Velociworld

More on Vouchers

I realize I'm in the minority of conservatives who don't believe in school vouchers, but I don't care. I still think they're a bad idea. I'm going to be brutally frank here (if I were a professional wrestler, I'd go by the handle Brutally Frank. I think it has a nice literate savagery to it): most conservatives are not in favor of vouchers because they care about the poor little undereducated inner city kids. If they did, they would sponsor some, and put them in private school with their kids. I'm not saying conservatives are racist, either. I don't think they are. I just think they're being disingenuous here.

The real reason they want to institute vouchers is because they want to deliver a swift hard kick in the gonads to the NEA (and yes, for the record, women have gonads, too, but you'd have to kick them really hard to get to them).

I'm not saying this isn't a worthy goal, or pasttime, but it's not worth getting in bed with Beelzebub to accomplish it. Vouchers take the war to the outside, so to speak, when it should be fought on the NEA's home turf (my, don't we reactionaries love all this talk about War? If I keep it up my hand will be going to War with my particular friend Johnson shortly).

Change must come from within, or advocates of public school reform will forever fight a retrograde action. You cannot give ground, you must take it, incrementally, obviously, but moving forward. I learned this from Sun Tzu's brilliant polemic The Seven Habits of Hightly Effective Warlords.

For alternate viewpoints, Jonathan Adler at NRO links to a paper by Caroline Minter Hoxley, which Adler found at Harry Brihouse's blog. The gist of the Hoxley paper, which I have not read in its entirety, is that public school test scores went up during the fight over vouchers in the Milwaukee school districts in the late '90's. Adler even headlined his post VOUCHERS IMPROVE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. I don't know if I'd go that far, having no firm understanding of the causalities involved, but I'll render an opinion shortly. My initial reaction is the improvements could be the result of external programs already in place. If indeed there was a concerted and concerned effort on the part of public school administrators to improve scores in a hurry to stave off impending vouchers, which I don't think has been proven, that would speak volumes about the administrators, none of it complimentary.