The Role Of Faith-Based Organizations

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MR. DIONNE: We are going to start and folks coming in from the back of the room will slowly return. Dennis Shirley is associate dean of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He previously served as a professor of education and college master at Rice University. He holds a doctorate in teaching curricula and learning environments from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And he is a recipient of fellowship awards from a long list of distinguished institutions. He has written several books on the role of secondary institutions and faith-based groups in improving public schools, including Community Organizing for Urban School Reform and Organizing the Valley: Community Empowerment and School Reform in South Texas. It is a familiar theme from what we have just heard. It is a great pleasure to welcome Dennis Shirley. And if you haven't read it, his paper is very powerful and very helpful. He will give us a taste of it now.

Dennis Shirley, thanks for being here.

DR. DENNIS SHIRLEY: Thank you, E.J. I would like to thank all of you for staying. I know usually I go into a deep slumber mode after a nice hearty lunch like that, and I will try and be vivacious to help you with the task of maintaining alertness.

I just told E.J. that I think that there is one issue which I hope that we will grapple with a bit more frontally than we have done so far today. It was brought up by one gentleman this morning: the whole issue of government funding of this new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. And I am going to take perhaps a idiosyncratic line of interpretation here. I am going to give you a little bit of theoretical background in terms of how we might think about relationships between church and state, specifically the public schools, refer to the Constitution, and refer a little bit to the history of American education in specific reference to this new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. And then I want to move to two case studies, very briefly, of Alliance schools working in Texas that show different ways that congregations can work with schools to improve student learning outcomes. And then I would like to wrap up the paper with three indications of what I see to be primarily promising practices that can emerge from faith-based institutions working with public schools and also three caveats, or three cautions.

I would like to start with a story since sometimes these things help a little bit. It is in some ways a story that I think is representative of my generation which grew up in the shadow of the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam and that protest. And, Ruth, you referred this morning to the kind of challenge against authority, not just illegitimate authority but perhaps the challenge to all forms of authority which has disrupted different parts of American culture over the past quarter century. I have a 10 year old son and a 12 year old daughter. Last fall, my son was listening to some stuff on the radio and my wife heard it. And she immediately turned off the radio. And when I came home that evening, she gave me an earful of what my son had been listening to. And she said it was profanity, graphic descriptions of sexual acts with a lot of gratuitous violence mixed in. And I thought to myself, well, wait, I am a child of the sixties, this stuff is probably just boundary testing, no issue at all. I asked my son Gabriel, "What is the number on the radio dial?" And he told me. So I thought to myself, fine, I will listen to the radio station as I drive to work the next morning, no problem at all. And I thought I will calm this whole situation here. It is probably no big deal. So I got in my car and I turned on the radio to that station. And after like five or 10 minutes, my temperature started going up, and I could not believe what I was listening to. The stuff out on some mainstream radio stations these days is so sexually explicit and so filled with profanity, with references to violence, with disrespect for other people, with disrespect for oneself. By the time I got into work and picked up the receiver to call my wife, I was absolutely apoplectic.

So that is one little story. Now, it goes further because my 12 year old daughter was taking art in the fall in our local public school, and she comes home one day and says, "Mom and dad, I was really feeling uncomfortable in my art class today," because the teacher lets the kids choose a radio station to listen to so that they can listen to music while they are doing their artwork. What do you know, it was the same radio station that was playing during art class. Now, I can't stand the idea of any 12 year old girl having to listen to this stuff during school time. So I tell you that story. Subsequently, I went in and talked with the teacher. What did the teacher say? The teacher said, "Well, the kids wanted it. We liked to rebel when we were young too. So this is their rebellion." And that is when I realized that I was crossing a cultural divide, if you will, and that I was at a point where I was deeply concerned with a lot of the messages that are out in mainstream culture now.

I share that story because for me it is related to the idea of linking faith-based organizations with public schools. And I say, this is really interesting, I am perhaps different from many people who are supporting this issue in that I am a lapsed Episcopalian and sometime Unitarian. I am not a person who is approaching this issue out of a faith tradition, but I am a person who cares very deeply about having a good society for my kids to grow up in. And I care very much about kids who are disconnected from any values other than marketplace values. And, boy, do we ever project those marketplace values out there through a host of media. Television is one of the most powerful ones, the Internet now. But I think when we actually look back at the history of the last few hundred years, there were a number of folks all along the way who knew that marketplace values were not sufficient values for raising children in a society. Interestingly, one of these folks was Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations, who wrote a companion volume or actually two companion volumes called The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith talked about the need to inculcate sympathy and compassion in children and adults to have a moral society.

So for me, there is a whole cluster of issues here. I bring all of this up because I think that a lot is at stake with this particular effort to link congregations with schools because of the value-base, the value orientations, that different faith traditions can bring to the projects of education. And so that is my personal stake in this. And I think it is a stake that we all have in terms of this initiative right now, to try and find ways to link faith-based organizations and schools. That is my personal preface.

Now, that personal preface comes out of a context that to my mind is intensely paradoxical and full of ironies. We in the United States have the strictest separation of church and state than perhaps any Western democracy, with the possible exception of France. Yet we seem to be the most devout people, both in terms of the beliefs that people report and in terms of our participation in religious institutions. That is one paradox.

Another paradox is that we have a host of research that tells us that kids' participation in religious institutions is a very powerful indicator of kids' resilience, especially kids who are growing up in at-risk situations. And yet because of the way in which the First Amendment has been interpreted, we also have difficulties linking faith-based institutions with schools. So, there is a lot of research that indicates that participation in faith-based institutions is very good for kids, but is it a constitutional barrier? I would question that. The way that the Constitution has been interpreted since 1947 that indicates that maybe we can't have close collaborations between faith-based organizations and schools. That to my mind is a second paradox.

Then we have a third paradox that one gentleman referred to over lunch. There are programs like Teen Challenge out there that have absolutely incredible results in terms of getting teenagers off of heroin and other addicting substances with a strong evangelical component. And the research tells us that these kinds of programs are more effective than many secular programs. This is where we have to ask ourselves the question: when human lives are at stake, can government money go to support these kinds of services or is the separation of church and state so sacrosanct in our current interpretation that the government can't contribute to programs like that?

And then we have this paradox that even though the Supreme Court has essentially insisted on no aid to religion since 1947, one recent survey shows that 63 percent of religiously-affiliated nonprofits indicate that they have received more than 20 percent of their budget from public funds.

So there are just all kinds of paradoxes at play here.

Now, in my paper, I have this sentence: "Into this happy minefield, let us wander, well aware of the controversial ground on which we are treading, as well as the probable impossibility of finding a consensus that will please all parties." So, clearly, there are lots of situations or we can imagine a lot of situations in which there will indeed be a lot of litigation and many different challenges to possible collaborations between faith-based organizations and schools. And, yet, I would say even though it is likely to be fractious, and even though it is likely to involve a lot of debates, and even though there may be litigation, which is time consuming and expensive, I think that this is a good thing. In fact, I will even say that I actually think that this Bush initiative to put $8 billion into this Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is a good thing. I think that one of the reasons it is really a good thing is it is getting us discussing these issues in ways that we haven't really in the past. When I worked with the Alliance school effort in Texas, I was looking at congregations working with schools. Many people, most people in the mainstream education community, had no way of even conceptualizing this. And I will tell you, outside of Texas, when I worked with the public schools in Massachusetts, people don't really have a way of thinking about congregations or faith-based organizations as resources for their schools. It is not in the culture at all. And so I think that we need to think about some ways that we can re-mix our institutions so that at least some conversations about possible collaborations can come to the table.

