Seced Launches Vouchers Bureaucrats Run Interference - Road to the Middle Class

WHAT A COICIDENCE! Just before Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announces a new federal pilot school voucher program the folks deep in the bureaucracy at the Institute of Education Sciences release a study that shows that “public school students did as well as or better than those in private school” in many areas.

That meant that the New York Times report by Diana Jean Schemo on Spellings’ announcement of a $100 million school voucher program could feature this paragraph:

The new legislation was introduced after an Education Department report released Friday, which showed that students attending public schools generally did as well as or better than comparable students in private schools.

And of course the reporter made sure to get an inflammatory quote from liberal activist Ralph Neas:

“The goal of this movement isn’t to help students. It’s to achieve vouchers at any cost.”

Still, the Times did have the decency to insert this quote from Secretary Spellings into their report:

Whatever the report’s findings, Ms. Spellings said, parents with children in public schools that repeatedly fail deserve more options.

Actually, you could put it stronger than that, to balance the flamethrower rhetoric of Ralph Neas.

It is wrong and unjust to condemn little children to lousy inner-city schools and stand in the schoolhouse door protecting the monopoly privileges of the system while generation after generation of children go to rot. And when activists like Ralph Neas trample on the right of parents to get their kids a decent education they ought to be ashamed.

How is that for a start?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
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Never Trust Experts

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