Vouching For Vouchers

Once Upon a Time in a City Not Far Away

There was a black lawyer in a top firm in Philadelphia in the mid 1980s. In the mid 1980s this was quite an accomplishment for a black lawyer to even be an Associate in a major firm in Philadelphia. He was tall, rather handsome, maybe a bit full of himself, but clearly very bright. He was a Penn Law School graduate.
At Penn Law he met and eventually married an equally or more bright law student. They practiced law in Philadelphia for a while then moved to Los Angeles. Last I saw him (which was quite some time ago) he had a thriving practice, a nice House in a georgeous part of LA and was starting a family.
The American Dream was working for him.
The key- if you asked him- was his educational foundation.

He was a kid from the inner city- someone you would have said was "at risk"; Most of the people he grew up with didn't have anything like his success. A lot of them are either still in North or West Philadelphia. Some got stuck in "the system." He wasn't from a "bougie" part of Philly- he was from hard core, lock your windows, boarded up row houseville-the part of town the police didn't even respond to calls at much and you could barely get a cab driver to go to. The place smelled of unemployment and disability checks, wired fences, undercover drugs and houses heated with open doored ovens.
So how did such a kid end up at Penn Law School then in a nice house in LA?

So how did he "escape?"


He had a free and/or highly subsidized Catholic education from first grade through High School.
For years, he took a public bus half way across town to go to school because no one in his household owned a car.

Then he got into Penn Law School. Can you imagine the elation in his entire family upon receiving his acceptance letter. I don't think either of his parents went to college.

This is just one such story in the naked city that I know about. There are millions more.

One of the things that Catholics do Amazingly well in cities is help keep kids out of trouble through elementary, jr. high and High School education. Any youth who is blessed enough to be given a "voucher" or any free benefit, assistance or scholarship to get to take advantage of a private catholic education when they otherwise could never afford one, is blessed indeed, because it sets them up for a Life wholly distinguised above and apart from the alternatives.

This is not to say that the Alternatives should not get better, or that money should not be put into the Alternatives so that we have the best education in the world- Obama is absolutely correct that if we fail in education we are doomed to fail in competition globally- so the public schools have to be improved as well with double attention paid on those schools which have suffered from discriminatory neglect in government funding/appropriation. But these are not either/or propositions. We can do all of it. The people who value, want and NEED the spiritual dimension of a Catholic education should have that choice. It can literally save their lives. Seriously.

A Catholic Education, with the spiritual dimension, is something that one should be able to choose and get help if one desires their children to go there.

One aspect of the beauty of those who choose to devote themselves to God as celibates is that they do not have their own children to devote themselves to which frees them to have very large families and treat all children like theirs, or like their extended family with special attention and devotion toward nurturing the things that feed the kids souls as well as minds. I remember a very sweet priest who referred to all the students to which he attended as a Neuman chaplain at a University as "my kids." All of them were "his kids." If you have met a really devoted educational priest you see something very special- something that people want their kids exposed to.

Many people in the country, and the world will swear that a Catholic education saved them.
They would be lost without it.
It drove out demons that would have swallowed them alive otherwise.

I can think of few sadder events from a policy perspective than eliminating this benefit for families who have come to rely on it for the intellectual and spiritual formation of their children.