Now, of course, the Bush Administration did not start this whole initiative. This has been gaining headway for many years. It began with the Charitable Choice option of the 1996 welfare reform bill, which was supported both by President Clinton and by Al Gore. But because this is a brand new administration and because this issue has been put on the table in the first fortnight of the new administration, and because of the $8 billion of financial backing that this is bringing with it, this is now moving to the forefront of our social policy agenda. It does so even though Americans are very ambivalent about the role of religion in public life. One recent survey found that Americans overwhelmingly believe that people would be better off if they were more deeply religious. Yet Americans also harbor fears of religious groups, particularly in public life. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe that if religious organizations were to become more involved in public schools things could get out of hand and religious extremists would try to take over.

So this kind of ambivalence, it seems to me, calls out for analysis. And it especially calls for analysis given the confused way that the whole Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is unfolding right now. Some of you may have had the chance to look at the actual paper the White House put out called, "Rallying the Armies of Compassion," which is on their Web-site. There is a very brief reference in that document to a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the Department of Education. And this is what it says — it is just two sentences: "The Center in the Department of Education will be concerned with the agency's social programs, such as after school programs and efforts to link public schools with community partners, including neighborhood faith-based groups. It will not work on K through 12 or higher education policy as such." I don't know if you follow the contradiction that I see there, but I think that if the Department of Education is putting out guidelines and possibly putting out grant proposals for faith-based organizations to be working with public schools. That is going to be a shift in educational policy. And it is going to have ramifications for the public schools in the United States. And it is also going to have ramifications on possibilities of litigation regarding issues pertaining to the separation of church and state.

Here is my interpretation of how we think about congregations of faith-based organizations working with public schools. I believe that Professor Haynes was exactly right this morning when he said that 90 percent of the issues have actually been settled in terms of church-state relationships with public schools. I think in spite of my enthusiasm for this new office, we have to proceed cautiously. I do believe that there are dangers in increasing collaborations between public schools and faith-based organizations. Those who do have concerns about proselytizing and other kinds of coercion have legitimate concerns and they must be heard. But I do believe also that there is a capacious middle way that we can explore to link faith-based institutions with schools. And I would suggest, and I hope that this would be a way in which we could avoid litigation, the route that we actually have been using for many years of government funding for religiously-affiliated nonprofits or schools themselves would be a way that we could increase collaboration between faith-based organizations and schools without getting into too much trouble with the First Amendment.

Let me turn now briefly to the First Amendment itself, just so we remember the wording of the Amendment that is relevant here. It actually says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." I want to remind us of this because the original intention of the Framers of the Constitution was that there not be a national religion in the United States. Unless I am mistaken, every single state with the exception of Virginia and Rhode Island had a state religion shortly after the Constitution was ratified. It was well into the 1830's, I believe, when Massachusetts became the last state to revoke that. But I think it is very important to note that the original wording was that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." And, of course, if we look at the Constitution, we see that there is no articulation of a federal role in educational matters at all. It is strictly a state and local matter, at least until after the end of World War II. And it wasn't even until 1947 that the Supreme Court broadened the First Amendment and determined the Establishment Clause applied not only to the federal government but also to state and local governments. I think that is very important. And I want to say I am not a person who believes that when we interpret the Constitution, we should always go back to the late 18th century. But just in terms of understanding the intentions of the Framers, I think that is an important demarcation to look at.

Then, of course, when we look at the reality of the history of American education, we find that the history of American schools is tightly interwoven with the history of religious institutions. Virtually all of the public schools in the United States originated with close affiliations with religious institutions. This is true whether the case was that of Puritan Massachusetts, Quaker Pennsylvania, Anglican Virginia. Many of these schools were funded through a mixture of public and private revenues. And for Americans, this was considered to be part of the sine qua non of a good education.

Now, of course, since then we have gone through many ripples and many transformations in terms of how we have looked at the First Amendment. But I just want to put these three issues out there: the Constitution itself, the wording of the First Amendment, and American educational history so that we understand that how we have looked at the separation of church and state has modulated radically really over time. And I would suggest that the value of separation of church and state is a relative value. It is not an absolute one. It has undergone many contestations and it is going to involve more revisions in the current context and in the future.

Now, I would also suggest even though it is sometimes really heterodox to suggest that any of our policies might be enlightened by looking at other countries, I do think it is interesting to look at the case of Western Europe where there is no such strict demarcation between government and religious institutions. And where, to my way of looking at things, religious institutions have clear rights and clear prerogatives in which the rights of religious minorities are protected and where all the civil liberties that we care most about are also protected. Again, maybe the value of the First Amendment Establishment Clause is a relative value, which should modulate over time and is not an absolute.

Let me turn now to the research base on congregations working to improve public schools. I hope that one of the things that all of you are getting from this gathering today is that this research base is actually tremendously thin. I think that that is very important when we talk about $1 billion going into the support of faith-based organizations working with public schools, there is not a strong research base to support $1 billion going into public schools. If all of our policy decisions were driven by having empirical research at our hands, this would not be a way to proceed. So I think that is very important.

As far as I can tell, I seem to be one of the few people out there who has actually done any sustained research about the matter of congregations working with public schools. It is a new area. There have been a lot of local initiatives but they don't appear to have been researched systemically, which for me is one of the reasons that I am glad this money has come down the pike because I want some colleagues who are also looking into faith-based organizations working with schools. We know that it is happening out there. We know about the Chicago Public Schools Interfaith Community Partnership, the Black Ministerial Alliance working with schools in Boston, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in St. Petersburg, Florida. We know that there are all kinds of fascinating work going on with after school programs, literacy activities, youth mentoring programs. And we know that to a certain extent it seems to make sense given what we know about the power of religious affiliations for students' psychological and educational development. We don't know about the role of the faith difference in contributing to student achievement. And we do know that collaboration in and of itself is not a magic bullet. I hope you got that from Professor Sanders' presentation this morning. Collaborations can be filled with conflict, and I hope that none of us leave the room thinking that collaborations are easy and it is just a matter of clarifying what our goals are because folks in schools have very much their agenda which they have to pursue. Most teachers right now are under the gun to raise standardized test scores and are feeling threatened in many ways by collaborations with outsiders. It is a tough time in many ways in American education right now. And if we move to a system of national testing, as the President is proposing, that is simply going to increase the pressure on teachers.

So, we are doing tough work when we talk about congregations working with schools. It is filled with problems but also filled with possibilities. Since Ernie Cortes and Willie Bennett both referred to some successful cases with the Alliance schools, I am going to just refer to two very, very briefly. Although I do think that it is really interesting to dig into the stories that pertain to faith-based organizations working with schools, if you want to go to your local library and request my book, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform, I think one can learn a lot by looking at how educators in under-resourced schools and communities can come together with congregations. There are lots of setbacks. There are many defeats. There are many unexpected outcomes. This is not a science, it is an art and it is something that is evolving. And it requires patience. While the Alliance schools do have some schools that show instant results, that is not most of them. Most of them are really struggling to find ways to get communities involved in kids' education and to improve on student outcomes and it is not easy work.

