Selling Out Our Kids For

24 Jul, 2002 by John Hawkins

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Selling Out Our Kids For Votes: Here’s a few stats from the latest Walter Williams column on school vouchers…

“School choice opponents are also dishonest when they speak of saving public schools. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 47 percent of House members and 51 percent of senators with school-age children enrolled them in private schools in 2001. Public school teachers enroll their children in private schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cities close to 50 percent. This also applies to the black elite. Jesse Jackson, for example, sent his son to Washington’s most elite private school.”

So people with the money and the people who know the schools best want their kids to go to private schools but they want to deny poor families the opportunity. Why is that? The honest answer is that the Teacher’s Unions don’t want the competition and their Democratic patrons are doing everything they can to block it. That’s despite the fact that using vouchers would create competition which would lower the costs, increase choice for parents, and would greatly improve the quality of our children’s education. It’s a shame that the Democrats care a lot more about pandering to one of their constituent groups than actually educating our children or they could get together with the Republicans and get a massive voucher program rolling by the end of the summer.