison warned us "to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties...
...To make matters worse, van Beeck begins by disclaiming any concern with arguing the pros and cons of women's ordination, although his "intutition" proves to be related precisely, and really only, to that subject...
...Feuerherd confuses one of the means (vouchers) with the basic end (responsible parent choice...
...I could not help thinking about another example: the Middle East, long a place of ethnic hatred and violence...
...Only thoughtful schools, powerful schools, and schools where adults, not mindless tests, are in charge might fit our citizens to exercise wiser judgment...
...Thomas Jefferson called it "sinful and tyrannical...
...But I wouldn't argue that there's a cause and effect here, just that there is no evidence that more tests are a way to cure whatever ails us...
...TONY DiSTEFANO Alexandria, Va...
...We have our own problems, of course, particularly in the West, but theologically and ecclesio-logically we are all of one mind...
...DENNIS FERRARA Washington, D.C...
Vol. 126 • March 1999 • No. 6