Having said that, let me tell you briefly about Morningside Middle School in Fort Worth, Texas. This was the very first of the Alliance schools back in the mid-1980's. Morningside Middle School is located in an African-American community on the south side of Fort Worth. And the principal of the school in 1985 had his jaw broken in a playground scuffle and when he was replaced in the following fall, on the first day of school, the new principal came in to find that her office had been firebombed by some vagrants the night before. And the principal was afraid. As often happens in our large urban school districts, the principal was not really given any choice to be the principal of the school, she was simply assigned. And she subsequently spent a lot of time going around to the Black Baptist and Pentecostal churches in south Fort Worth and going into the congregations and saying, "I am the new principal of Morningside Middle School. I am afraid, and I need your help." So there was an educator who was taking a leadership role in reaching out to faith-based organizations.

Now, I don't believe that this principal, Odessa Raven, could have turned things around in the school at all if there hadn't been a community-based organization, like Mr. Bennett's Allied Communities of Tarrant, to work with and if there hadn't been religious leaders in the community that were looking for a school to partner with. But essentially what happened is that out of Odessa Raven's outreach into the community, ministers and laity began making home visits to the parents in the Morningside neighborhood and encouraging parents to voice their grievances about the school and to come to school meetings. And parents came to the meetings, and they had a lot of grievances because the school was in utter chaos at the time. The police were coming out several times a week to break up fights. There was a convenience store right next to the school that was selling alcohol to the middle school students. And everyone was irate about the firebombing in the school. And essentially what happened is that through an 18 month organizing effort, Morningside Middle School went from being the middle school which was rock bottom on the standardized test scores in Fort Worth to the middle school that was third from the top, all within a two year period. That is just one brief snapshot story of how a number of congregations worked with a school to improve student achievement.

The other case study that I would like to share with you is that of Sam Houston Elementary School in McAllen, Texas. It is about seven miles from the Mexican border and serves a student population that is coming from homes that are 100 percent Spanish monolingual. In this particular community, what is interesting is that the parish Catholic church on the south side of McAllen had strong leadership in the form of Father Bart Flat and Sister Maria Sanchez, two individuals who did a lot of community organizing in their neighborhood and found out that their parishioners were very concerned about poor performances in the public school. And in this case, the religious leaders organized principals to come into the Alliance school network. And in the case of Sam Houston Elementary School, there were also problems with rats, actually, in the cafeteria and in the schools. And what happened at Sam Houston Elementary School was that the parishioners and the educators from Sam Houston Elementary School were able to turn that school around so that within five years it became a "exemplary school" in Texas. And this is a school that serves one of the poorest student populations in Texas, all along the lower Rio Grande Valley. It is a region of high poverty and student transience. So those are two cases which I think indicate that congregations can play extremely important roles in improving student achievement.

Let me just indicate very briefly what for me are some of the promising practices that emerge from these kinds of collaborations. The first thing that I think educators have to understand, and this is very painful I know for a lot of teachers and a lot of principals and a lot of school staff, but it is very critical to understand, for a lot of low-income folks, the school is not a place that they trust. They do not view the school as a community center. They view the school as a place in which they are welcomed warily, if at all. Just last week, I was in an urban middle school, and I was part of what is called an in-depth review team where you go into every single classroom. And in only one classroom in this middle school was there any place where a parent who might want to come in to observe the class could find a place to sit. So if parents just wanted to come in and observe the class, it was clear they were going to have to find a place to stand. There are so many little things that we could do to welcome parents into our communities but partly because of the way that urban schools have developed, we simply don't do that. I believe that there is a different relationship that exists between parents and their faith-based organizations. They often find solace in those organizations. They find faith. They find camaraderie and comity. And it is a different way for people who themselves may have failed in schools to muster some political power so that they can take on what seemed to them to be massive, overwhelming odds, that is an urban public school system.

The second thing to notice about this, and this didn't come out from the presentations over lunch, is that in the Industrial Areas Foundation, the way that funding occurs for the organizations is that institutions — like churches, synagogues, or mosques — pay dues to Allied Communities of Tarrant or Austin Interfaith or the El Paso Inter-Religious Sponsoring Organization. So, institutions, you buy a piece of that community-based organization, and what this means is we get out of this culture what we have in many schools where the way that we organize parents is that we send a take-home slip and it is all individual one-on-one organizing. It is very different, if you are low-income parent and your minister or a nun or someone in your congregation approaches you and talks about a joint effort. It is a much more of a communitarian understanding than an individualistic understanding. And parents often feel more support when they go into a school with the backing of a congregation than they feel when they go in on their own.

And then there is a third promise I see the time, which is the faith element itself. I am not sure if we can really get people involved in schools just on the basis of higher student achievement or just on the basis of their civic duty. There is a whole different reservoir, a whole different sentiment that we can tap into, when we tap into their wellsprings of faith. I don't know how to articulate that. We need to do more research on it but it brings a very different dimension in when we are willing to engage that facet of human identity.

A couple of real quick perils. One is proselytizing. If congregations are going to become involved in schools, they have to understand some ground rules. Dr. Haynes' research indicates that guidelines can be set up for teaching about religion. I would submit that guidelines could also be set up for helping congregations to work with public schools but there is a lot of educational work that needs to happen in that domain. We are going to have to be sensitive to teacher's concerns, that their professionalism could be compromised. And that is not just an issue that relates to people from faith-based organizations coming into schools, it could be a business group, it could be any community group that comes in. But I have done some research on some schools where the teachers say, "Congregations coming in, please don't. We know what our mission is. We have the professional training. We know how to teach the kids." Sometimes the teachers were wrong, okay, because sometimes they really need the parents in there but they don't know how to engage them. But I simply want to indicate that that is a problem, will be a problem if congregations are working more with schools.

Then there is another issue which is goal displacement. That means sometimes teachers can get off on the issue of doing innovative community collaboration work but forget about the core of their activities, which is teaching kids. And so we have to be alert to that. And then, of course, there are issues that faith-based organizations have about working with schools. I have seen cases, which have been real clear, where public school folks have wanted to dump their responsibilities on churches. That is not going to work. Very specifically on a case in Houston where a principal had funding to run an after school program in her school, but she didn't want to do it. She wanted to get the churches to do it. And an irate organizer, a community organizer told me, "That principal never wants to do anything extra. She always wants to get out of the school as quickly as she can at the end of the day."

I regret that I can't comment on the sphere of religious leaders who worry that collaboration with other schools could undermine their autonomy. I have to say I have a large grant from the Department of Education that relates to teacher quality issues. It has not diminished my criticism of the Department of Education, but I shouldn't generalize from that.

I want to end with the idea that we can find ways for faith-based organizations to work with schools, and I really do believe this, if we are inventive. When I got my grant from the Department of Education or rather when I applied for it, I had to indicate that my coalition, which consists of seven higher education institutions in Massachusetts and 18 urban schools and three business partners, I had to indicate that we had business partnerships. And I would ask you why is it critical that we could prove collaborations with business partnerships but it wasn't critical for us to show any collaborations with any community organizations or with any faith-based organizations? We had worked with faith-based organizations. They are critical allies in getting our work off the ground. Is there any reason that those groups, which often are more responsive to the needs of their communities, couldn't be involved in some of the coalitions that are government funded?

I have gone over my time, but I want to leave you with that. I want to go on the record as saying that I think this initiative in the Bush Administration — this is really strange for me out of my political background — is really exciting, and I hope that we will give it a chance to get off the ground.

Thank you.

