Posted on 07/28/2007 4:04:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Democrats missed a real opportunity during the July 23 CNN/YouTube debate to declare themselves proudly pro-choice. Not on abortion, but on education.
During the unconventional debate, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., could have done it easily. He's been an advocate for giving poor families the same opportunities wealthy families have: moving kids out of failing public schools and into private ones.
Unfortunately, his admirable position wasn't clear during the debate. Asked if candidates would send their children to public or private school, Biden's answer sounded positively apologetic. He said that, after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, his two sons went to the private Wilmington Friends School, where his sister taught. When it came time for high school, he sent the boys to a Catholic school: "I'm a practicing Catholic -- it was very important to me they go to a Catholic school, and they went to Catholic school."
Biden should be proud of the choice he made, and this came through somewhat when he talked about high school, but he retreated from that when he ended his answer with what seemed to be a misplaced mea culpa: "My kids would not have gone to that school were it not for the fact that my wife and daughter were killed and my two children were under the care of my sister, who drove them to school every morning."
Perhaps it was the stress of the moment or the personal nature of the question. For, on the Senate floor, Biden has seen the American education landscape more clearly: "When you have an area in the country -- and most often here we are talking about inner cities -- where the public schools are abysmal or dysfunctional or not working and where most of the children have no way out, it is legitimate to ask what would happen to the public schools with increased competition from private schools and what would happen to the quality of education for the children who live there."
He's right to embrace alternatives for Americans of all income brackets. School choices, studies find, raise graduation rates, and -- as Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute has pointed out -- "result in higher test scores for both the kids who use them and the kids who remain in public schools."
Supporting school choice is, frankly, a populist position. Most Democrats would have adopted it by now if they weren't so beholden to teachers' unions and other liberal pressure groups.
It's a position you'd think Barack Obama should be taking -- heralding a message of empowerment and civil rights. But in that same debate, the Illinois senator explained: "My kids have gone to the University of Chicago Lab School, a private school, because I taught there, and it was five minutes from our house. So it was the best option for our kids." Makes sense to me. But he, too, sounded defensive for absolutely no reason. He went on to explain that "there are some terrific public schools in Chicago that they could be going to. The problem is, is that we don't have good schools, public schools, for all kids."
Which is why, Obama, families should have the choice -- public or private. But on July 5, Obama was bashing No Child Left Behind at the National Education Association's annual convention, referring to procedures as "abandoning" public schools.
In "The Audacity of Hope" (Crown, 2006), Obama wrote: "When we as a society pretend that poor children will fulfill their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and teachers who aren't trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on these children, and on ourselves." He ought to look at the test score numbers. The statistics have made other liberal Democrats (Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Gov. Eliot Spitzer, D-N.Y.) take a look at school choice. It's the new civil-rights movement, and the Democrats should all embrace it for the children.
Theory has it that the de-moKKKer-RAT party is the party of the common man; in reality the two chief pillars of financial support of this monstrosity are govt. workers unions, particularly the NEA, and the trial lawyers’ guild.
I wouldnt be holding my breath waiting for the RATs to give parents a school ‘choice’. The NEA and teachers unions are their bread and butter. The next time I hear more clamoring for $$$ for public education I think I’ll go ballistic!
30-40 more years in the Senate and Biden might actually amount to something. But he has a problem with property rights: respecting the property and persons of gunowners.
As far as I’m concerned the problem with the public schools is the liberal philosophy that children cannot be flunked, punished, kicked out for bad behavior, etc. The liberals made the public schools what they are. Don’t blame public schools for the fact that libs have forced them into a position of having to bow to political correctness. Give public schools the same options as private schools - if a student refuses to behave, they get kicked out - period!
I've not seen a comprehensive breakdown in several years. Members have the options of leaving their families at home or, if they bring them to D.C., living in a good school district in the 'burbs. It's not hard to finesse the issue.
So Obama sent his kid to an upper tier specialty school, and justifies doing it because it was just five minutes from his house and thus real convenient for his family. Yet he wants the common folks’ kids to endure an hour long bus ride across town so that each school has a precise racial “balance”.
These guys are such phonies.
“Democrats backtrack on school-choice statements”
Choice!
This is how you beat the RATS. COnservatives will howl but here is how you destroy the left.
Choice!
I am PRO-CHOICE. I choose life. What do you choose? Abortion, although legal, is immoral. Since we support the law, legally we have to support the right to kill our unborn child. But not morally. It is repugnant. But you do get a choice. So choose life and let the liberal choose death. You take the whole pro-choice/pro-life argument away from the libs. Come to the pro-choice marches with your I AM PRO CHOICE AND I CHOOSE LIFE! signage. You will destroy the left. They will not know what to do and they will cry foul. The media will have a cow. 200,000 Pro-choice choose life signs in a 500,000 pro-choice demonstration? Wow.
I AM PRO-CHOICE. I choose to fund my own retirement. It is my money. The state wants to give their employees pensions and benefits, let state employees fund it. I choose to pay for my own. What do you choose?
I AM PRO-CHOICE. I choose to educate my children by sending them to private schools that I am more then willing to pay for. In saying that, if my child goes to a private school that I pay for, I want the choice of paying taxes to fund public education. I choose to use the portion of my property taxes to pay for my kids education. What do you choose?
This is the meaning of Pro-Choice. The left has used emotion and labels long enough. It is time to get smart and play their game. Smack them upside the head with it. Let them whine and complain to the NY Times that we coopted the PRO-CHOICE label.
It will be over in less then a year. Either Pro-choice groups will have to adapt or change their strategy. Maybe then we can say we are pro-choice while they say they are pro-abortion. They are pro-gay marriage. They are against individual liberty.
That’s how you win. And you don’t have to fire a shot.
RATS (and many Pubbies) perpetrate a lie when they fail to acknowledge the causal relationship between the demand for "diversity" and the lack of teachers trained in the subjects they teach. A school could recruit such teachers but then Obama and his ilk would be complaining that the faculty doesn't "look enough like America."
The RATs gotta dance with the whore what brought them.
Another reason to homeschool, right?
The fact that this author fails to mention the lockhold the Educrat monopolists have on the Democrats bespeaks either ignorance or a willingness to cover up Democrats malfeasance.
The education system is broken because the public school monopolists have broken it and they will not allow real reform.
School choice is a vital component of that real reform; without giving students the power to leave a school, the system has no real incentive to improve. All the NCLB tests in the world can’t fix the borken public school system.
This farce is allowed to continue because:
1. the aforementioned lockhold on the Democrats by the NEA (teachers unions) and the bureaucrats
2. Republican fear of being cast as ‘anti-education’ if they dare challenge the corrupt, venal public school orthodoxy of the educrats
3. Liberalism and its manic belief in ‘esteem’ instead of competence and opposition to merit and excessive egalitarianism (nobody can get a bad grade, nobody can lose, if they cant read its not their fault, lets not teach them American values, etc.)
“We ought to take a flamethrower to this place” - Al Pachino in “Scent of a Woman”
Actually, I’m not sure. I don’t see anything in there that I would consider a reason to homeschool. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting article to see the stand taken by politicians and the excuses they give for not using the public school system they want to inflict on everyone else.
Maybe it would be more appropriate for Dave’s list??
Perhaps. It’s interesting that these candidates say that public schools are good for the public, but won’t place their own children in them.
Everything I’ve ever heard is that public school teachers enroll their kids in private schools at a rate twice the national average. Even THEY won’t use the system they work in. That’s pretty bad.
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