But vouchers exist in Cleveland because the public school system fell apart under incredible strain. As Cleveland's once mighty industrial economy stagnated and whites fled the Rust Belt city, the schools deteriorated. By 1995, when vouchers were introduced, 40 percent of Cleveland's nearly half-million people were living below the poverty line. Voters were unable or unwilling to pass a school levy, and the Cleveland public schools were $150 million in debt. School buildings were literally crumbling.

"I remember when the Browns [the NFL team] left town, there was all this hoopla and the whole city's in an uproar," recalls Richard DeColibus, president of the Cleveland Teachers Union. "The very same weekend that happened, one of the roofs in our elementary buildings collapsed, just fell right in. If the kids would have been there, you would have had 20, 30 kids killed. Nobody cared."

Violence in the schools also terrified parents and teachers. Zora Johnson is a mother of six with a bright smile and an uncanny resemblance to Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the mid-'60s "bad girl" group, the Ronettes. She is a dedicated preschool teacher in the Cleveland public schools and a union activist.

But in 1994 a fight erupted at her daughter's middle school, someone pulled a knife, and her daughter intervened to try to save a friend's life, only to have him bleed to death in her arms. Johnson immediately transferred her daughter to a Catholic school. "There's no way I was going to allow her to remain in the school system," shivers Johnson. "I was afraid she was going to get hurt."

The stark reality is that in Cleveland the only real alternative to public school is Catholic school. No one else has the institutional network in the inner city. No one else manages to educate kids on less than $2,250 a year. Proponents of vouchers argued that new private schools would spring up to educate voucher students. But it hasn't really worked out that way. The economics are daunting. And sometimes the temptation to take the money and run is too strong.

LaRuth Jackson, a single mother who lives in the projects, sent her first-grader, Jayve'ante, to a new school aimed at black voucher kids, the Islamic Academy School of Arts and Sciences. "What got me was the karate," recalls Jackson. "They had it every week and I met the instructor and he was nice, you know what I'm saying?"

But the school's promises proved hollow. Extracurricular activities vanished. It turns out that the teachers were not required to have credentials and one was reported to be an ex-con who had been jailed for murder. The founders of the school left town, owing more than $70,000 which they had collected from the state of Ohio for students who never actually attended class. A group of pro-voucher businessmen paid off the debt to avoid further embarrassment to the voucher program.

Jackson is bitter about her experience with vouchers and angry that her son wasted a year of schooling. "They do that with the black society," says Jackson. "They give you a voucher program and then everybody think, 'Oh, private school, better education.' But sometimes it might not be. It's all about the school."

One of the great controversies surrounding voucher students is whether their academic performance improves, even in the better-run schools. The results are mixed and inconclusive. Even an outspoken voucher advocate like Paul Peterson, a Harvard professor who has studied the Cleveland program, claims only modest improvements. "On test score data, you'd have to say the gains are fairly clear in math," Peterson concludes. "The gains in reading are less clear, more marginal."

What studies do confirm is that the parents of voucher students feel better. "I would say the results on parent satisfaction are overwhelmingly conclusive," says Peterson. "If parents are given a choice, they're very happy. They're much happier with their private schools."

Tammy Guido is definitely one of those happy parents. She views vouchers as a life preserver. A poor, white mother of three boys, she said applying for and receiving a voucher was like winning the lottery. And like other non-Catholic parents I interviewed, she has no objection to the mandatory weekly Mass and regular instruction in Catholicism.

"I am Lutheran," notes Guido. "Lutheran and Catholic is basically the same." That's not exactly the way Martin Luther saw it, but the ecumenical spirit is definitely alive and well among black and white voucher parents in Cleveland.

"I just feel any time you take public money and use it for private institutions, it's wrong," argues Woodford, and many agree that the $11 million a year it costs to run the Cleveland voucher plan is money better spent on improving public schools. Educators who oppose vouchers worry about the kids left behind in failing public schools after the voucher kids have bailed out.

"What about the kids who can't find a seat in that other school that presumably is a better school, what about them?" asks Rudy Crew, who was chancellor of the New York City public schools until the other Rudy, Mayor Giuliani, dismissed him last year after Crew refused to implement a pilot voucher program.

"What kind of materials and supplies and laboratory equipment and so forth will the kids in that school have?" Crew asks. "What are you going to do? Are you going to just simply say, 'Well, we've gotten a third of your kids out of here, and now the two-thirds of you that are remaining, basically don't need this?' That's absurd. Not only is it absurd, it's insidious."

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