MR. DIONNE: We are going to operate under the last shall be first principle and go back the other way. I just have three quick responses to Dennis' very good presentation, and also his excellent paper. One of the interesting things about the IAF organizing to me is that it tries to respond to this problem of whether the faith-based organizations will be practical or prophetic. It oughtn't to be contradictory to be practical and prophetic. And I think the way these groups do their work is they try to combine the two. Secondly, I truly hope that the lesson of today is not that if you want to organize parents and energize congregations, you release rats in the public schools. I was struck that at both presentations that worked. And for later on in the conversation, I want to throw back at you one interesting thing you said when you were talking about Western Europe as a model. You could ask the question, "is it not the case that religious organizations, and for that matter religious belief in the United States, are actually stronger than in Western Europe and might not that have something to do with a relatively tough interpretation of the First Amendment, which has turned out to strengthen rather than weaken the power of faith in social and political life." And I can see arguments on either side. But I think it is worth considering that when you compare us to Western Europe, the power of religious institutions is stronger here.

One other housekeeping announcement. The lesson is never invite anybody who is in a one month old administration because she has a lot of work to do. Nina Rees called again to say she is desperately trying to get here but was called up to a meeting on the Hill. We are hoping she will arrive shortly, and we will welcome her into our conversation.

Ruth Wattenberg, please start us off.

MS. WATTENBERG: Okay, I was interested that Dennis ended by saying he is very excited about the Bush initiative because it could sponsor so many interesting things. And I was struck by the fact that so much of what he talked about in his remarks, and even more so in his paper, never could get funded under the Bush initiative. A lot of what IAF does that was talked about today by Ernie and a lot of what was talked about by you and even more so in the paper was involving religious congregations in political advocacy — something which I am very much in favor of. But I think nobody, even the Bush Administration, imagines that that would be the appropriate use of federal dollars. And I do think that is a lot of what the strength of IAF was. So I just want to put that out there.

In fact, you gave examples from IAF work that I would say are certainly the right models for engaging the faith community. Whether or not it is the right model for getting funding, I am not sure. But it is the right model for engaging the faith community in the sense that I think what happened is the principal said, "Look, I need help." That is a good thing for a principal to say when things are failing. She went out to the faith community, which is a good place to go because, as was said this morning, that is a place that has a lot of energy and moral energy that kids need. That was good. The result of that was to engage parents in a whole variety of activities at the school, they were tutoring, they were doing some activities that helped in the safety of schools and so on. I would contrast that very much to the second example, which is laid out more in the paper than in the remarks but it seemed to me the example flipped this over so that what you had very much was the teachers were being recruited very much to be political organizers, to go out into the homes and to encourage parents to come to assemblies that were mainly about generating political support for the school. Again, I am totally for such assemblies and I am totally for all kinds of organizing to get people to increase political support for the schools. But it struck me that it was not the right place to use teachers. I would much rather that those teachers were being used to tutor the kids who really needed them or to serve as mentors or to do any number of things that we could imagine. So I want to just throw that out. I think even in the advocacy mode, there are ways to do it that more educationally sound.

Also, going back to the discussion what will the Bush initiative fund, it seems to me that the big executive order says the dollars are not going to be for K-12 policy, it is going to be for after school and community service. So it seems to me that the big gorilla is the after school programs. And we haven't talked a lot about them other than to say that they are good. So let me say a few things about them and they may even turn out to be contradictory. I'm not sure. The first is that kids, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, desperately, desperately need constructive things to do with their time outside of school. I think nobody here would disagree with that. It is also true that the dollars available for that now are puny and insignificant and insufficient. There are a long list of very good things that faith-based organizations could run that would be constructive uses of student time after school, whether it is running a bowling league or having after school basketball or running discussions for teenagers on adolescent issues. You could run through a lot of them. And they could have tutoring programs and so on.

I want to raise a couple of questions. One is that right now there is not enough money for after school programs. A lot of public school communities recognize this and have been struggling for a long time to get more money available to run programs in the school. Now, you don't want to set up a situation where you now have ugly competition, not just between religious groups but also between the faith community wanting to run after school programs and the public school community wanting to run after school programs. So we need to really think about what principles should determine who runs these programs because faith organizations should run some of them and schools should run some of them. It sort of depends on what the purpose is.

And since we have spent much of the morning talking about the natural usefulness of faith-based organizations as a gathering point for youth because of the moral capital and so on, I want to say a couple of things about the usefulness of schools as an after school gathering point. One is, and Willie Bennett really made this point during his lunch comments, that if you have an after school program in the school, you have an enormous ability to coordinate it with the school program. He talked about how at those after school programs, kids were doing their homework. And that is a very good thing. That is more likely to happen at an after school program at the school than not, although I certainly think programs that were held at faith organizations could make that a point. And I think they should.

A second question is what should happen in these different settings. And I think the gentleman raised this morning the point that reading programs were being run out of some churches. And, again, I will just raise the question. Kids who haven't learned to read — this is a huge problem. And they need to learn how to read, and they need to learn how to read wherever somebody is going to teach it to them well. It is probably a failure if they have to go to a church-based institution —

UNINDENTIFIED: No, it is not in churches.

MS. WATTENBERG: Okay, but let me say the example, that misinterpretation also exists: there are churches that want to run tutoring programs. And at one level, it doesn't make a lot of sense. The schools ought to be doing that and they ought to be doing it right and well, and you don't want to deny them their responsibility for doing that. At the same time, there are going to be places where kids don't feel comfortable staying at school after hours, and the only place they are going to go to get after school tutoring is they are going to go to the neighborhood church. And I think we need to figure out ways to accommodate that.

Can I go back to one thing from this morning? I don't want to get us too off track on the afternoon session, but Bill Galston did chide me for trying to get away from the money question, and I feel obliged to come back to it for a minute. He said that if you were going to have these massive Bush dollars, he put out two ways that that money might be challenged, direct aid versus the certificate/voucher model and suggested that it should go to the certificate/voucher model because then it was not direct funding of religion. And he used the example of this fishing school where religious instruction was seamlessly interwoven into the educational experience. And I would just suggest that if you fund that school through vouchers or through direct funding, you have the same problem, which is it is religious instruction. And so far we have said that is not an appropriate place for public dollars, and I think that the public view on that is pretty strong. So I wouldn't imagine it would go in that direction.

And I guess just one last point. I think Dennis also talked about how families often didn't feel comfortable in the public schools. So they wanted to go somewhere else in the afternoon, and they had such a good sense of nurturance from their congregations. I would say to that, you can go there and we could easily find ourselves just further and further eroding the ties between the community and the schools. So what I worry about is there is a lot of good in this, and yet it is very easy for this answer to become an answer that exacerbates many of the problems that we are already facing. And so I think that is something we need to keep front and center as we go through each of these questions.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very much. Bob Muccigrosso.

DR. MUCCIGROSSO: Yes, listening to the luncheon presentations, this morning, Dr. Shirley's presentation, and the commentary so far, it occurs to me that in Dr. Shirley's paper he talks about quoting another researcher who said that the most significant contribution private schools, and religiously-affiliated private schools being counted among them, can serve the public enterprise is as an exit strategy. In other words, providing alternatives and therefore improving the public sector because it has to be vigilant and competitive with the private sector. And it seems to me that that is probably legitimate but that there are also things that can be learned to improve the public sector. And I think that some of the public school enterprise and some of the commentary at lunch and this morning and this afternoon are very consistent with that. In Bryk and Holland's Catholic Schools and the Common Good, which is published by Harvard University Press, they talk about social capital and the quality that distinguishes Catholic schools and the comparable success of Catholic schools that has been documented over the last 20 years. And that goes extremely with the kinds of stories that people have been sharing today.

