Ponderable

Can we talk bout the Secretary of Education DeVos? Never sent a kid to a public school? Wants to give rich people vouchers so the government can subsidize their private school education?
 
xav10 said:
Can we talk bout the Secretary of Education DeVos? Never sent a kid to a public school? Wants to give rich people vouchers so the government can subsidize their private school education?
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Don't forget the main beneficiaries of a shift if public funds to private schools will be religious schools.
 
xav10 said:
Can we talk bout the Secretary of Education DeVos? Never sent a kid to a public school? Wants to give rich people vouchers so the government can subsidize their private school education?
Click to expand...
Wez said:
Don't forget the main beneficiaries of a shift if public funds to private schools will be religious schools.
Click to expand...

Young Blacks Turn To School Vouchers As Civil Rights Issue

When Cory A. Booker talks about fixing America's school system, he invokes the words of Malcolm X: by any means necessary.

To Mr. Booker, 31, an African-American Democrat elected to the Newark City Council in 1998, that means lobbying state lawmakers for smaller classes and teacher testing. It means organizing book drives for the schools in his impoverished neighborhood, and arranging for an insurance company to create a community health clinic at one of them.

And it also means the unbridled backing of the contentious notion of giving parents vouchers financed by taxpayers to send their children to private schools.

''It's one of the last remaining major barriers to equality of opportunity in America, the fact that we have inequality of education,'' Mr. Booker explained. ''I don't necessarily want to depend on the government to educate my children -- they haven't done a good job in doing that. Only if we return power to the parents can we find a way to fix the system.''

Mr. Booker, a Rhodes scholar who quotes Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes in his speeches, is part of a growing cadre of young blacks who have embraced vouchers, and school choice more broadly, as a central civil rights issue for their generation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/us/young-blacks-turn-to-school-vouchers-as-civil-rights-issue.html
 
Lion Eyes said:
Young Blacks Turn To School Vouchers As Civil Rights Issue

When Cory A. Booker talks about fixing America's school system, he invokes the words of Malcolm X: by any means necessary.

To Mr. Booker, 31, an African-American Democrat elected to the Newark City Council in 1998, that means lobbying state lawmakers for smaller classes and teacher testing. It means organizing book drives for the schools in his impoverished neighborhood, and arranging for an insurance company to create a community health clinic at one of them.

And it also means the unbridled backing of the contentious notion of giving parents vouchers financed by taxpayers to send their children to private schools.

''It's one of the last remaining major barriers to equality of opportunity in America, the fact that we have inequality of education,'' Mr. Booker explained. ''I don't necessarily want to depend on the government to educate my children -- they haven't done a good job in doing that. Only if we return power to the parents can we find a way to fix the system.''

Mr. Booker, a Rhodes scholar who quotes Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes in his speeches, is part of a growing cadre of young blacks who have embraced vouchers, and school choice more broadly, as a central civil rights issue for their generation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/us/young-blacks-turn-to-school-vouchers-as-civil-rights-issue.html
Click to expand...

I think it has the potential to help some low income families see private schools, but my understanding is the vouchers help cover the cost of private schools, not necessarily the whole cost. So low income families, to benefit from vouchers, not only need a school within a reasonable distance from their homes, they also need ones with tuition assistance programs. We'll see soon enough how it plays out.
 
......
Omar Wasow, 29, the executive director of blackplanet.com, a Web site for African-Americans, said he sees school choice as a direct outgrowth of Brown v. the Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools.

The goal then, as now, was to give poor black children access to the same quality education as their better-off white counterparts, Mr. Wasow said; only the methods have changed. Where his civil rights forebears focused on ending legal discrimination and turned to the government for protection, Mr. Wasow sees the enemy in subtler racism and believes the savior resides in the private sector. Vouchers are his voter registration.

''The black freedom struggle has fundamentally been about trying to produce a society where black individuals have as much freedom and agency as white Americans,'' said Mr. Wasow, whose parents met in a 1960's program to mentor inner-city youth. ''As long as black people are trapped in failing public schools, we will never achieve the kind of dignity and power that has been the central cause of the black freedom struggle for more than 200 years.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/09/us/young-blacks-turn-to-school-vouchers-as-civil-rights-issue.html
 
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