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School reformer Michelle Rhee tells how she came to support school voucher programs in Washington, DC.
When I began my stint with the D.C. public schools, I had strong ideas about what education reform should look like and what it shouldn’t look like. I believed wholeheartedly that we had to have a very strong focus on teacher quality. I was also a believer in charter schools. I had seen their value when I served for a couple of years on the board of the St.HOPEPublic Schools. I guess that was my first break with Democratic dogma. I knew that charter schools were anathema to teachers’ unions. I also knew the best ones could serve children extraordinarily well.
But I drew a very deep line in the sand when it came to vouchers. As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers. Vouchers provide public funds to parents who need help in paying tuition for private or parochial schools. Proponents, mostly Republicans, see vouchers as leveling the field and broadening choice for families. Detractors, usually Democrats, decry the use of public funds to pay for private education. I had bought into the arguments that Democrats and others use in opposition to vouchers: vouchers are a way of taking money away from public school systems and putting them into private schools; vouchers help only a handful of the kids; and vouchers take children and resources away from the schools and districts that need those resources the most.
For all of those reasons, my view on vouchers was set. But soon after I arrived in Washington, D.C., I was in a pickle. The District of Columbia had Opportunity Scholarships, a federally funded voucher program that helped poor families attend private schools. The program was up for reauthorization, and there was a heated debate going on in the city.
“You’re the most high-profile education official in the city,” a Washington Post reporter asked. “Do you think the Opportunity Scholarship program should be re-upped?”
My inclination was to say no. As a good Democrat, I should have responded, “I don’t support vouchers, because they are not a systemic solution to the problems we face.” No one would have been surprised or upset with that answer.
However, I wanted to have my facts straight. So I decided to meet with families across the city and spend some time better understanding the Opportunity Scholarships initiative. It’s amazing what one can learn from talking to parents.
The outreach I did about the Opportunity Scholarships was part of a countless number of meetings I had with parents over the course of my time in D.C. Many of those parents were young mothers who came to me looking for answers. Although they were different in many ways, they often came with the same goal: better schooling opportunities for their children. Usually mothers would request meetings with me during the school selection process that takes place each January and February.
The typical mom would come to the meeting armed with data and talking points. For example: …
… After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program. People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.
“Michelle, what are you doing?” one education reformer asked. “You are the first opportunity this city has had to fix the system. We believe in you and what you’re trying to do. But you have to give yourself a fighting chance! You need time and money to make your plan work. If during that time children continue fleeing the system on these vouchers, you’ll have less money to implement your reforms. You can’t do this to yourself!”
“Here’s the problem with your thinking,” I’d answer. “My job is not to preserve and defend a system that has been doing wrong by children and families. My job is to make sure that every child in this city attends an excellent school. I don’t care if it’s a charter school, a private school, or a traditional district school. As long as it’s serving kids well, I’m happy. And you should be, too.” …
Thomas Sowell with many more examples of how liberal democrats have imprisoned blacks in this country.
There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?
San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown.
Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.
Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the level of minimum wage laws. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country, as such laws created high unemployment rates among young people in general in European countries.
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state. Most black children grew up in homes with two parents during all that time but most grow up with only one parent today.
Liberals have pushed affirmative action, supposedly for the benefit of blacks and other minorities. But two recent factual studies show that affirmative action in college admissions has led to black students with every qualification for success being artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with colleges for the sake of racial body count. …
How do homing pigeons find their way around. The Economist reports on new studies that suggest pigeons can hear waves hundreds of miles away.
ON AUGUST 13th 1969, when the rest of the world was watching Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts being showered with ticker tape by the inhabitants of New York, Bill Keeton was releasing homing pigeons from a more rural part of the state, Jersey Hill. This hill is 100km (60 miles) west of Ithaca, the home of CornellUniversity, where Keeton, a bird biologist, worked. Unlike those who launched Apollo 11, however, he had no expectation that his charges would return safely, for that part of the state had long been known as the Birdmuda triangle. Pigeons released there tended to vanish, and Keeton wanted to know why.
August 13th, though, turned out to be both his and the pigeons’ lucky day. All the birds got back to their loft in Ithaca—the only time this happened during years of experiments. Keeton, who died in 1980, never did work out what was special about that particular Wednesday. But his successor Jon Hagstrum, of the United States Geological Survey, has. And the result, which he has just published in Experimental Biology, helps explain how homing pigeons pull off their spectacular feats of navigation.
Keeton knew that pigeons navigate by the sun and by the Earth’s magnetic field. But both of these are as available in upstate New York as anywhere else, so a third factor must be involved. Dr Hagstrum set out to discover what it was.
He had a theory. Pigeons are now known to be able to hear very-low-frequency sound waves, called infrasound, such as are generated by ocean waves. This was information unavailable to Keeton, but Dr Hagstrum suspected it might be the missing part of the puzzle because infrasound can travel thousands of kilometres from its source. …
It’s Andy Malcolm’s weekly dose of late night humor.
Letterman: Women will be in combat now. Finally, someone in the tank who’ll stop and ask for directions.
Conan: Iran has successfully sent a monkey into space. Iran is calling it a huge advancement in not letting women drive.
Conan: Barnes & Noble is closing one-third of its stores because of Internet competition. The CEO said, “Good luck using the bathroom at Amazon.com.”
Conan: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has rejected an increase to the minimum wage. As a result, Christie got a lot of dirty looks today when he went to McDonald’s and Arby’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Long John Silvers.
Conan: A Secret Service dog died during a fundraiser speech by VP Joe Biden. The dog is being described as “lucky.”