My school in East Flatbush, by virtue of its existence, only exists because there is a vision of what education can be that is shared by parents, teachers, and students most of the time. And each constituency sacrifices to make that possible: parents paying for what two blocks away is available for free, teachers and administrators working for less than what they can make, again, a few blocks away. In addition to that, secondarily, but just as important, we have the support of graduates who attended an all-male, all-white and then co-ed, then mixed, and now totally black institution and yet make significant contributions to enable us to keep our tuition, substantial as it is, tuition relatively in the context of the family economics of our clients. And we have parishes, Protestant denominations, and others participating. I was talking with the gentleman from the Islamic Federation, and he was quite surprised to find out that I have Islamic students who leave early on Friday afternoon. So it is like release time once removed — not leaving the public schools to go to church, but leaving one church school to go perform their religious duty in another context.

But what holds it all together is that the vision that drives the Catholic school, which is in this case Gospel-based, is shared. And to, again, build the church on earth. We have our share of shortcomings like anybody else. But there is a shared vision that holds us all together. That is what I really heard this afternoon. And part of me is saying what about this exactly is controversial? I think what is controversial is not what we hear about. It is not what has got a foot in the door. What people are afraid of is in the lobby. That is my guess at this. Because what I heard this afternoon at lunch is an effort to organize and mobilize people of faith to act out that faith — to bring that faith to bear on social problems. We call that in church building the city of God. And that is not an exclusive city, that is an inclusive city. That doesn't seem to me to be controversial. Now, God is in the details or the devil is in the details, however you want to go theologically with this. And I understand that there are perils and there are things that have to be avoided. But it seems to me that the Texas story and some of the Philadelphia story we heard this morning is about mobilizing people of faith to act out that faith and to make the society better. To make the public school and therefore the society a better place. That seems to me hopefully laudable.

The second point is the idea of a threat of the religious identity of the sponsoring organization — or the accepting organization when funding is involved. I have had anecdotal kinds of experience. Our school is affiliated with schools — and we don't have to go to Western Europe for this, we can go to Canada because in Canada, schools are all funded — where the idea of the barrier between church and state is to fund all of them within certain guidelines. But I have had anecdotal exchanges with building principals and leaders in Canada and in London, and it is an issue. It is an issue. Because who writes the checks — who we are faithful to, very frequently is the person whose name is at the bottom of the check. And there is certainly a danger that goes with that model. Certainly that is so in any interaction that way, particularly the more operational it gets rather than formal. I have interaction with the city and the state. I am accountable to the New York State Department of Education and the New York City Board of Education. But those are all it seems to me formal interactions rather than operational, and they are not at all interfering. And the kinds of interactions that we have heard today it seems to me, are about using churches and church communities as a delivery system and building on the special place faith relationships have in the lives of people to improve the public school enterprise. That seems to me to be not threatening at all to the identity and the core faith beliefs of the institution but rather calling on them to be put to use. So the things I have heard today, I don't see that particular danger as being too pertinent.

And lastly, I offer the idea — and to some extent you can see it developing in public schools -that there is also a role to be played in studying operationally those elements that have contributed to the success of Catholic Schools. In other words, not as part of an exit strategy where they are there and they can provide an alternative. But rather to look and see there is much more in common than there are differences between my high school and Samuel Tilden two blocks away. And the question I would suggest is a right question for investigation is, "is there something to be learned about the way Catholic schools do things differently than the public schools that might be used to improve the public school?"

I will modestly suggest a couple of areas that might be. One is, and you see this developing in public schools, investing in the individual building level unit as the most important unit. My school sinks or swims on how well the people that come to work at 475 East 57th Street every morning do their job. It is not a diocese, it is not a parish, it is not a district. It is the people that come together every morning who make it or break it. And I don't think that has been true of public schools. I think public school administrators, somebody referred to them this morning as compliance officers, are caught in the middle with the real people doing the real work and not being invested with the kind of autonomy to respond at the building level, which is where we can respond. We are as good or not as good, successful or failing, as our ability to provide services that people value locally. And my operation, again, has much more in common with other Catholic schools, but there are a lot of differences, too, in the way we respond.

And, secondly, two things that go together: what I call the curricula knitting, and, secondly, preserving the common learning experiences. We can't afford in private schools to respond to every innovation that comes down the pike. We really didn't get all caught up in the old math, the new math, the new newer math. And we can't afford to go down what I see as all of these diverting side streets because when I say we can't afford to, I don't mean we can't afford in any other sense except financially we can't afford. We operate very marginally. So we tend to stick to what we are about. And we, therefore, avoid a lot of pitfalls that I think are strewn in the place of people in public schools. I think of English as a Second Language and the whole debate, in New York City it is a very big deal, but I have worked in two schools which have served immigrant populations. People came to New York City, Polish people, and they had in one pocket the address of an uncle and in the other pocket the address of my old high school because somehow if you live in this part of Brooklyn, you went to that school. They would come to the school not speaking a word of English. We had no special programs. We put them in, we matched them up with a student. We matched them up with a guidance counselor. They were in a very safe, supportive, nurturing kind of environment and then by the end of the year they were performing extremely well without the special services that we couldn't afford.

That then leads to the other point about preserving common learning experiences. That is what happens. And if you look, there is ample research on this. NCEA, Bryk and Holland. Our students take more academic subjects for longer periods of time and that is all to the good.

And, lastly, a point about what I call institutional integrity. The canard about Catholic schools being randomly selective or taking in students and dismissing students as they present challenges is ignorant of the way our school is run financially and is inconsistent with any understanding of the mission of our schools, which is based in the value of every individual. Nevertheless, there was also a need to do some work to preserve the idea that education is not something anybody can do to anybody else. The primary responsibility for learning resides with the learner. However small a portion of the school population is not interested cannot be tolerated at the expense of the larger population in real learning. And by that, I don't mean that schools should be abandoning students. I think access shouldn't ever be closed off to anybody, but I do think there is a responsibility to be part of the school community that nurtures you in a way that is nurturing to it.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you. I love the idea as a Catholic of a hierarchical church running local worker-controlled institutions, which in effect is what you were describing. That was fantastic. Thank you very much. Mr. Hornbeck or I guess you are Juris Doctor, Dr. Hornbeck.

MR. HORNBECK: I want to pick up on the distinction I made this morning between the pastoral and the prophetic and address my comments entirely to the issue of the prophetic, in a sense extending Ernie's comments today. He made an observation at one point that he didn't want his standard of accountability to be in the realm of the organization rendering service but rather whether it effectively exercised power or exercised political power. And the exercise of political power in at least of a small "p" sense is a significant piece of what I would characterize as the prophetic role of the church or other faith community.

There are three or four backdrop comments that I would make, and then I will share three or four ways in which we did this in Philadelphia just for bringing it down to the nitty-gritty. First of all, it may be a rhetorical truism, but hardly one that drives as much policy as it should: public education does not, in my judgment, serve poor children well in this country, whether they are the rural poor, the suburban poor, or the urban poor. And against that backdrop, I would argue that public education needs to emerge as the next great civil rights battleground of this country in an aggressive straightforward way.

A second backdrop comment, people who are in power got there, at least in part, by accommodating the status quo. And one cannot, in my view, come anywhere near to changing the status quo, which is the mistreatment of poor kids, without some sort of external intervention in that process.

