SCHOOL CHOICE
The following appeared in the Waterbury Republican on July 7, 2008
Lieberman standing strong on school choice
Op Ed By Thomas P. Durso of Watertown
Tom writes on political and economic issues
Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., is not referred to often as a freedom
fighter even though he did help with civil-rights battles in the South during
the early 1960s. Today, Lieberman has joined in another civil-rights issue: the
right of Washington, D.C., children to a decent K-12 education as
the children of most members of Congress and presidents provide for their own
children.
The four-year-old Opportunity Scholarship
Program, which provides $7,500 vouchers to more than 2,000 D.C. children to
attend the private school of their choice, is up for renewal. Lieberman has
written D.C.'s delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Rep. Jose E. Serrano,
chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee, pleading they do nothing to
"adversely alter the OSP authorizing language at this time."
When former Education Secretary Rod Paige called the largest teachers union,
the National Education Association, a "terrorist organization," he
didn't mean it in the sense of al-Qaida or Hezbollah. Paige was referring to
the union's campaign to kill the Opportunity
Scholarship Program. Leading the charge in urging House appropriators to
eliminate funding for the program is Del.
Holmes Norton, whose two children attended non-public schools.
In published articles and Senate floor speeches, Lieberman has been calling for
voucher experiments for almost 20 years. Unfortunately, he was rather quiet on
the topic when Congress was controlled by the pro-school-choice Republican
Party under President Bush. Regrettably, Lieberman chose not to stand up to the
government education establishment as courageously as when he withstood the
withering attacks for supporting the war against Islamofascism.
However, Sally Sachar and Byron Davis of the Opportunity Scholarship Program told me Lieberman has
been a reliable and forceful ally in the war against the D.C. government's K-12
monopoly. Today, 21 states and cities allow some form of K-12 school choice.
According to the Friedman Foundation (www.friedmanfoundation.org), Florida's McKay voucher
program for disabled students ranks highest because of
minimal restrictions and generous funding for participating schools.
Other school-choice programs provide for tax credits and deductions for parents
who send their children to private or parochial schools.
The Friedman Foundation has published its Grading
School Choice: Evaluating School Choice Programs by the Friedman Standard,
which is school choice for all, not just for some.
Lieberman spokesmen have told me the senator supports school choice, but
observers know he must act within Democratic political realities. A few years
ago, Lieberman's former press secretary Dan Gerstein, writing in The Wall
Street Journal, flatly warned his Democratic Party to dump its association with
the teachers unions because of the political liability with the nation's taxpayers
and voters.
Eventually, Connecticut's
inner-city parents will awaken and demand their children's liberation from the
one-size-fits-all government-school monopoly. One has to wonder how our urban
state lawmakers face their trapped constituents knowing they are complicit in
keeping them on the government-school plantation while the school-choice
movement slowly but inexorably grows in other states.
I disagree with Lieberman on his big-government solutions to many of the
nation's economic problems, including his support of extreme measures to combat
supposed man-made global warming and his resistance to drilling for oil and
natural gas under our own continent.
But his defense of Washington's
children in the face of the powerful government education empire warrants the I, for independent, after his name.
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Lieberman Appeals to Delegate,
Appropriators to Protect Opportunity
Scholarship Program http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=299156
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Note from FCTO:
Tom Durso is also the Treasurer of
FCTO.
The following web links will take you to additional reports
on School Choice:
http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/friedman/research/ShowFilteredResearch.do?method=date
http://www.schoolchoices.org/
http://www.edreform.com/index.cfm?fuseAction=section&pSectionID=14&cSectionID=37
http://www.allianceforschoolchoice.org/New/index.html
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