VOUCHING FOR vouchers is easy if you do not intend to use them. After the Supreme Court upheld Cleveland's school voucher program, President Bush called it a ''great victory to parents and students.'' He said vouchers give ''freedom to parents.'' He said ''it was an important statement'' to ''make sure no child is left behind.''

Bush equated vouchers with the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregated schools. ''The court declared that our nation will not accept one education system for those who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and for those who can't, and that's just as historic,'' Bush said.

Bush put vouchers on the same shelf as a decision whose application periodically required the National Guard to ensure that no black child was left behind or stomped on. That makes it all the more transparent why Bush flew to Cleveland last week to blow a kiss at vouchers yet blew out of town with no revolutionary proposal to expand them. Truly pursuing vouchers means roiling America almost as much as 1954. It requires the equivalent of Bush sending the National Guard to the suburbs.

If vouchers are this good, why should the disproportionately blond burbs have all the fun? Besides, the right wing for years has been saying we are wasting, through busing and union contracts, the $5,934 that we spend per student per year in school districts where the poverty rate is more than 35 percent. Let us see what happens for that $6,144 per student per year in districts where the poverty rate is less than 5 percent.

Based on Bush's personal path to education, at Phillips Academy in Andover and at Yale, we obviously should not stop there. Only 6 million of America's 47 million schoolchildren attend private schools. The horrible divide in resources is only getting wider. While the national ratio of one private school student to every eight public school students is about the same today as it was in 1970, the ratio of private school teachers to public school teachers has risen from 1 for every 9 to 1 for every 7.

How sincere the nation is about addressing inequities is revealed fairly rapidly by looking at Cleveland's voucher program. Currently, only one Cleveland student out of every 20 uses vouchers. They cannot use them to go to the suburbs because no suburban school system will take them. Vouchers are useless for elite private schools since they are good for only up to $2,250 per student. Nationally, nonsectarian private school tuit ion averages $4,693 a year at the elementary level and $9,525 in high school. In the Northeast, elite private schools easily go for $15,000 a year for day students and $25,000 a year for boarding students.

Those realities have led to 96 percent of Cleveland's voucher students using their money to go to subsidized religious schools. That may make Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia happy in his efforts to increase the relationship between government and religion, but it hardly represents ''choice.'' A religious school may be a better choice than imprisonment in a decrepit public school, but this is nowhere near the ''freedom'' proclaimed by Bush.

Vouchers would not be an issue if we properly funded public schools. The nation has so successfully destroyed them that a majority of African-American parents have come to support vouchers.

Bush might have seemed more sincere if he had come to Cleveland not only to show off the black folks who supported vouchers there but admonish the suburban systems and private schools that do not participate. But even when suburbs are willing to help out, government is not very interested. In the Boston area, several suburban systems have for years volunteered slots to students from the Boston public schools in the METCO program, yet state funding has been frozen, and the program now faces Draconian cuts.

Bush stands in a no-man's land of education. Disastrously underfunded urban public schools are on one side. On the other are the uninterested burbs and the disconnected, disburdened nonreligious private schools. Short of announcing that he is disbanding urban public schools altogether and offering freedom for all, Bush is pushing the disingenous distraction of vouchers. Vouchers cannot offer a path to freedom when so many children will be left behind.

Bush can liken vouchers to the Brown decision all he wants. He has yet to rise to the leadership of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. They sent federal troops to desgregate schools. Bush has yet to even whisper against the segregation that stands between families who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and for those who can't. When he does, that will be historic.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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