Vouchers

Casey J. Lartigue Jr. described his experiences volunteering for the Washington Scholarship Fund's final recruitment session this school year for the publicly funded scholarship program. I will quote a small part, but I urge you to read the entire post.

And I talked with many others who are desperately trying to find better education options for their children. Those parents weren't asking for a handout. Rather, the money currently being spent on their children can be used at the school of their choice... It was stressful talking to these parents, hearing their stories, knowing how desperate they are to get their children out of the situations they are in now..... At a meeting two years ago, I mentioned to a parent that DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton was opposed to the voucher program being created. After expressing her admiration for Del. Norton, the parent then went off, saying that "Eleanor" doesn't know anything about education or her child.... Then I was there when some of the parents were notified that they had received scholarships. So many shouts of hallelujah! and praise the lord! were coming through the phone lines. Then there are the sad calls to parents to let them know that they had not received a scholarship..... At a panel discussion at which I was the featured speaker, I talked about being at the Martin Luther King, Jr., library, and having a young girl, I think she said she was six years old, eagerly spelling different words for anyone who would listen. I was looking at her and thinking--if she doesn't have quality schools, she may be pregnant in a decade..... While it is tempting to critique the findings of the PFAW report, instead, I’ll invite them to come out of the cave. The cave, as in Plato’s allegory, has prisoners sitting in a cave watching images on a wall in front of them. Unable to grasp that the shadows are just a show, they remain in the cave, failing to capitalize on possibilities beyond the cave. The cave dwellers are those school choice opponents who refuse to recognize that, in the words of the National Working Choice Commission on Choice in K-12 Education housed at the Brookings Institution: “Choice is here to stay.”.... PFAW complains that only a small percentage of the kids given priority (low-income kids in schools deemed to be in Need of Improvement) applied for the program. Does that mean that PFAW would support giving a voucher to all children in In Need of Improvement Schools? Of course not. The organization is just trying to make a point about a program that it believes should not exist.

Constrained Vision blogged Voucher opponents like the two mentioned by Lartigue, People for the American Way and D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, definitely need to come out of the caves of their offices (and the offices of the teachers unions) and go to a WSF event. They should experience the desperate hopes of families seeking vouchers and the immense joy of families lucky enough to receive them. They need to meet the families that Lartigue met--the very families they claim to represent. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I think that venturing out into the sunlight would help change their minds.

Hispanic Pundit blogged If it were up to me, I would take every child of an anti-voucher limousine liberal out of the private school or fancy public school they are attending and send them to some of the worse public schools in the country - for example, schools in Compton, Watts or South Central Los Angeles. I can guarantee that all of their babble about how one more billion to the school system is the solution will quickly vanish and they will start pushing for solutions that have some track record of working and start to clearly see the power and hope vouchers bring.

Economics With a Face blogged It has just never made sense how much opposition there is to letting parents choose a school for their child, especially when the families these programs are meant to benefit are the poorest in our society who are forced to attend some of the worst schools. But I know what the real issue is about: teachers' unions and money. If parents were free to send their kids to the school of their choice, many parents might choose private schools where the teachers were not unionized. This could represent a huge loss to both the coffers and political clout of the unions. That's also why the unions spent around $80 million to defeat the proposition at the same time they complained schools were underfunded.

These are some amazing stories about vouchers, and the good that they can do.