Class warfare?

The lawsuit over school vouchers in Colorado is following a familiar pattern: Better-off suburban parents who are happy with their children's public schools oppose poorer parents who want options | Lynn Vincent

WITH ONLY A LITTLE summer freedom remaining, 11-year-old Danielle Teague wasn't happy about the prospect of entering middle school on Aug. 8. Sitting slump-shouldered at the aging table in her mom's eat-in kitchen, the soon-to-be-6th-grader pouted as she sucked on a Go-Gurt: "I wanted to go to MLK."

She meant Denver's Martin Luther King Middle School, where her friends will go. But her mother, Angelia, didn't want Danielle and her twin sister Denise distracted with too much socializing. That, plus stories of violence at MLK, led Ms. Teague to enroll the girls at Rachel B. Noel Middle School instead.

From an academic standpoint, it wasn't much of a choice. 2003 Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) scores show that student achievement at both schools is equally dismal: Just one in 10 students, grades 6 through 8, was proficient in math, while nearly half scored an unsatisfactory. Only a third of students could read proficiently, while about one in three read at an unsatisfactory level. Noel's math scores didn't slide backward this year as MLK's did. But then, 2003 was Noel students' first year taking the test.