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"If we give poor parents the same opportunity to make choices about their children's education that the richest and most affluent parents in New York have," the mayor said, "let's see if that doesn't work to really energize that school district and help to create another alternative and more competition."

Dressing the conservative faith in free markets in the liberal cloth of fighting inequality, the mayor's words typified the argument increasingly and effectively made for vouchers by an unlikely coalition of libertarians, the religious right and traditionally Democratic minorities. That the mayor would advocate the cause in a city once so renowned for its public schools only added to the impact and symbolism.

Then, in the weeks after Giuliani's speech, he and Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as the presumptive candidates for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Circling each other in appearances across the state, Giuliani and Clinton held the prospect of making vouchers the central issue of the most closely watched Senate race in the 2000 election. No supporter of vouchers -- no one, for that matter, who relishes a public debate on how to better educate poor children -- could have asked for a more prominent forum.

Giuliani, however, did not know when to clam up. Presenting his budget on April 22, the mayor could not resist deriding New York's public schools as "dysfunctional" and "just plain terrible." He concluded, "The whole system should be blown up."

And so, in a single outburst, the man who could have been vouchers' most important advocate on the national stage transformed himself into their worst enemy. The fear of vouchers, even among those sympathetic to the plight of minority students, is that in the course of rescuing a few thousand children they will undermine the public schools that educate millions and, in a broader sense, erode the entire concept of public education. The mayor's choice of imagery manifested the suspicion that vouchers, however camouflaged in the language of fairness, fundamentally amount to a wrecking ball.

There may well be an argument to be made in favor of wrecking balls in places like Florida, which approved a voucher plan last month. Decades of segregation and under-funding have done little there to create a tradition of quality public education. In New York, in contrast, the public schools are inextricably part of the civic mythology of immigrant uplift and social mobility: nothing less than the American Dream. Even in its depleted present state, the city system continues to send a remarkable share of foreign-born pupils on to college.

Next page | Blacks support vouchers