Star
Parker examines the Obama administration’s education policy and suggests that greater
school choice is what kids and parents need. Excerpts:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said
recently, "Our K-12 agenda can be summed up in one word: reform."
If only it were true. But what Duncan calls
reform is indeed putting lipstick on a pig. In this case, the pig is
Washington's never changing formula for solving everything: spending
ever-increasing sums of taxpayer's money.
"Reform" means generating new
ideas about how to spend and coming up with clever new titles for programs.
…
In normal markets, customers drive the
quality of the product. In the case of the public education monopoly, the
customers -- kids and their parents -- are pawns in the game. Anything that
would give the customers power -- such as school choice -- government and union
bureaucrats fight.
The Obama administration, with all its
lofty rhetoric about reform, quietly has allowed congressional Democrats to
kill the successful Washington D.C. voucher program. The program has
demonstrably given 1,300 inner-city kids a better education in private schools
at a third of the cost their counterparts are getting in D.C. public schools.
Even the liberal Washington Post has
editorialized to save the program, as President Obama and Secretary Duncan turn
deaf ears.
Duncan was chastised for recently saying
the "best thing" to happen to education in New Orleans was Katrina.
But education has markedly improved there as parents were given school choice
in the wake of the disaster.
The best thing that could happen to
inner-city education nationwide would be a political Katrina that would give
birth to parental empowerment and school choice.