Outside the committee's meeting room last week, nine-year-old Mosiyah Hall, a D.C. public school student himself, politely asked Sen. Landrieu where she sent her own children to school. "Georgetown Day," came the response, a reference to one of Washington's most exclusive private schools.
Betraying D.C.'s Children
Where do your kids go to school, Mary Landrieu?
BY WILLIAM MCGURN
Thursday, July 24, 2003 12:01 a.m.
WASHINGTON--Go ahead and try to explain to Janet Butler why a voucher won't make a dime's worth of difference in the life of a District of Columbia schoolchild. But you'd best be prepared when she pulls out a pretty potent Exhibit A: her daughter.
Today 17-year-old Noree'na Jazzmine Dowtin is headed off to college, and she speaks excitedly about her dreams of becoming a doctor--a gynecologist/obstetrician, to be precise. And while teenage daughters and their mothers famously disagree, on this issue this mother and daughter see completely eye to eye: Without the lifeline provided her by a private voucher from the Washington Scholarship Fund, Jazzmine would have been another D.C. education casualty. "I would have been swallowed up," she says.
Alas, not everyone supports the current congressional push to let others just like Jazzmine escape one of the most dysfunctional school districts in the nation. A telling vignette outside last week's meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee illustrates the hypocrisies. Back in 1997, both Republican Arlen Specter and Democrat Mary Landrieu voted for D.C. vouchers, though the move was later vetoed by Bill Clinton.
But now, at the moment of truth, with a president in the White House who has made clear his eagerness to make such a bill a reality, Sens. Specter and Landrieu upset a critical Appropriations Committee vote by switching from yea to nay. What makes their flip-flop especially nasty is that this move to undercut choice to the overwhelmingly black and Latino students of the district comes from two white senators who each chose private schools for their own children.
Even a child can spot the contradiction. Outside the committee's meeting room last week, nine-year-old Mosiyah Hall, a D.C. public school student himself, politely asked Sen. Landrieu where she sent her own children to school. "Georgetown Day," came the response, a reference to one of Washington's most exclusive private schools. Mosiyah's mother says an obviously agitated Sen. Landrieu then came over to a group of local mothers to explain that a voucher would be no help for them here, because even with the $7,500 voucher this bill offers, they still couldn't afford Georgetown Day.
"It was an ugly moment," says Virginia Walden-Ford, head of D.C. Parents for School Choice and one of the moms demonstrating.
Ms. Butler's been there herself. Her first daughter had no problems with the D.C. schools. But by Jazzmine's time, more than a decade later, she says the system had grown cold and unresponsive. She tells of making appointments with teachers who never showed, and of showing up for what she thought were parent-teacher meetings that turned out to be appeals for more money. The last straw was when she found out that Jazzmine's entire French class was spending its time in the hallway because the school didn't have a teacher.
Academics weren't her only concern. She worried too about peer pressure and the temptations of drugs and sex in a system insuffiently attentive to its charges. "With me being a single parent I didn't want to come home to a latchkey kid with a belly [pregnancy] and everyone saying 'I don't know what happened.'"
She tried home-schooling for a while. And just when hope was running out, the Washington Scholarship Fund delivered. Now in its 10th year, the privately administered Ffund is at any one time helping about 1,200 D.C. children with vouchers that deliberately pay only a portion of tuition costs, to help ensure parental commitment. The $3,000 they awarded Jazzmine didn't pay the full freight, but it did provide the margin to get her to Emerson Preparatory School, the capital's oldest coed college prep school.
It proved a godsend. "Parents of private school kids can go to their school and say 'I expect,'" says Ms. Butler. "What a difference that was."
The folks at the Washington Scholarship Fund are proud of Jazzmine's success, but they report hers is one of many stories of lives changed by the opportunity even a modest voucher can bring. One of their students this year even earned an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In a D.C. school district where two out of every five kids never see a high school diploma, moreover, the kids who started with this program in grade school are now beginning to graduate from high schools, and almost all these are headed to college. "And because we choose our recipients by lottery we can't be accused of creaming off the top," notes C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel who now serves as a Fund director.
In the intervening years since the Senate last considered--and passed--a D.C. voucher measure, many of the old excuses for opposition are no longer valid. The Supreme Court has upheld their constitutionality. Congress is even allocating new money for this program, so it doesn't take away from the public schools. And this time around too the D.C. voucher bill has strong local support from key figures including the mayor and head of the school board. Even Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who says she's never voted for a school choice bill in her life, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying it's time to try one in D.C.
It's no longer Ms. Butler's fight, but she feels for the thousands of other Jazzmines still out there. And she believes the D.C. school system should have to begin to earn the $15,000 per kid it now gets automatically because of its monopoly. "If they want it, they should have to work for it," she says. "That's the American way."
Someone should tell Sens. Landrieu and Specter. |
