The accompanying article is not about a war on academia. What it clearly illustrates however is the degree to which the left favors unions.
Thus here is another example of how much politics stinks and how the public is fleeced, on a daily basis, by the hacks and pigs in national office. Properly educating children is a much lower priority than being reelected, holding on to power and extending one's feeding time at the public trough. In other words from the progressive prospective, screw the kids. Our retirement, benefits and pure self-interest is far more important.
To those who drink the kool aid of either major party, shame on you. By tolerating this behavior in the name of party politics you only perpetuate the problem.
Do you really want to sacrifice our children and thus our future so that "career politicians", who bring little if any value to the national interest, can continually benefit at the expense of the public? Time to send someone else to DC and send the hogs home.
Putting Children Last
Democrats in Congress have finally found a federal program they want to eliminate. And wouldn't you know, it's one that actually works and helps thousands of poor children.
We're speaking of the four-year-old Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that provides vouchers to about 2,000 low-income children so they can attend religious or other private schools. The budget for the experimental program is $18 million, or about what the U.S. Department of Education spends every hour and a half.
This fight has nothing to do with saving money. But it has a lot to do with election-year politics. Kevin Chavis, the former D.C. City Council member who sits on the oversight board of the scholarship program, says, "If we were going to do what was best for the kids, then continuing it is a no-brainer. Those kids are thriving." More than 90% of the families express high satisfaction with the program, according to researchers at Georgetown University.
Many of the parents we interviewed describe the vouchers as a "Godsend" or a "lifeline" for their sons and daughters. "Most of the politicians have choices on where to send their kids to school," says William Rush, Jr., who has two boys in the program. "Why do they want to take our choices away?"
Good question. These are families in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. More than 80% of the recipients are black and most of the rest Hispanic. Their average income is about $23,000 a year. But the teachers unions have put out the word to Congress that they want all vouchers for private schools that compete with their monopoly system shut down.
This explains why that self-styled champion of children's causes, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Congressional delegate from the District of Columbia, is leading the charge to kill the program. Ms. Norton contends that vouchers undermine support and funding for public schools. But the $18 million allocated to the program does not come out of the District school budget; Congress appropriates extra money for the vouchers.
The $7,500 voucher is a bargain for taxpayers because it costs the public schools about 50% more, or $13,000 a year, to educate a child in the public schools. And we use the word "educate" advisedly because D.C. schools are among the worst in the nation. In 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all urban public school systems on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Opponents claim there is no evidence that the D.C. scholarship program is raising academic achievement. The only study so far, funded by the federal Department of Education, found positive but "not statistically significant" improvements in reading and math scores after the first year. But education experts agree it takes a few years for results to start showing up. In other places that have vouchers, such as Milwaukee and Florida, test scores show notable improvement. A new study on charter schools in Los Angeles County finds big academic gains when families have expanded choices for educating their kids.
If the D.C. program continues for another few years, we will be able to learn more about the impact of vouchers on educational outcomes. The reason unions want to shut the program down immediately isn't because they're afraid it will fail. They're afraid it will succeed, and show that there is a genuine alternative to the national scandal that are most inner-city public schools. That's why former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and current Mayor Adrian Fenty, both Democrats, support the program.
"Hopefully," says Mr. Chavis, "Congress will focus on the kids, not the politics here." Barack Obama might call that the audacity of hope, if he finally showed the nerve to break with the unions on at least one issue and support these poor D.C. students.
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Comments
DC shouldnt tell folks, "Yeah, our skools suck, and we dont wanna actually fix them so here's a ticket to a better school, a catholic school, down the street"
DC should fix the schools. Thats what it comes down to. Do you want to shirk off the responsibility? Or do you want to get your hands dirty and fix the larger problem?
Vouchers only help those who have the means to ask for it. Fixing the schools help everyone.
You are, of course, exactly right. However all efforts at public school reform has been and continues to be blocked by teacher's unions. Thus vouchers are the only way out for poor people stuck in the worst schools imaginable.
It is a sad story but it comes back to those unions and the polticians they have in their pockets.
Absolutely, and I was thinking that after I posted. Its the unions who defend unaffective teachers. I used to be an earth sci high school teacher for a hot second in Richmond... where they gave me a closet and a cart. How does one teach earth science without a classroom!? I met one disaffected teacher after another. It was sad, and I do feel bad.
In DC they have a new schools czar. She's been making sweeping changes, and hopefully, in a few years, vouchers will be a thing of the past.
I'm not exactly against the idea of Charter Schools, but in my mind they have to perform as Public Entities - which means not for profit, institutions which are accountable to public process. Privatizing educational institutions or any other like entity which doesn't readily lend itself to selling a discrete product is doomed to failure.
If charter schools are the difference between what I was given in Oklahoma compared to here, then charter students can afford the disruption long enough to find a different school that will also keep them ahead of state run institutions. Call me disingenuous if you want to, but students are much better off with their parents dictating what the student is to focus on and what extra curricular activities are good for their development rather than a state infected with, (yes I used the word infected) with CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas funding scandal, which wants to revisit history to clean up the image of Islam. Successfully I might add.
Henesua-
Good points. Charter schools are publically funded and are subject to County Office of Education direction and control. The leg up they have is that they are not controlled by teacher's unions and they are not subject to as many of the most ridiculous guidelines that weaken regular public schools. For instance a Charter school can expel students with far less effort and a Charter school can avoid passing a student forward to the next grade level if that student is not ready.
The problem as I see it is bureaucracy. You solve that problem. You solve it all. Interestingly enough not all school districts have the same level of problem in this department. And the responsive school districts frequently out perform private schools.
Mill Valley, Davis, Berkeley. For example.
Henesua-
Great point as to the bureaucracy. There is more to it than just that but that is a big chunk.
Bureaucracy is the problem, one which vouchers could have done and end run around. Forcing state schools to compete with charter schools would have fixed the problem by making all the schools state supported but competing for the approval of students and parents. The point is, in the current system the only motivation for improvement is found in people of character who choose to do the job well for their own reasons while leaving others to do pretty much as they please. Morality cannot be legislated so standards are better served by the competition of the market rather than a set of tests and requiring teachers to perform to an arbitrary standard at the same time the unions have managed to pull the teeth out of any consequence for not meeting those standards.