A third backdrop comment, I would commend to you a PBS Documentary three or four months ago, "A Force More Powerful." It is the story of non-violent movements in the 20th century: South Africa, Poland, India, 1905 Russia, Chile, 1963 Nashville. And one of the most extraordinary observations is one attributed to Gandhi when he is quoted in this thing as saying that Great Britain dominated Indians not by virtue of the greater armed power represented by Great Britain but because Indians gave Great Britain permission to dominate them. And that when the permission was withdrawn, it was not too long thereafter, that Great Britain turned over power to the Indians. At least in Pennsylvania, at least as it relates to school finance and school reform and having observed it now for 35 years in a variety of capacities, I am kind of a slow learner in this, the fact is that the people of Pennsylvania, and I would argue by extension many other places in the country, have given permission to a group of leaders over those 35 years to maintain a lousy public education system for the children in those 300 of our 500 school districts in which concentrations of poor kids rest. And it will only be if and when we withdraw permission that mistreatment of our children and our public education system that that will change.

The fourth backdrop observation has to do with why churches or why faith communities are an important institutional leader of radical change in the way institutions relate to one another. And I would make two observations about that. One is that as I look back across history, and people who are more professionally historians than I might correct me to some extent, but I still think there is at least a germ of truth in what I am about to say, whether one looks at abolitionists or child labor laws or civil rights movement or the Vietnam War or other movements, but the ones that one can argue were successful in one sense or another are ones in which faith communities played an important vanguard sort of role. And my own take on that, why that is so is that all of those have educational content to them and political content, legal content, but the factor that for many people sustains them in the most difficult moment is what I would characterize as the moral content. The fact is that the scriptures of many of the world's great religions in one form or another admonish us to house the homeless and feed the hungry and release the prisoners and heal the sick and so on. And they have things in them like, as we see in the New Testament, when did we see you hungry and sick and all those homeless and so on. And it is when you do it to the least of these. And then that translates even into political rhetoric — like when Hubert Humphrey says the way we judge the quality of a nation is by the manner in which it treats its most vulnerable. I don't want to draw a direct connection between Hubert Humphrey and Jesus.

[Laughter.]

MR. HORNBECK: But maybe Hubert Humphrey was drawing on a little bit of Jesus there when he made that observation. But my point is that in those hardest, darkest moments, it is in fact the moral lessons that one draws from great faith traditions that sees people on the streets through to that next moment. That is why you see faith leaders in those positions of being in the vanguard of leadership for movements that work.

Against, those sorts of backdrops, there were a whole variety of things that we have been up to and continue to be up to in Philadelphia that are at least worth observing. One is to work with, to propagate, to raise $4 million for over the last six years IAF-trained and IAF-look-alikes in the city without and sometimes with great controversy. I don't know how many times I had principals become unhappy with me for my support of these activities because they had not yet reached the point in their principaling of where they understood the value of the parents coming to them and insisting on a different kind of school for the students. But that kind of capacity-building, that kind of organizing, has been an important feature in probably 30 or 40 schools in Philadelphia as they pursued what IAF refers to as the iron rule: that you don't do for somebody what they can do for themselves. And as a consequence, they organize and they create something of substance to bring to the table. My rationale for being engaged with them was not that I enjoyed being called to an action and told what it was that I was going to have to do in that action, as I was on several occasions. It was instead my own view that unless the people on the other side of the table themselves bring something to the table, then the conversation isn't worth having. And we in the public schools need that kind of strength and capacity in a sense on the other side of the table, so that ultimately it becomes the same table.

We have pursued in Philadelphia very aggressively the idea of the Children's Sabbath. It is something that got started by the Children's Defense Fund some years ago. We have dozens and dozens of them taking place, and we use them in Philadelphia as a moment both to reflect and worship with one another in an interfaith way, and as a moment of mobilizing that is very helpful.

A third way that we came together in this is that the black clergy of Philadelphia and its vicinity have been a co-plaintiff in at least two lawsuits that the mayor and I brought against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And the black clergy have been good partners in all of this. But it is an example of how faith communities and people otherwise outside of the mainline bureaucracy can be engaged because it is at least conceivable that, come this summer, there will be an attempt to suspend again a civil rights lawsuit that was brought against the Commonwealth. And I think there is sometimes an allusion that if the school district and the city government were to decide to do that, that they could do it unilaterally. Well, the fact that the black clergy and some other independent, private plaintiffs are a part of that process is such that they can't do it unilaterally. And the standards that I think will be used in the non-bureaucratic context will be higher standards than we are in danger of using. It hasn't happened yet, so I don't know that it will happen. But this lawsuit was brought because in a majority-minority school district that is also poor in Pennsylvania, for every 1 percent increase in the minority population that school district loses $52.88 per child, which this year in Philadelphia cost us $100 million. So it is serious money in that process and that is why we brought this particular lawsuit.

Finally, there are a group of people across the state of Pennsylvania, who are at this moment in those school districts where the children are concentrated that have been mistreated by Pennsylvania's educational system over these last 30 or 35 years, who are pulling together with faith communities a very broad-based and deep grassroots organization that will in the end seek to change the nature of the permission that is given to our leaders to lead in that process. And if it succeeds, it will succeed in large measure because of the prophetic voice, the prophetic role, that faith communities bring to this undertaking.

Let me say by way of disclaimer, so there is no misunderstanding, there are those who think that I place at Governor Ridge's and this legislature's feet this mistreatment of poor kids in Philadelphia. Lest anybody mistake what I have just said, the fact is that it has been going on for at least 35 years and at least 16 of those years have been under the leadership of Democratic governors and legislatures that are controlled by Democrats. And so this is something that is rooted in our society, in the way in which we think about children, in our low expectations of children of color and kids whose first language is not English. It is not rooted in Democratic or Republican philosophy. And it is important I think that we recognize that fact because the solution will also be neither Democratic nor Republican. Tt will be an alteration in the fundamental way in which we think about little kids.

Thank you very much.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you so very much. I was struck when you fell into that moment of comparing Hubert Humphrey to Jesus of a story — Ming is out of the room so she won't hear the story again — one of my favorite political stories told by Archbishop Hubbard of Albany, New York, who was speaking at Democratic dinner. And he spoke of Mrs. O'Reilly, who was 89 years old, had voted straight Democratic all her life. And her son was a middle class split his ticket, voted for a lot of Republicans. And he turned to his mother, was taking her to the polls on Election Day and said, "Mom, how are you voting today?" And she said, "As always, straight Democratic." And he said, "You know, mom, if Jesus came back to earth and ran as a Republican, you would vote against Him." And the mother looks at the son and says, "Oh, hush, why should He change His party after all these years." Thank you David Hornbeck. Charles.

DR. HAYNES: I want to thank Dennis Shirley for a great paper, balanced and thoughtful and very helpful. I won't go in length about that because we will be here all afternoon. But because we are reaching the end of the day let me address the elephant that has been in the middle of this room all day: money, of course. We still are having a hard time seeing that that elephant is standing there and dealing with it. It is a tough issue, and I am not going to resolve it here in a few minutes. But I just want to remind you that it is still standing there. I think it is a pink elephant, as a matter of fact, and that is not because I had wine at lunch.

I want to mention two paradoxes — well, one thing is not a paradox that I think Dennis brought up and one thing I think is a paradox — and I just want to comment on those two things and then I will turn it to you. First, what I don't think is a paradox. I think the First Amendment can be a friend to these initiatives and to this way of thinking about partnerships and collaborations if it is properly understood and applied. I want to say that. It takes a lot of thought on how we do that, but I think we can come together and work on that and uphold our First Amendment principles. I do not think it is a paradox, and this goes to what E.J. was saying earlier, that the no Establishment Clause combined with the Free Exercise Clause. But even just that the Establishment Clause has promoted religious liberty and religious diversity in our nation. I don't think that it is in spite of the Establishment Clause; I think it is because of the Establishment Clause that we have this vibrancy in religious life in the United States. Removing government from involvement in religion and controlling religion, I think, has removed the greatest source of conflict and oppression in human history, and I think the United States is the boldest and most successful experiment in religious liberty precisely because the first 16 words of the First Amendment provide a framework for our life together.

