By
In his speech commemorating
the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington,
President Obama hypocritically bemoaned the current state of education,
saying that many Americans face a “fortress of substandard schools and
diminished prospects.” He claimed that such schools were “underfunded”
and that every child has a “right … to get an education that stirs the
mind and captures the spirit and prepares them for the world that awaits
them.” However, it is the Obama administration that has been
instrumental in depriving poor, especially minority, children from the
“right” to a quality education with its campaign to eradicate school
vouchers. Just recently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed suit
in New Orleans federal court to prevent Louisiana from implementing a
voucher program at public schools that remains under federal
desegregation orders.
According to the DOJ, the 570 students who received the vouchers for
the 2012-2013 school year “impeded the desegregation process,” and
therefore vouchers for 2014-15 school year must be blocked. The great
irony here is that 90 percent of
the children who used the vouchers to get themselves a better education
are black Americans. Yet the DOJ remains concerned that 10 percent of
the 2012-2013 voucher recipients came from schools that remain under
desegregation orders written a half-century ago. In their court petition,
the DOJ insists that some of the voucher recipients were “in the racial
minority at the public school they attended before receiving the
voucher.” As the Wall Street Journal wryly notes, the DOJ “is
claiming that the voucher program may be illegal because minority kids
made their failing public schools more white by leaving those schools to go to better private schools.”
Despite that reality, the DOJ claims that ”the loss of students
through the voucher program reversed much of the progress made toward
integration.” Yet the actual number of students involved in the two
examples cited by the DOJ itself reveals the fatuousness of that
assertion. At Celilia Primary School in St. Martin Parish District, all
of six black children transferred to voucher schools. Prior to
the transfer, 30.1 percent of the student body was black. The District
itself is 46.5 percent black. Yet the DOJ further asserted that the
voucher program increased the difference in the racial composition
between the school and the District, “reinforcing the school’s racial
identity as a white school in a predominantly black school district.”
How the DOJ maintains that a District less than half black is
“predominantly” black is impossible to fathom.
The DOJ’s logic is equally twisted with regard to Independence
Elementary School in Tangipahoa Parish District, where a grand total of
five white students transferred to voucher schools. The school’s
enrollment is 61.5 percent black in a District that is 47.5 percent
black. Thus the school’s racial identity was already predominantly
black. Yet the DOJ insists the loss of those five students “increased
its black student percentage away from the district percentage, again
reinforcing the identity of the school as a black school.”
The Louisiana Scholarship Program that established the voucher system was passed in
2012. It is a state-wide initiative guaranteeing a voucher to students
from families with incomes below 250 percent of poverty who attend
public schools graded C, D or F. In other words, it is designed to give
poor families with children trapped in lousy schools a choice. In this
particular case, that choice is for an overwhelmingly black American
recipient base. Those would be very same black American children whose
counterparts are trapped in some of the worst schools in the nation,
most of which are in big cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia
and Washington, D.C. Those are also cities where Democrats are running
the show, and where their continuing alliance with education unions
virtually ensures the miserable status quo will remain intact.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited confirmation
by sources in Louisiana, the same dynamic is in play in the Pelican
State. “It’s about helping the teachers union repeal the voucher law by
any legal means, and the segregation gambit is the last one available,”
the paper states. “Justice gives this strategy away when it claims
‘jurisdiction over Louisiana’ even for vouchers for students in
districts without desegregation orders.”
This is not the Obama administration’s first effort to deny
educational opportunities to minority children trapped in lousy schools.
In his 2013 budget, Obama zeroed out funding
for the highly successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that
served more than 1,600 minority students in the nation’s capital. The
program, effectively killed in 2009 by the Democrat-controlled Congress,
had been revived in 2011 when House Speaker John Boehner got it
restored during heated budget negotiations with President Obama. It was
subsequently zeroed out, despite the reality that students who used the
vouchers to attend private schools had a 91 percent graduation rate,
compared to the dismal 55 percent in Washington’s public school system.
Even its cost was a bargain. Each voucher was worth $8000, far less than
the $18,000 per child spent by D.C. Public Schools.
Money was the impetus behind multiple lawsuits attempting to thwart the use of vouchers in Louisiana, culminating in a 2012 ruling by
the Louisiana Supreme Court declaring that Governor Bobby Jindal’s
method of funding the program was unconstitutional. The Court decided
that per-pupil allocation, called the minimum foundation program (MFP),
must go to public schools. Jindal refused to be thwarted, coming up $40
million from other public resources to cover the tab for this school
year’s nearly 8,000 recipients.
Thus, it is no surprise that Jindal is incensed by
the DOJ’s latest effort. ”After generations of being denied a choice,
parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal
government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this
right. Shame on them,” he said. ”Parents should have the ability to
decide where to send their child to school.”
Apparently not if it threatens a Democratic Party funding source. According to OpenSecrets.com, a website that
tracks campaign financing by special interest groups, between 1989 and
2012, the fourth largest campaign contributor in the nation has been the
National Education Association (NEA), which has fattened the coffers of
politicians by more than $53 million. Sixty-two percent of those
contributions went to Democrats, compared to just 4 percent for
Republicans. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) came in at number
ten, contributing more than $37 million to elected officials, 88
percent of which went to Democrats — and zero percent went to Republicans.
Thus the inevitable reality emerges: anything that threatens union
leverage, even if it mortgages the future of millions of students around
the nation, must be fought tooth and nail. It must be fought even as
the Journal notes that seven out of eight national studies reveal vouchers actually enhance racial integration.
Under the current lawsuit, the Louisiana would be barred from
assigning students in 34 school systems to private schools unless a
federal judge agreed to it. Theoretically that could happen as early as
next year. Yet Brian Blackwell, attorney for the Louisiana Association
of Educators, indicated that the time, effort and evidence needed to
persuade judges could take a lot longer.
Furthermore, the judge assigned to the case is problematic. In November 2012, Judge Ivan Lemelle ruled that
elements of Jindal’s educational reform package were unconstitutional,
claiming they violated the desegregation agreement of Tangipahoa Parish,
because the money that would have been spent on vouchers would have
impeded their ability to pay for programs necessary to comply with
federal desegregation orders. This puts the federal government in the
position of being able to effectively kill any voucher system, simply by
forcing the state to incur the costs necessary to achieve Washington’s
vision of desegregation. Louisiana has appealed the ruling, which is
currently pending.
State Education Superintendent John White notes the absurdity of the
DOJ’s stance, contending that ”it’s a little ridiculous” to argue that
students’ departure to voucher schools makes their home school systems
less white, even as the rules that were initially conceived to combat
racism are now being used to trap black children in failing schools. In
other words, Eric Holder and the DOJ are essentially pursuing same kind
of Jim Crow laws that were designed to achieve the same purpose, even as
they falsely promoted the idea that schools in America would
be ”separate but equal.” For Holder and the DOJ, as long as some federal
notion of desegregation can be pursued under the banner of racial
equality, it is irrelevant that such equality amounts to the equality of
misery and deprivation. The very same misery and
deprivation desegregation was designed to alleviate for millions of
black Americans.
As for the students themselves, they remain nothing more than pawns
beholden to a Democrat-union alliance whose promises of educational
“reform” ring as hollow today as when they first made them more than 50
years ago. There is no other alliance in the nation that could produce a
half-century of consistent failure and remain as viable. Perhaps one
day, black Americans will realize that an inferior education leading to
government dependency is one of the primary ways Democrats, who promote
such dependency, maintain their power base. Until then, black American
families will continue to have their children trapped in the hellholes
many public schools have become.
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