God help me, I'm now reading editorials. The New York Times has a telling editorial on the way Congress abuses DC. Vouchers are front and center in the argument.
In D.C., Taxation Without Representation
nytimes.com
The 500,000 people who live in Washington, D.C., are accustomed to being humiliated by Congress, which dictates everything from how the city spends its tax dollars to how it collects the garbage — while denying Washingtonians a vote in the body that runs their affairs. This arrangement becomes painfully obvious at election time, when Republicans typically grandstand for the far right by ramming outrageous proposals down the throats of the city's overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
Thanks to this dictatorial oversight, the District of Columbia is the only city in the country that is barred by Congress from spending locally raised tax dollars to provide abortions for impoverished women. For a decade, the same intrusive Congress barred the city from extending domestic partnership rights to gay people.
This year, Congress is trying to force the city to send about 1,300 public school children to private, mainly parochial, schools at public expense over the objections of the school board and a majority of the city's elected officials, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city's nonvoting representative in the House.
There are a handful of small voucher programs at work around the country. But voters have rejected statewide voucher initiatives in state after state, including California, home of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has inexplicably endorsed the tyrannical Washington proposal — one that would lead to an uprising were it tried in her home state.
This proposal is antidemocratic, but its faults run deeper. It further erodes the wall between church and state by pushing children toward parochial schools, which make up a vast majority of Washington schools. Private school tuition would be covered by the proposed stipend of up to $7,500. This new federal money is likely to drive out the private money that Washingtonians have been raising for children trying to move into private schools.
This proposal sends the wrong message by funneling public money to private schools at a time when public schools are broke. It also brings attention to the fact that the Bush administration has failed to finance fully its vaunted public school initiative, No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to remake public education but is rapidly becoming just so much window dressing. |