Separation in France is another matter entirely. There is no resemblance in my view to separation, if you want to call it that, and no establishment in the United States. If you go to a French school that is funded by state dollars and you are a Muslim girl, you may not wear your head cover. Is that the kind of separation we want? No, of course not. Is that the kind of nation we want to live in? I don't. I don't know a school in the United States, not just in Philadelphia, anywhere, that wouldn't try to accommodate the needs of that child to wear that head covering even if they had a no caps policy. What a country. Because we take claims of conscience seriously in the United States, and we take them seriously not just because of the Free Exercise Clause but because the no Establishment Clause means the government may not tell that child to take off that head covering unless it has a very good reason for doing so. It may but unless it can show that it does, it may not. And that is why it is so important to remember.

In France today, they are passing legislation to control religious groups in France. That is separation of church and state all right. That is saying that the government has the right to give a list of who is a legitimate religion and who is not. Toleration, which is another model in Europe, well, sure, there are lots of religious liberties in various nations of Europe that have toleration, that it to say they don't have total disestablishment as we do in the United States. But that toleration can be removed. It is not good enough to give government toleration in matters of religious liberty. We have to give people freedom to practice their faith and that means keeping the government out. In Germany, for example, if you are a Scientologist, I am not defending Scientology, I am just pointing out if you are a Scientologist in Germany, you probably can't get a job. You will be discriminated against. Now is that the kind of nation we want to live in? I don't think so.

So, I think our model is the best model, and I am concerned that all day long and in this conversation and all the other charitable choice conversations that we roll over these principles because they are just annoying. It is just annoying, separation of church and state, let's get beyond that and let's get to how we can get the money here and do this and wonderful things and work together. But if we roll over the First Amendment too quickly, we roll over our religious liberty. We roll over the very principles that gave us this religious diversity, this vibrancy of religious life. And I think we ought to take a long hard look at why no establishment is a principle that should be preserved in any model we come up with. And I am not pre-judging what the model will be by saying that. Religion must remain independent. It must have its integrity. And people of no faith or people who have minority religious convictions must be protected from the government getting involved in determining what religions are favored, funded, and so forth.Now, that is not a paradox. I don't think the Establishment Clause is a paradox at all.

What is a paradox I think in the discussion we have had all day long is the plan on the table under this administration. I also think it is great because it is getting us to look and is opening up a whole new possibility for schools and communities. Fine. But the paradox at the heart of this suggestion and plan is that the President says, and many others say in the administration, "We do not want to aid religion by any of these plans." They have said that time and again. The President has made it very clear that he does not want government money going to aid religion because that would violate a fundamental principle of our arrangement and it is dangerous for religion. But at the same time, the administration wants to encourage faith-based organizations to get involved in addressing our social ills. And he wants to help through federal funding to make it possible for them to do this and retain their religious character and sometimes religious content because that is precisely what makes them effective, as you noted at lunch, what makes them effective, and the President has said that time and again. That is a paradox. How do you keep aid from going to religion and yet fund religion to do what it does best? It is difficult, not impossible, to answer that but I think that is what we are struggling with. And I think it is well motivated, if I may say so, because we all know that we need help in the public schools and in other arenas addressing social ills but at the same time we understand that if we ignore that important principle, that we don't want the government involved in the religion business, we lose a lot more than simply the latest church; we may lose this experiment in liberty.

As I mentioned this morning, we tried very hard in our guide to say constitutionally there are many ways in which faith communities can collaborate, cooperate, partner with public schools — a whole list of ways under the current law Constitution. I don't know what the heck will happen to this advice if in fact funding gets into the picture because our advice is built on the notion that it doesn't involve federal dollars, it involves constitutional ways of collaboration. All of the examples mentioned today, I think without exception, in Professor Sanders' paper, this afternoon, lunch, all of the examples mentioned today are constitutional under the current law. They have nothing to do with what is being proposed. Nobody can object, I don't think, unless they are done badly or around the edges. But in general, we have put out example after example of constitutional models. But what is being proposed, however, that is something that Bill mentioned briefly this morning and then we went on: what do you do with an organization that is providing a wonderful service but has in fact a religious message and content that is integral to providing that service that can't be separated out? Do you fund that? Well, in the charitable choice discussion, that is one set of issues because the Welfare Reform Act says, "yes, you can." We are not clear where the line is. You are not supposed to use money to proselytize. The administration says, "well, we won't buy Bibles, we won't change the religious character." Does that mean no proselytizing? Does having prayers as part of what you are doing with people, is that proselytizing or is that just the religious character? We don't know yet. This is a very uncharted discussion I think. I do think that the administration is suggesting that unless you actually buy the Bibles, you can probably fund that group to offer its services and retain its religious character. Maybe so.

But, as I suggested earlier, when it comes to public schools, that is much more difficult to do — not only constitutionally but just as a matter of conscience, because we are dealing with young people. I think that the way it is funded does matter. And I understand what Ruth said earlier, and I think I agree. However, I saw David Saperstein nodding vigorously this morning when it was brought up that it is possible for these certificates or vouchers to pass constitutional muster. We don't know yet. But direct aid is another matter entirely.

Now, here is the paradox within the paradox. Let's say that somehow this money does flow to these religious organizations to provide help for kids who are in our public schools. We just had a church-state case sometime down the line, but they are going to do it. And we don't require them to get rid of their prayers and their religious message. We don't want them to use the money to buy Bibles but beyond that, we don't worry. In that scenario, which is coming soon, what do public school officials do in terms of relating to that program? I suggest to you that they will say we can't relate too much to that because then we would be accused of promoting religion if we start funneling kids over to that program, then we will be accused of violating the conscience of kids who may be of other faiths, who may be of no faith and here we are sending them to a religious program. So the very encouraging of these collaborations may be discouraging. The program may go on but the school may find itself unable to collaborate. It must keeps an arms-length distance just because I think rightly our case law suggests that public school officials should not be in the business of encouraging or discouraging kids to be involved in a particular religion or no religion.

How do we get beyond all this? Well, I don't have any quick and short answer to this, but I will say this: we need to think together about what safeguards would be appropriate and that would allow us to build a model of collaboration. The easy way, of course, would be to go back to these guidelines, which the Christian Legal Society helped to write — it is not from one side or the other — as well as the American Jewish Congress. This is common ground. And say let's do all of these things in a way that is constitutional. If money gets involved, then we need to go beyond this, and we need to ask what is the funding mechanism. And we do it in a way, whether through an affiliated group, 501(c)(3), or through some other way, that protects kids and their conscience if they are getting involved. And then we need to address the deep issue of does it in fact undermine what the organization is doing if we require them to give up their religious message. So these kinds of questions and what kinds of safeguards we are going to put in place I think are now on our agenda. I don't think we should get into our corners and throw up our hands and say, "Oh, no, we are just going to litigate." I think we should come to the table and say, "Since this is such a great public good that we are talking about, and we want to encourage, not discourage partnerships between schools and faith communities, let's work together under the First Amendment to find the guidelines that we can agree on if possible. It is going to take work, but I am ready to do it and I think most people in this conversation today are ready to do it.

