As public schools nationwide face larger class sizes and cuts in programs, the Senate’s leading Democrat on education issues proposed a $23 billion bailout Wednesday to help avert layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and other school personnel in the coming academic year.
[…]Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that school layoffs could total from 100,000 to 300,000 unless Congress acts.
“It is brutal out there, really scary,” Duncan told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is a real emergency. What we’re trying to avert is an education catastrophe.”
Duncan stopped just short of endorsing Harkin’s bill. But he said efforts to improve schools will suffer if class sizes rise, summer school is cut and other programs are jettisoned.
Harkin, chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s panel on education and of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said time is running out because states are starting to issue layoff notices. “We must act soon,” he said. “This is not something we can fix in August. We have to fix it now.”
[…]Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said he worried about where the government would find $23 billion for a bailout in a time of growing federal budget deficits. “I wonder from whose schoolchildren we are going to borrow this money, because we have a looming debt crisis in this country and we’ll need to debate this,” he said. “We all want to help our children and our schools, but that is a deep concern.”
A fitting follow-up to today’s earlier education policy post. This is why you don’t put silver spoon liberals in charge of the country – they just keep spending and spending to bail out their greedy special interest groups.
Let’s start with a personal experience from one of the 200 low-income households affected.
Put yourself in the shoes of LaTasha Bennett. A single mother living in Washington, D.C., Ms. Bennett is able to send her child to a private school thanks to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Hoping to enroll her daughter in the same private school, Ms. Bennett applied for and recently received a voucher from the Washington Scholarship Fund.
But last week, Ms. Bennett and hundreds of other D.C. parents received a form letter from the U.S. Department of Education informing them that their children wouldn’t be receiving a scholarship.
The data is in. School choice works. And it significantly lower costs. Opportunity Scholarships offered through the program are worth $7,500. Since the participating private schools cannot charge scholarship students more than the amount of their scholarships, that amount is still less than half of the $15,315 that D.C. taxpayers spent per pupil in the 2004–05 school year.
And what about the educations of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan?
Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.
…
Mr. Duncan’s office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You’d think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program.
When I had the chance to ask Duncan — at a meeting of the Denver Post editorial board on Tuesday — whether he was alerted to this study before Congress eradicated the D.C. program, he offered an unequivocal “no.” He then called the WSJ editorial “fundamentally dishonest” and maintained that no one had even tried to contact him, despite the newspaper’s contention that it did, repeatedly.
When I called the Wall Street Journal, I discovered a different — that is, meticulously sourced and exceedingly convincing — story, including documented e-mail conversations between the author and higher-ups in Duncan’s office. The voucher study — which showed progress compounding yearly — had been around since November and its existence is mandated by law. So at best, Duncan was willfully ignorant.
And why are we surprised? Teacher’s unions funded Obama’s election campaign, not children and parents. The purpose of schools, according to socialists, is to indoctrinate the youth with socialism, moral relativism, secularism, and the religion of global warming. The purpose of schools is not to provide them with an education, so that they can get a job and avoid dependence on the government!
Further study
The Heartland Institute’s series of podcasts on vouchers and school choice.
WINTERY KNIGHT 