House approves vouchers for D.C.

The House, on two razor-thin votes, yesterday approved a historic private-school voucher program for D.C. parents who want to remove their children from public schools.

On a 205-203 vote, with four Democrats joining 201 Republicans, the House voted to start a five-year pilot program to offer school-choice scholarships of up to $7,500 to an estimated 2,000 parents whose children currently attend failing D.C. public schools.

The program passed as an amendment to the appropriations bill for the District.

“This amendment offers help and hope to disadvantaged families in the District of Columbia, by giving them the same education choices that middle-class families already enjoy,” said Rep. John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

House Democrats still hope the voucher vote will be overturned when the appropriations bill comes up for a final vote Tuesday. The program also awaits Senate action, which, given the closeness of the House votes, is not anticipated to be easy, both supporters and opponents of school vouchers said yesterday.

Fourteen Republicans opposed the voucher initiative championed by President Bush and proposed by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican. The close vote was marked by heavy Republican arm-twisting.

Opponents repeatedly said there was “no evidence” that vouchers help poor families or foster public school improvement. They equated vouchers to abandoning the public schools and stripping them of much-needed funding.

“I see a trick; I see subterfuge. I see us undermining the right for our children to get a good common school education,” said Rep. Danny K. Davis, Illinois Democrat.

“It’s D.C. today. It’s Chicago tomorrow, St. Louis, New Orleans, Los Angeles next week, then it’s all of America. The message … goes far beyond Washington, D.C.”

In a separate vote, the House blocked D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton’s effort to strip the $10 million from the District’s appropriation bill for fiscal 2004, which would have left the voucher program unfunded. The vote ended in a 203-203 tie, after Republican leaders convinced two Republican congressmen to switch their votes.

“There was a bit of an uproar on the House floor” as the first vote was closed, an aide to one opposing Republican lawmaker said. Rep. Robert R. Simmons, Connecticut Republican and voucher opponent, was blocked from voting as he came running onto the House floor while the vote was still open.

Reps. Philip S. English of Pennsylvania and Ernest L. Fletcher of Kentucky, both Republican opponents on the first vote, switched their votes from “yes” to “no” on Mrs. Norton’s amendment.

House supporters repeatedly spoke of the large academic achievement gap of black students in D.C. schools, despite the more than $10,000 yearly per-pupil cost, which is nearly the highest in the country.

Terming the city’s school system “a failed dysfunctional bureaucracy,” Mr. Davis of Virginia said it has “the highest drop-out rate in the nation and the lowest academic scores.”

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