The Real Voucher Winners

When Humari Bokari was principal of St. Leo's Catholic school in Milwaukee during 1990s, vouchers helped financially, she says, but "we didn't get much of a boost in attendance." Today Bokari is principal of Salam School, an Islamic primary school across town, where the story is different. In ten years the school has gone from seven students to 360. While other factors have fueled the expansion, Bokari states flatly, that without Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program "we would not have this high an enrollment." And she believes last week's Supreme Court ruling approving a similar program in Cleveland will improve prospects for Salam School and other Muslim schools around the country. Bokari, a Muslim woman who speaks with careful, British-bred diction, reveled in understatement, "I should say: whoopee."

Much of the public debate has taken it as a given that vouchers would be a boon for Catholic schools. But since Cleveland's voucher pilot program began in 1995, the 30 small diocesan schools that participated have lost some 2,000 students, according to Mary Lou Toler of the diocese's Office of Catholic Education. "There was no enrollment boost, and no financial boost either," says Toler, who points out that enrolled students simply substituted vouchers for tuition they had previously been paying out of pocket. If anything, the Cleveland program drove children back to free public schools by asking parents to pay 10 to 25 percent of the tuition if they chose private schools.

The big winners of any school voucher program may turn out to be not established private and parochial schools at all, but smaller evangelical Christian, Buddhist and Jewish academies-but perhaps none more so than the hundreds of Islamic schools, like Bokari's Salam School, that have bloomed in the last two decades.

To some extent, the reason is timing. While the Catholic school system is contracting-last year was the first in which more closed than opened--Islamic schools today resemble Catholic parish schools a hundred years ago, feeding on a huge immigrant tide that hasn't yet crested. As Muslims began to arrive in the United States from Asia and Africa in the late 1960s, their first order of business was to build mosques, then Islamic centers to anchor their fledgling communities. Only in the past two decades have they turned their attention to education. "After they saw the impact of public schools on their children, they decided to establish schools, usually using rooms in the Islamic center," says Sabah E. Karam of the Council for Islamic Schools in North America, an accrediting agency.

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