It's always good to see political courage among Democrats, even if they are fictional. Joanne Jacobs (one of the finer edubloggers) reports:
President Jed Bartlet of West Wing backs school vouchers for low-income students, but real-life Democrats lack the courage, writes Clarence Page. On the TV show, as in real life, the mayor of Washington, D.C. and the president of the school board want a voucher experiment to help kids trapped in dreadful schools. Bartlet, a liberal Democrat, produces his young black assistant, a graduate of D.C. public schools. The assistant says he wishes he'd had a voucher to go to Catholic school. The fictional president decides to spend political capital to support vouchers.The horrid truth here is that the Democratic Party is far more interested in the money and election workers that the education unions can provide, than in the children that they hold hostage, or the true interests of the poor families that they assert they represent. The one single thing keeping African Americans in poverty is the horrid economic disadvange imposed by schools that no family with any real choice would let their child visit, let alone attend. The sordid partnership that the Democrats have with the equally sordid NEA to perpetuate a bloated bureaucracy at the expense of teachers, schools and students is very nearly a crime against humanity.
Consider in West Los Angeles, where few if any local kids attend neighborhood public schools (all the students are bussed in), and local private schools abound. Even middle-class African-American families send their kids to private schools whenever possible. In immigrant communities, like East LA, children are forced into schools so overcrowded that they are running two sessions on year-round schedules. In the poorer areas of South-Central, black kids go to schools that offer as good a chance of serious assault as they do of high-school graduation. The refrain from the bureaucracy: more money. Even though LAUSD already spends $13,000 per child, most of which never gets to the classroom.
Vouchers for poor children would solve most of these ills, reducing overcrowding, allowing others to avoid long bus trips, closing cesspool schools, and forcing LAUSD to stop spending all it's money on featherbedded headquarters staffs and competing for teachers and students in a free market.
Why should this monopoly be so widely supported by people who would be the very first to confront same in the real marketplace? That they do so solely to support their political machine is as tawdry as the Tammany machine of 150 years ago. Where is the shame?
As Paige points out
[T]he larger irony is that polls show most black Americans, statistically the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency, support vouchers...But the money and legwork comes from the unions, so the kids are SOL. If the Democrats ignore this long enough, they'll find that some generation of African-Americans will forget the 60s just as their grandparents forgot emancipation. That day cannot come too soon. Posted by Kevin Murphy at March 10, 2004 12:35 PM | TrackBack