Fighting those who hold blacks back

January 08, 2004

Armstrong Williams has an excellent column on the efforts by U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige and D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams to improve the education of our children, especially children of color in our cities.

According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "More than 70 percent of the nation's black students now attend predominantly minority public schools."

In all likelihood, too many teachers in these schools believe that these poor students - mostly of color - cannot really do much better and so they tolerate a system with incredibly low achievement rates.

We said as much in our "Urban Fatalism" post today.

While it is probably not possible to cure the fatalism that infects many urban schools, giving parents a choice renders destructive attitudes irrelevant. Williams quotes secretary Paige:

"Any efficiency expert would say the wider the choice, the better the efficiency. The same thing goes for educational systems. What motivation do public school administrators have for improvement without competition? But if parents can take their children somewhere else to learn, now administrators are going to get off their butts and make sure things are done right."

The most potent weapon of choice? Vouchers.

But there's a problem. On the one hand, we have the NAACP and the Democratic Party proclaiming their steadfast opposition to vouchers, and on the other, we have the simple fact that most black parents approve of vouchers as a mechanism of choice.

A 1999 poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that 70 percent of American blacks under the age of 35 support vouchers. For many of these families, vouchers offer the only way out of urban school systems.

"It's a disheartening situation," says Paige, who criticizes our so-called civil rights leaders - the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Eleanor Norton Holmes - for opposing school vouchers. "It's an issue of the politics being more important to them then the impact it's having on the children."

Democratic D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams has been accused of being a sellout for supporting vouchers for his city's children. He had this to say:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We've been doing the same thing over and over in terms of our approach to education in this country and we need a new approach which is geared toward increasing educational options. Why should we continue to have segregated lousy schools for the poor? People should have a choice as to where they get their education."

Yet somehow the usual suspects are able to eloquently oppose school choice, turning their backs on the very parents they are purported to champion.