WASHINGTON — President Bush will soon sign into law what is being described as the largest school voucher program in American history,providing about $1.6 billion in federal money for students affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Under the law, the money can go to parochial schools. That provision has won praise from school choice advocates and some religious leaders while attracting criticism from the National Education Association, a union that represents teachers who work at mainly government-run schools.

The money is appropriated under the Hurricane Education Recovery Act, part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act. The legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 93–0, and the House granted final approval in a voice vote last Thursday. The funding is valid only for this academic year and sunsets in August 2006, but observers said religious schools that take in students as part of the program would likely provide scholarships for displaced students to continue at the schools if their parents cannot afford the tuition without federal assistance.

The president of the National Education Association, Reg Weaver, called the bill part of “the worst assault on public education in American history.”

“For the first time ever,” Mr. Weaver said, “taxpayers will be forced to pay for a nationwide voucher program. … Religious schools will be allowed to receive taxpayer dollars, and proselytize and discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.” The text of the legislation does allow parents of students attending religious schools funded by the bill to “opt out” of any worship or other religious activities.

The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, also denounced the legislation, saying the bill “does not provide appropriate firewalls against taxpayer funding of religious instruction and proselytizing, and sets a disturbing precedent for the future.”

Other religious groups, however, celebrated the legislation. A spokesman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, told The New York Sun on Wednesday that the conference is “very pleased” with Congress’s decision to provide assistance to parochial schools, adding: “We can all hope that that does indicate a greater understanding among lawmakers on the usefulness of Catholic schools to a community.”

The director of the Institute for Public Affairs of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, Nathan Diament, called the funding an important step away from government discrimination against religious institutions. Initially, the hurricane relief act provided reimbursement only for public schools sheltering Katrina-displaced students, but not private and religious schools. The bill was later revised to include nonpublic schools as part of an effort in Congress undertaken most visibly by Senator Kennedy,a Democrat of Massachusetts, who is traditionally an opponent of school vouchers.

Mr. Diament said he hoped the legislation would set a precedent for more religious institutions, particularly those that provide social services, not to be excluded from future government grants and funding.

Under the act, public and nonpublic schools educating students in kindergarten through grade 12 displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may receive up to $6,000 a student, and up to $7,500 per disabled or special-education student. The appropriations bill provides $645 million for direct reimbursement to schools educating displaced students, and another $750 million to help with the reconstruction of public and nonpublic schools in the Gulf region.

Texas is sheltering the most displaced students, just over 41,000. New York was educating 428 displaced students as of December 3.

Of those displaced students, Department of Education officials said,it is impossible to tell how many are being educated in nonpublic schools. A public policy adviser to the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans, Kirby Ducote, however, said that before Katrina around 135,000 children were in private and religious schools in the state of Louisiana; between 90,000 and 100,000 of them were in Catholic schools. The superintendent of schools for the archdiocese of New Orleans, Fr. William Maestri, told the Sun: “I do know that over 90% of our 50,000 children had been placed back in the Catholic schools in some part of the country,” many in other Catholic schools in the New Orleans area.

A spokesman for the federal Department of Education, Chad Colby, told the Sun on Wednesday that the department will soon be conducting a survey of all states educating Katrina-displaced students to determine how many are enrolled in nonpublic schools. The federal funds will be distributed by the federal Department of Education to state departments of education, which are then responsible for getting the money to local public school districts and private and religious schools, which must apply to the states to receive the funding.

Advocates for school choice welcomed the bill as a sign of shifting attitudes toward vouchers and public funding of schools that are not government-run.

“You see a growing acceptance of aid to children” in keeping with the school choice principles of Milton Friedman, the executive director of the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation, Robert Enlow, told the Sun. “I think it makes it tougher for anyone who opposes school choice,including Democrats and Republicans, because if you voted for this, then you have voted to allow children and parents to go to the schools that work best for them.” For those who voted in favor of the bill to later oppose other choice programs, Mr. Enlow said, “doesn’t really come across as consistent.”

He called the program awaiting Mr. Bush’s signature “monumental,” and said it will be remembered as part of Mr. Bush’s “two-term approach to trying to change the way we do education in America.”

A member of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on School Choice, Eric Hanushek, said the bill and Hurricane Katrina served as a wakeup call about the need for more widespread school choice.The students of New Orleans,Mr. Hanushek said, were suffering from a disastrously underperforming school district before Katrina hit. “We would hope that it doesn’t take a natural disaster to get everybody to focus on the learning of individual kids that haven’t been particularly well served in the past,” he said. “Some parts of the country aren’t subject to such cataclysmic natural disasters, but they have horribly performing schools, and we now have to turn our attention more directly to how we help those schools.”

Mr. Bush’s educational legacy also includes the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and a $14 million school voucher pilot program in the District of Columbia that was approved by Congress in 2004.

The D.C. voucher program is threatened by a space crunch in middle and high schools.

According to the organization that manages the program, the Washington Scholarship Fund, the space crunch means the 2008–09 school year will find more than half of the eighthgraders who receive vouchers unable to use them at nonpublic high schools. Under the legislation that created the program, students who attend public schools because they are unable to use their vouchers are still included in the academic testing sample that will evaluate all program participants, which analysts say will jeopardize the program’s usefulness as an educational experiment.

The chairman of the Senate subcommittee on the District of Columbia, Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas, sought to remedy the dilemma earlier this year with a legislative fix that would expand the reach of the program, currently limited to within D.C.’s borders, to Virginia and Maryland schools within three miles of Washington. The remedy would have also increased the cap on vouchers to $11,500 from $7,500 for secondary schools, to reduce the amount schools must subsidize voucher recipients and thereby encourage schools to open more seats for voucher recipients.

That legislation died in committee, however, owing principally to opposition from Senator Specter, a Republican of Pennsylvania, and Democratic Senators Landrieu, of Louisiana, and Feinstein, of California. According to Mr. Brownback, political fallout from the initial voucher battle was cited as a reason for the opposition.

The chairman of the Washington Scholarship Fund and a longtime school choice activist, Joseph Robert, expressed outrage at the senators’ position. “I’d like these senators to sit in a room and face these children,” Mr. Robert said,“and tell them themselves: Sorry, the political pain will just be too much to bear. We can’t help you.”

Mr. Brownback said he hopes to bring the issue up again in the new congressional session. Students, meanwhile, are facing the disappointment of having won a voucher lottery while remaining unable to cash it in for a private school education.

The mother of one such student, Barbara Tucker, said her daughter, Victoria, was devastated when she had to leave her private middle school to return to a public high school, where she missed the friends and individual attention the voucher had provided her last year.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Ms.Tucker said.