A Mayor Breakthrough
D.C. Democrats back education vouchers.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003480
Sunday, May 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Bully for Anthony Williams. The Mayor of Washington dropped a political bombshell earlier this month when he publicly embraced vouchers during an appearance with Education Secretary Rod Paige commemorating National Charter Schools Week.
Mayor Williams's defection from inner-city Democratic orthodoxy not only signals just how close vouchers are to becoming a reality in the nation's capital, it exposes a huge fault within the largely Democratic African-American establishment.
His endorsement reverberates all the more powerfully because it represents a complete turnaround from Hizzoner's initial reaction in February, when the White House announced its intention to bring choice to the District's parents. And he is not alone. Only a few weeks ago there was a similar, high-profile defection by the liberal president of the local Board of Education, Peggy Cooper Cafritz. And they are joined by the increasingly voucher-friendly statements of D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous, who chairs the education committee.
In the local political environment, such moves require courage. Simply for acknowledging that the school system is broke and vouchers are the best shot for fixing it, these men and women find themselves excoriated by the District's delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton. On May 2 Mrs. Holmes Norton took her tantrum to the radio, where she bitterly denounced Mayor Williams for abandoning "home rule."
For the edification of those outside the Beltway, Mrs. Holmes Norton's charge about "home rule" is code for the real accusation: that the Mayor, the Councilman and the head of the D.C. Board of Education are, via vouchers, delivering the District into the hands of white colonial (i.e., Congressional Republican) rule. That, too, was the message from Courtland Milloy, who used his recent Washington Post column to denounce Mayor Williams as a closet Republican. In elite black D.C. circles, that's like calling someone a traitor.
The harshness of the debate indicates that the real war here is not the one between Republicans and Democrats. The real battle lines are drawn between Democrats who will defend the miserable status quo no matter what and those who are beginning to question the wisdom of sacrificing African-American children to the interests of the teachers' unions.
To put it another way, what Mr. Williams and Ms. Cafritz recognize is that the system over which they nominally preside has become untenable. And money can no longer plausibly be claimed as an excuse: The District school system boasts the third-highest level of per pupil spending in the nation. Yet this is a system where the longer children stay within it, the further behind the rest of America they fall.
As welcome as is the newfound willingness to give vouchers a go, it's worth remembering how we got here. Congressional Republicans have fought to expand opportunities for D.C.'s schoolchildren with vouchers--just as they did when they "imposed" the now successful charter schools on the District a few years back. Surely there's irony here, in that the voices screaming loudest for "home rule" are those most unwilling to give District parents any say over where to send their own children for school.
But reform of D.C. schools would also not be possible without the work of tenacious local citizens such as Virginia Walden-Ford, head of D.C. Parents for School Choice. The African-American moms who turned out to demonstrate for school choice with Mrs. Walden-Ford did so even though they knew they would be largely ignored by the mainstream media. The scales now falling from the eyes of local Democratic leaders attest to the unflagging persistence of these ordinary moms and dads.
In short, the alliance for school choice has helped bring public pressure to bear on what is in essence a civil rights proposition: that the mostly African-American kids now condemned to rot in failing D.C. public schools deserve a real shot at a decent education. They have persevered, and it looks as though they shall soon overcome. |
