School choice is passing the test
from The Washington Times
Hearing teachers unions complain about extending school choice to
American families is nothing new. They have been spreading
misinformation about efforts to break up their monopoly on education for
years. With millions of students going back to school, we can,
unfortunately, expect them to turn up the volume.
Yet every year,
the unions’ grip on power loosens. Scholarships, education savings
accounts, vouchers and other reform efforts keep proliferating. Worse,
from the unions’ point of view, school choice keeps growing in
popularity among parents and students. Forty-four percent of Americans
now favor allowing students the option of attending private schools at
public expense. That is up 10 percentage points from last year.
Small wonder that the Louisiana Association of Educators
threatened last month to sue private parochial schools in the state
that plan to accept voucher students this fall, or that the
union-supported Obama administration has supported a plan to give federally issued paychecks directly to local teachers. Desperation must be setting in.
The
calls for more taxpayer money persist despite the huge increases in
federal education spending over the past decade. President Obama’s
fiscal 2013 budget request included another major increase for the Department of Education — 2.5 percent more than last year — to nearly $70 billion.
We’re
now spending an average of $11,400 per student, a record amount. Yet
test scores and other measurements of academic achievement continue to
lag.
Given this state of affairs, we should be glad school choice is on the rise. Among the promising signs we see:
New
Hampshire is one of 11 states to offer scholarships for underprivileged
students to attend private schools. Parents unhappy with their local
public schools have a choice. They can do something to get their
children into schools they feel would better meet their needs.
Businesses and individuals who donate to private-school scholarship
funds receive sizable tax credits. The scholarships average $2,500 for
students whose families earn up to 300 percent of the federal poverty
level.
South Carolina has a tuition tax-credit program that lets
children attend schools that are right for them. Who is eligible for the
tax credit? Anyone who donates to the privately funded scholarships
that have been set up for low-income and special-needs students. The
program gives tax deductions of up to $4,000 to families to help cover
the cost of sending their children to private schools, $2,000 for home
schooling and $1,000 to help with expenses related to sending their
children to out-of-district public schools.
North Carolina is home
to an elementary school that has used online learning to move from the
middle of the pack on student achievement into a tie for second place on
state tests. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Juan Williams
explains how:
“All of their textbooks, notes, learning materials
and assignments are computerized, allowing teachers and parents to track
their progress in real time. If a student is struggling, their
computer-learning program can be adjusted to meet their needs and get
them back up to speed. And the best students no longer wait on slow
students to catch up. Top students are constantly pushed to their limits
by new curricular material on their laptops.”
Home schooling.
Heritage Foundation education analyst Lindsey Burke says it may be the
fastest-growing form of education in the United States, rivaled only by
charter schools. Data from the U.S. Department of Education
show a 74 percent increase in home schooling since 1999 alone, with
approximately 1.5 million children (2.9 percent of school-age children)
being home-schooled in 2007. The numbers have only grown since then.
Some analysts place the number of home-schooled children at more than 2
million.
These and other encouraging trends suggest that the
status quo in education won’t necessarily remain the status quo much
longer. The trend is flowing away from government control — and toward
parental control.
“Parents are the first and the most important
educators of their own children,” Pope John Paul II once said. “They
also possess a fundamental competence in this area; they are educators
because they are parents.” They, not Washington, are the ones who should
be directing education. The more our education policy reflects this
truth, the better off our children will be.
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