Is the Public School Still Possible?

Called by some the Satan case, the legal battle in the Bedford, N.Y., public school district earlier this year raises issues of community values and parental control over a child's education. It also calls into question the viability of public education in a nation that has become more diverse in religious views and increasingly divided in approaches to basic moral issues that once united Americans.

As part of a popular trend among public school educators, the Bedford curriculum includes a multicultural emphasis in which students are given extensive information about the cultures of other societies, including religious beliefs and practices.

Some parents wondered why these beliefsincluding pagan and occult practicescould be explained in public schools where discussion of the Ten Commandments and Jesus Christ is traditionally discouraged. They were also concerned about the religious aura that was given to some civic observances such as Earth Day.

A group of Catholic parents eventually brought suit, charging that the school district was promoting occult practices and New Age spiritualism, and claimed their First Amendment rights to freedom of religion were violated since Catholic practices were not given equal treatment.

In the wake of the case, some education experts are asking if the common school, once hailed as a foundation of good citizenship and national pre-eminence, is possible or even desirable in modem America.

IT'S PARENTAL CHOICE

Professor Rosemary Salomone of St. John's University School of Law in New York is writing a book on parental choice and educational values which is due to be published next year by Yale University Press. She considers the Bedford case a focal point for important issues in education today.

Devoting a full chapter in her book to the protracted battle in the suburban Westchester County school district that drew national media attention, she studies the finer legal points and the different views and motivations of parents. students, school administrators and teachers.

Her conclusion is that government-run schools are incapable of educating a large and diverse student body, especially in sensitive areas of values and morality, and that families should be afforded the financial resources through government or private programs to send their children to the schools of their choosing.

The Bedford case is important not because one side was right and the other wrong, she told the Register but because it highlighted the fact that there are some things in society's structure that government cannot legislate and courts should not decide.

The truth is, nobody was wrong in this case, she said. A government-run school system does not lend itself to parents who march to a different drummer. The real problem is when you have parents locked into a neighborhood school they do not like and have no choice.

Concluding the Bedford case last May in White Plains, N.Y, federal District Judge Charles L. Brieant ruled in favor of the Catholic parents on three of the 15 charges, describing as truly bizarre an Earth Day observance and as `terminally dumb a field trip to a cemetery. Both sides claimed partial victory and are considering appeal.

The judge prohibited a culture of India study in which elementary students made paper images of an elephant-headed Hindu god, the construction of worry dolls by elementary students which were supposed to ward off bad dreams and anxieties, and a high school Earth Day celebration featuring statements that the earth is the mother and the sun the father of all things.

Bruce L. Dennis, superintendent of the Bedford schools, said that he was satisfied that most of the district's practices were upheld and called the three proscribed practices relatively trivial incidents.

Christopher A. Ferrara, head of the New Jersey-based American Catholic Lawyers Association, which represented some of the parents, called the decision a vindication. The parents had been ridiculed and called extremists even by some fellow Catholics, but a federal judge found merit at the heart of their arguments, he said.

He added that if public schools are barred from teaching or promoting Christianity, they should not be allowed to impose the beliefs and practices of other religions.

Mary Ann Diari, the grandmother and guardian of two students in the case, claimed a major victory in that the court recognized a violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights.

People For the American Way, an organization which is openly hostile to what it calls the religious right and typically opposes the mixing of religion and public education, filed an amicus curiae brief on behalf of parents who supported the school district. The organization objected to the legal efforts of the Catholic plaintiffs to have parts of the curriculum removed simply because they did not agree with them, said Elliot Mincberg, vice president and general counsel for the Washington-based group.

The group is opposed to the routing of public funds to religious-based schools even if it is by means of vouchers paid to parents.

Mincberg told the Register that public education is viable because there is a broad-based agreement in most school districts about what should be taught. For parents who don't agree with the majority, options such as home-schooling exist, he stated.

IT'S BAD PEDAGOGY

Law professor Salomone, who lives in Westchester with her husband and their son, said that as a Catholic she does not see the practices in Bedford as a violation of religious rights. Rather, she considers worry dolls and earth-and-sun creeds bad pedagogy that should not be taught for educational reasons.

She also found objectionable some practices the judge did not prohibit, such as the drug-prevention D.A.R.E. program, which she thinks gives students too much information at too young an age, and a card game called Magic: The Gathering, which includes images of demons, ghosts and witches.

Her husband, Joseph Viteritti, a political scientist and a research professor of public administration at New York University, has also written extensively on education. His latest book Choosing Eqnality, will be published in the fall by the Brookings Institute. He told the Register the supporters of public education who oppose tax vouchers and charter schools generally have romantic visions of public education and fail to recognize the rate of failure

This common school concept doesn't work for everybody. What happens to them? he said.

Salomone and her husband send their son to a private, nonreligious elementary school even though the public school in their area is highly respected. The school of their choice is superior in academics and promotes golden-rule values. They prefer to leave religion to the home and the parish CCD program.

Parents decisions regarding their children are the most important they will make, Salomone said. If I exercise my choice in the matter of education because I have the resources, what of parents who don't have resources? They're stuck. ... The system is based on income. If you can buy yourself out, you're free.

Most adversely affected are those who look especially to education to improve their family's position in society, she observed. Poor parents who are forced to send their children to inferior schools are the biggest supporters of vouchers, she said.

The ability of parents to choose schools for their children is the equality issue for the new millennium, Salomone stated. And it is an issue that will not be resolved easily or quietly.