Thanks.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you very, very much. We have an almost sacred commitment to some folks who need to use this room. So we have to clear out here by four o'clock. The faithful in this room have been so faithful that I do not want to cut you out of the conversation. Is there any way that people who have comments can make quick comments? And I am going to ask Dennis to make quick comments so we can keep our near sacred commitment. Sir?

Q: Charles X. White, from Houston and Harris County, Houston Faith-Based Group. Two things. Is it religious because it is held at a church or is it religious because of what the church is teaching? Because if it is focused on an after school program, curriculum, policies, and procedures can control that from that standpoint.

The other point is that there should be a collaborative that includes civic clubs and churches and lets the civic clubs take the lead in citizenship because are we saying that citizenship can only be taught or that morals can only be taught by churches. What is the difference between citizenship and morals and regardless of who teaches it?

DR. HAYNES: The location doesn't matter. If the First Amendment guidelines are followed, the location doesn't matter. And on the second one, choice and the types of organizations that are included in these partnerships and collaborations makes them more constitutional. I think is one of the safeguards we need to put in place, that it shouldn't just be focused on let's cooperate with religious groups, it should be a variety of community groups, civic and otherwise. I think those are important points.

MR. JOHN SCIBILIA: John Scibilia, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Just a couple of observations as we look to what will be tested and questions of you. I am not sure we need to look too far in that we look at how the Child Care Block Grants are used throughout the states where faith-based communities are even getting brick and mortar dollars to expand capacity for child care, as well as the faith-based communities receiving federal dollars to feed those kids who get free and reduced lunch and breakfast and yet during vacation times have nothing, and we see that particularly in the cities where faith-based communities come to bear on that problem. What is looked at there in those instances, and with the Child Care Block Grant, even taking that one step further, where four-year-olds or pre-kindergarten programs where parents may use vouchers to pay in a faith-based organization for that program, how will that play out when one day, at least I believe, there will be universal pre-K and perhaps even required in this country.

And one other point, how will the child benefit interpretation that has been put on the Constitution come to play in this conversation?

MR. DIONNE: Very quick, and then Dennis, and I think we just have to shut down, as much as I would like to keep going.

DR. HAYNES: I think the child benefit analysis under the First Amendment is going to get five votes whether we like it or not. Some of us might and some of us might not. And I think that the Supreme Court will uphold a voucher arrangement that focuses on that element. And I think that will have many implications for the kind of model that might work in this conversation.

MR. DIONNE: Dennis, the last word.

DR. SHIRLEY: For the whole thing? Just a few reality checks from my point of view. Lutheran Services in America, largest faith-based nonprofit in the United States now receives 39 percent of its $7 billion in annual budget from government sources. Catholic Charities receives 62 percent of its $2.3 billion budget from government sources. I would respectfully submit that our civil liberties have not been imperiled.

DR. HAYNES: That is a different model, Dennis. I'm sorry, but that is not what is being proposed. We need to get over this. They set up separate organizations to receive that money, to have all kinds of safeguards built in. Charitable Choice model, this model for public schools would remove that requirement of setting up a separate 501(c)(3) that receives that money. They have many restrictions on how they use that money. This initiative would change that model, and I am not saying that is bad or wrong, I am just saying it is a new world, and we need to understand that that model which has worked for very long has been upheld as constitutional. No one is arguing with it. But now the effort under the Welfare Reform Act and now under these other proposals is to remove the requirement that you need a separate organization to receive the money.

MR. DIONNE: Could I just say quickly in defense of what Dennis said — I agree with that that this is a new model, you are right — on the other hand, I think Dennis' point is that when you are dealing with church-state issues, we are dealing in somewhat grayer areas than the discussions leads us to believe. And these figures, even though it is a different model, should point that out. The second thing is where I think you are very right is the Bush model seems to be directed much more to individual churches and small congregations rather than to larger and established charities that have a track record. And you could, again, argue that either way. But I think that, putting aside the constitutional issue, also raises interesting problems of its own.

But, Dennis, go on.

DR. SHIRLEY: Well, I guess it is an empirical question that you raised about the girl with the shawl in France, and I would need to research that more closely to see whether those kinds of abrogations of civil liberties actually happen more rampantly in Western Europe than they do in the United States.

Here is the key question: When faith-based organizations work with government, is it a fatal embrace? And some would say that it is. And, of course, Tocqueville made the classic argument that you do which is that religious institutions flourish in the United States because they are untainted by the hand of government. That doesn't really work in the area of public education because public education was founded in joint collaborations between public revenues and private revenues. And I think that we can learn from looking at the Western European model.

My respondents had a number of fascinating points that I think are critical. We really need to be thinking about them. Is it inappropriate for teachers to become community organizers? All I can say is that those teachers love that because they see it as leadership development. Maybe it is inappropriate that that becomes an expectation for teachers.

Is it inappropriate for federal money to train people as community organizers? Now, we worked through this before in the sixties, right, that was part of the war on poverty. I am a former Vista volunteer. Mayors hated it, right. A lot of local officeholders hated it because there were community organizers coming in, paid by the federal government, who shook things up. Now, if you think that those programs were basically a flop because of that power dynamic, then you don't want to support this initiative. If on the other hand, you think that it is an interesting possibility that 65 percent of folks in black congregations are in favor of having a crack at government funding, 65 percent are in favor of that, if you think that that is interesting for helping to develop the capacity of the one institution that has been consistently there for African-Americans, then this is an interesting possibility. We have a difference of opinion here clearly, which is always good if you are in the audience, right. There should be a few differences of opinion that come out. I think that is an interesting possibility.

Will there be problems with proselytizing? Of course. Will there be all kinds of litigation? Absolutely. But for the first time in my life, a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to National Public Radio, and I heard a fascinating debate between black ministers about whether this was a good or a bad thing. I am 46 years old, I have listened to National Public Radio for years, never have black religious leaders had a crack at a public policy issue the way that they have it now. And if you talk to Gene Rivers up there in Dorchester, he is going to say, "This is great. I am glad that it is being pushed because it is only if there is massive federal money behind this thing that it is really going to have a chance in the public arena."

In my paper, I understated it. I said this should be iterative and there should be experimentation. But in the reality and in how things play out politically, there has to be a big push to try and get this thing off the ground. And I think it will be interesting. And I may be totally naive. All kinds of things may come into play. But there is another reality here. This thing was introduced by people from the more conservative evangelical side. John Ashcroft introduced this. And yet it is more the liberal and moderate Protestant denominations that seem to be more interested in going after this. Do you know what this means? This means this is an interesting political moment, folks. There is a break between the elite and how they represent things and what is really going on in the communities. And if for nothing else, what I love about the whole civil society debate and bringing in these faith-based institutions is it gets us out of the stale old rhetoric of left and right. And I think that this is an exciting opportunity, if for nothing else than for the kinds of conversations we are going to be having.

MR. DIONNE: Thank you so much for that. We almost had real conflict break out at the end of a long day. And I somehow suspect that what happened at the end of this may be a preview of the kind of debates we are going to have. And just to let you know, incidentally, on the Pew Forum Web-site, there is a fascinating argument between Gene Rivers and Bobby Scott, a Congressman from Virginia, that got at some of the issues that David spoke about.

We are going to meet again on March 14th. We are dealing with an issue that very much overlaps with today's discussion, the role of faith-based organizations on child care. Anybody who wants to come should RSVP to Ming. A transcript will be available of this conversation on the Web. It is at www.brookings.edu. And you can find the Sacred Places Project on there. I want to thank the very faithful who stayed with us. I want to thank our presenters, Dennis and this very, very distinguished panel. We will resume this again. Bless you all. Thanks.

[END OF EVENT]