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Saturday, June 30, 2007
School vouchers would grant parents a choice
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The ready cure is at hand for the anguish expressed by those who see last week’s 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court further restricting the use of race as a factor in determining how schools should be mixed.
Liberals won’t like it. The gods of “diversity” will be agog. And the grand strategists who see it as their mission to use public schools to expose children to an idealized multicultural world will fall into near-fatal fantods. But, yes, there is an answer.
It is vouchers. School vouchers. Allow parents to choose. Give them choice, alternatives to school administrators who have attempted now for half a century or more to brew some elusive concoction, using black and white students, to precisely integrate schools, presumably to help minority students overcome the disadvantage of poor schools and neighborhoods.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in a case arising from Seattle and Louisville, Ky., pointed out that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Seattle used race as a factor in a high school assignment plan. The Louisville case was filed by a parent whose child was denied a transfer to a kindergarten class closer to their home on the basis of race.
The original suit that gave rise to the decades-long efforts by federal judges to micromanage schools came in Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 decision addressing government-sponsored segregation in Little Rock, Ark. The problem, however, is that achieving any local board’s desired balance involves race-based remedies.
One likely outcome now is that administrators and local boards, convinced that it’s their moral obligation to expose children to “diversity,” will simply devise more subtle methods of employing race-based school assignments. While it is important for children and adults to respect people of different nationalities, races, religions and cultures, it’s not the primary business of the schools. The job of educators is to prepare children academically so that they are able to think critically and to be prepared to support themselves and their families as adults.
Schools should, of course, reflect the broad community where children live. But when those communities change, schools should be permitted to change.
If the schools are lousy, parents from the community shouldn’t be held prisoner. They should be able to take their children — and the taxpayer money — to another school, public, private or parochial.
Parents then can examine the classroom and the school, including its racial mix, and decide whether it’s achieving the results they want for their children.
Some will segregate, but that’s no different than now where constantly changing housing patterns affect the composition of schools. They may segregate black. They may segregate white. Or Hispanic. Or male. Or by religion. Or any other way that satisfies parents. Parents who believe a grade-school diversity experience is a priority, who further believe their child lacks opportunity to associate with a diverse array of other children, may choose a school on that basis.
With vouchers, children rich or poor need not be denied any of the experiences social planners strive for in creating and maintaining the perfect race-based mix in the classroom. Far too much time and energy has been devoted to the effort.
This is a tired, old debate that has no end. In about 40 school districts nationwide, with about 2.5 million students, school officials have now expanded their social engineering to employ “socio-economic status” to make certain that children of one income level are exposed to another, reports The Wall Street Journal. Income-based social engineering emerged as race-based efforts came under attack.
Give parents vouchers. Let them choose the setting they want for their children. Let parents, not strangers whose agendas are beyond challenge, be the social engineers.
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