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