Article...An Al Gore Education
The vice president's party insists on consigning poor minority kids to failing public schools. This is liberal?
opinionjournal.com
Thursday, August 31, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
When Republicans used their convention in Philadelphia to reach out to minorities, our pundit class contemptuously dismissed it as a "minstrel show." If the point of invoking such an ugly metaphor was truly to defend the dignity and choices of minorities, however, then why the liberal silence on one of the greatest outrages in American life today? We're talking about the vast public-school plantation, where Hispanics and African-Americans are supposed to be grateful no matter how badly their children do or how miserable the environment.
George W. Bush's answer to this is to give failing public schools three years to get their act together. After that, low-income parents would be given the option of a $1,500 voucher to use at a school of their choice. But even this modest nod to standards and choice is anathema to Mr. Gore and the teachers unions dug deep into the Democratic Party base. In his own convention speech, Mr. Gore promised billions for education--provided that not a nickel is used to help some African-American kid from a poor family get a crack at the kind of education Mr. Gore has given his own children.
Of course this played well in Los Angeles, where the National Education Association had more delegates than the state of California. No doubt Team Gore will defend its position by citing the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll reporting that most Americans are pretty satisfied with their public schools. But the picture changes dramatically when you move away from white suburbanites and teachers unions. As even the Phi Delta Kappa findings concede, nonwhites assign much lower grades to their schools.
With good reason. They know it's not the white kids who are paying the price for the public school monopoly on state-funded education. Mr. Gore's own Education Department, for example, has just released devastating findings on the growing racial canyon in performance at public schools. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found the gap between whites and blacks that was closing in the 1970s and 1980s has begun to widen again in the 1990s. Today, the average 17-year-old African-American's science, math and reading skills are at or below the level of an average 13-year-old white child.
Maybe that's why polls show that far more than whites, blacks are interested in choice. Last year a survey by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that three out of five African-Americans support vouchers. Just this month a Hunter College survey of New York City residents found vouchers favored by an astounding 87% of Hispanics, 83% of African-Americans and 86% of Asians. That support is now being funneled into action. Last Thursday, Howard Fuller, a former superintendent of the Milwaukee public schools, launched the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a bipartisan coalition of community leaders pushing to give poor parents more options for educating their children.
The point is that whether you are measuring public attitudes or performance, no one outside the NEA really believes that the answer to failing public schools is to throw more money into the pot. To the contrary, researchers at Harvard, Georgetown and Wisconsin found that black students who used a voucher-like scholarship to leave the public school system for private schools outperformed their peers who remained behind. As General Colin Powell asked in Philadelphia, with all this evidence, why not at least experiment with more choice?
The answer is the awesome power of the teachers unions, and in particular the hold they have on the Democratic Party. Indeed, earlier this year we published an article by two Heritage Foundation staffers who surveyed members of Congress about where they sent their own kids. Not a single one had a child in a D.C. public school. Yet many of these same people have provided the margin of victory in defeating initiatives to give ordinary parents the same choice they exercise.
It helps to remember that for all the myth-making about GOP opposition to civil rights, the real political opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act came not from Republicans, but from a group of Southern Democrats who tried to filibuster it to death. Today, too, it is the Democratic Party that has decided that the only way to keep black and Hispanic kids in failing public schools is not to improve the schools, but to build the fences enclosing them high enough so that poor families have no way out.
During the Bradley-Gore primary debate at the Apollo Theater earlier this year, Time magazine's Tamala Edwards cut to the chase when she confronted Mr. Gore. "You, yourself, are the product of private institutions, as are all your children. In fact, your--the only child you still have at home, your son, Albert, is a junior at Sidwell Friends, a very expensive Washington, D.C., private school. Is there not a public or charter school in D.C. good enough for your child?"
Or, Mr. Gore, are they only good enough for African-Americans |
