Politics and irony are very fond of one another. An example might be a xenophobic U.S. Representative (and second-generation immigrant) arguing for harsher immigration quotas. Or maybe a 6-term U.S. Senator telling a crowd to vote for him because he'll bring “change” to Washington.
Any profession that hinges on the ability to convince millions of very different people to pull the lever for one person is inherently ripe for bouts of cognitive dissonance.
Sometimes the irony is not so obvious. President Obama recently introduced Sonia Sotomayor as a candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. During his introduction speech, the President mentioned that Sotomayor's mother "sent her children to a Catholic school called Cardinal Spellman out of the belief that with a good education here in America all things are possible."
This statement is interesting because President Obama and the Democrat-controlled congress two months ago agreed to end the Washington, D.C., voucher program. The same President who lauds the importance of his Supreme Court nominee’s private school education and who attended one of the best private schools in the country (Punahou) for some reason opted to shut down a program that has allowed 1,700 poor D.C. school children to escape the squalor of their government run schools.
This begs the question: Why do Democrats hate school choice so much?
They posit many reasons.
First, they might try to claim that voucher programs should be stopped because they "don't work."
False. A recent study commissioned by the Department of Education confirms that students who entered the voucher program in 2004 are two reading levels ahead of their government school counterparts. Countless other studies (9 in recent years according to the Friedman Foundation) show similar results. But even if the programs had no marginal benefit, allowing parents the opportunity to send their kids to the school of their choice is justification enough.
The anti-choice crowd also complains about the cost. First we'll cast aside the blatant hypocrisy of simultaneously opposing a $12 million education program for a few hundred students and voting for a $3.6 trillion budget. The cost is also very minimal when you consider how much the D.C. school system somehow manages to waste every year. The city is currently spending close to $1.3 billion for less than 49,000 students. This comes out to a per-pupil spending average of well over $26,000 per student. Of course despite the outrageous expenditures, D.C. children are some of the most poorly educated in the country.
Finally, the anti-choice factions will claim that vouchers erode the foundation of the public schools in this country. To that charge, the only proper response is "good!" Just last year over one million high school students dropped out of government run schools. The fact is that the public schools have had a consistent record of failure in this country despite steadily increasing levels of education funding.
So back to the original question: why do Democrats hate school choice so much? As Education expert Andrew Coulson recently explained, Democrats “see the programs as a threat to the public school employee unions at the core of their party.” The National Association of Educators (NEA) is a 3.2 million member teachers union that overwhelmingly votes Democrat. Like any monopoly, the teachers union doesn't like its power to be undermined. The more successful alternative schools are, the less powerful the status quo becomes.
Unfortunately, the political party in this country that purports to be pro-education is more concerned with getting reelected than with doing what is best for children.
How ironic.
-Elijah Lavicky is a finance senior.
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Gene 2 years, 11 months ago
Vouchers show up in the news because Republicans like to use them to score political points, but their impact on the D.C. school system has been negligible. The real action in school reform is going on with the efforts of DC Mayor Fenty and Schools Chancellor Rhee to negotiate a new collective-bargaining agreement with the teachers' union and exert more control over how public schools are managed. The Atlantic recently had a good article on this: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/michelle-rhee
Even "school-choice" is hardly being advanced by voucher-based private schools. The real choices are happening with public charter schools. These are growing much more rapidly than private schools, and in fact many private schools are changing over to public charters themselves.
Private school students perform better because the kids have much stronger familial support to succeed, whether because they come from a higher socio-economic background to begin with or their parents care enough to advocate to bring them there on a voucher or scholarship. But real reform means reaching the kids who don't have that support, and that requires working within the public system.
For all their flaws, public schools are still the only sensible way to educate children at all economic levels. Even if all schools were privately run but funded through vouchers, they would still be heavily subsidized by government, only with less accountability and a healthy chunk being skimmed off the top as corporate profits.
If you really want to bash the teachers' union, there are plenty of legitimate ways to do that within the public system. But crying vouchers as the answer to everything only shows a lack of understanding about the serious issues of school reform being debated today. It makes for good politics, but it's ultimately a distraction.