Tag: School Choice

Corrupt Civil Rights Leaders Won’t Support School Choice

So says Juan Williams:

“The civil rights challenge of this generation is education,” Williams said. “Dr. King would never allow anybody to buy his silence, to buy him off.”

He charged that unions are paying off civil rights leaders like Reverend Al Sharpton so that they will not support charter schools and education vouchers. “Poor people need better schools and you can’t make excuses at the cost of our children and our children’s future.”

via Fox News Insider. (with video.)

The editor didn’t even choose the best quotes.

“They don’t ever want those civil rights leaders to stand up and say ‘Yes.’ to charter schools. ‘Yes.’ to vouchers.”  …  “We need  — the black community — better schools.”

This is a big story.  But the MSM will not touch it.  Sadly.

Poor children being denied a good education is a tragedy.

Civil rights leaders on the take not supporting educational choice for these poor children is a travesty.

How to Help Black Kids Graduate? Vouchers!

Since CTU is out on strike, this appears to be timely.

Educational choice is the civil rights movement of our generation.

Then look at a breathtaking new study from researchers at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University. Brookings fellow Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard government professor Paul E. Peterson tracked 1,363 New York elementary school students who, starting in 1997, had received vouchers worth up to $1,400 a year through a New York City scholarship fund. Those students had their choice of any private school, religious or secular, in New York.

Result: African-American students who had used the vouchers were 24 percent more likely to attend college, and more than twice as likely to attend selective four-year colleges, as their peers who had not won the voucher lottery in a random draw. The hard numbers: 45 percent of the African-American students with vouchers graduated and attended college. That’s compared to 36 percent of otherwise similar students who hadn’t received the vouchers.

Those vouchers didn’t give a similar boost to white or Hispanic students, but did help African-Americans close the customary graduation gap between black and Hispanic students, the researchers reported.

via Chicago Tribune.

Poor kids on the South and West sides of the city are stuck in failing schools and Rahm, Obama, and the rest of the Democratic cabal aren’t going to do a damn thing about it.

Parents Not Happy with Blue School

Back in April I wrote about the Blue School.  By some measure it’s not doing so well.

Parents are yanking their kids out of the “progressive,” $32,000 per-year private school founded by the Blue Man Group — which has no books and no tests — because their kids are barely learning to read, The Post has learned.

One mother, who is yanking her son at the end of the school year, complained that the school is “unstructured.”

“It’s true,” she said when asked if her kid was struggling to read.

In all, she added, four of her son’s first-grade classmates are leaving the Financial District institution.

Another parent who dropped her first-grade son off yesterday said he’s not coming back next year — because he’s got nothing to do.

“When a 6-year-old says they’re bored, there’s a problem,” the mother said. “I think they bit off more than they can chew.”

via NYPOST.com.

So I guess school choice works then!

Of course, people who can afford $32,000/year tuition do have a lot of choices.  This story shows that they are willing to take their money elsewhere when they do not feel (think?) that they are getting a good value for their dollar.

But what about those who cannot afford private school tuition?  Why do we deny them the same choice?  Just because one is poor does not mean that they’re not interested in their children’s education.

And aren’t so called “public schools” funded with tax dollars?  In sending their children to private schools the rich are in fact double-taxed on education.  This might not be perceived as a problem (they can afford it) by some but that argument missed the point.  When the “rich” pay to have their children in private school they care less about the performance of the public schools.  They’re basically walking away on the taxes they’re paying, accepting it as a loss.  And they invest not only their money but their time and energy in the private school.  This leaves our “public schools” weaker.

I prefer to think about “public schools” as government run schools.  In reality, every member of society has a vested interest in the education of the youth.  In reality, ALL SCHOOLS ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  The difference is that some schools are run by the government, and some are not.

What we find in the end is that government schools are run about as well as the government runs anything.  Which is why everyone, just like those who used to send their children to the Blue School, should have the option of sending the children to the school of their choice.

‘Why Didn’t White Folks Keep Them for Themselves?’

The Chicago Teachers Union, and school employee unions in general, are pulling out all the stops to slow down a school choice and education reform movement that is bowling them over in numerous states and cities.

Bold reform efforts are being pushed by the likes of Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Democrats like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It’s a bipartisan effort that has Big Labor on its heels.

In Chicago in particular, the teachers union is flailing to stop any meaningful reform it possibly can. In response to the move for a slightly longer school day, the union has demanded an astonishing  30% raise. For weeks, union leaders have been beating the war drums for a teachers’ strike, which could cripple the city.  …

But perhaps the most remarkable accusation came when she said, “If charter schools were so good, why didn’t the white folks keep them for themselves?”

via Breitbart.

Just plain amazing.  This is what CPS has teaching our children.

This is how brainwashed some people have become by CTU and it’s tactics.  A sorry state of society where race politics superceeds student and parent choice.  Troubling days ahead.

Church Groups Getting Public Money

Here’s something:

Faith-based groups that have become the face of community support for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial plans to lengthen the school day and close failing schools also receive millions of dollars in grants from his administration.

…

One of the key players touting grass-roots support for Emanuel’s agenda is the Rev. Roosevelt Watkins, a minister and longtime ally of former Mayor Richard Daley who has seen an uninterrupted flow of contracts to provide services to Chicago Public Schools students. …

A roughly one-month, $1 million contract was awarded for this spring to three groups, including HOPE, for a program designed to keep children off the street during school breaks. In June, Emanuel’s then-newly appointed schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard, lauded the Safe Haven, Safe Summer program, which the district said involved about 100 churches.In July, Watkins’ group was among 10 community organizations that collectively received a one-year, $6.3 million Safe Passage contract to watch over children going to and from school and to defuse potential conflict, according to public records.

via Chicago Tribune.

If CPS is giving all this money away to religious groups for after school programs then there should be no problem moving to a voucher system and giving CPS money away for during school programs.

This could be the birth of a nice school choice program for the city.