A Tide For School Choice

George F. Will wrote in WaPo Fifty-seven years later, Sumner Elementary School in Topeka is back in the news. That city's board of education is still wrongly preventing the right people from getting into that building. Two educators wanted to use Sumner for a charter school, a public school entitled to operate outside the confinements of dictated curricula and free from many work rules written by teachers unions. Their school would have been a back-to-basics academy from kindergarten through fifth grade, designed to attack Topeka's 23-point gap between the reading proficiency of black and Hispanic third-graders and that of whites.

I can understand why they would want to be able to choose a school that would work.

When the school board rejected the application of the two educators -- African American women -- but praised their dedication to children, one of the women was not mollified: "A bleeding heart does nothing but ruin the carpet."

Good point. The reason they don't want your children to get educated is that they might get smart enough to vote Republican.

.... Sumner, which has been closed for years, would have needed costly repairs. Still, clearly one reason for the rejection was the usual resistance of public educators to innovations that challenge the status quo, meaning centralized control of schools.

Absolutely. That is why they fight school choice so hard. They don't want to have to compete with an alternative school.