President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden greet a group of teachers, veterans, first responders, and business owners in the Roosevelt Room of the White House before making a statement on the American Jobs Act, Sept. 12, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Is there any public issue that more clearly defines this coming presidential election than the future of education in big urban school systems across the U.S.? As Daniel Henninger in the WSJ asserts: “It is indisputable that black lives matter.”
… the black lives most at risk are the young men and women living in the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods, attending the worst-performing public schools in the U.S. (This includes many Hispanic children, but for the past months they’ve fallen out of the conversation, if not their neighborhoods.)
Defund Public Schools
Instead of throwing rocks at the cops, protesters should be hurling outrage at these incompetent inner-city public schools, suggests Mr. Henninger.
Reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress have documented this urban failure for years. For most of the press, the problem barely exists as a subject anymore.
The Democratic Party has laid out its road map for schools in the Biden/Sanders Unity Task Force, which proposes both to reinforce the public-school status quo and suppress its competition from charter schools and private schools, continues Mr. Henninger.
Unity Task Force’s Criteria for Charter Schools
“We have learned that there must be guardrails on them if they are to receive federal funds.”
That’s a terrible abuse of “guardrails.” They don’t want guardrails for charters. They want roadblocks.
Among the most popular and successful programs is the District of Columbia’s scholarship program, which began with federal funding in 2003, notes the WSJ’s Editorial Board in a 24 July column.
Black parents love it. The Trump administration supports it. The Biden-Sanders schools recommendations would eliminate it. Years of Democratic opposition to this program, including by President Obama, is quite simply a disgrace.
Eliminate D.C. Scholarships
“It takes a special political animus to kill scholarships for poor minorities while proposing literally trillions of dollars in new spending on countless other programs,” notes the Editorial Board in a 24 July column.
There’s no moral or fiscal justification for killing the scholarships. Either Mr. Biden doesn’t realize this is in his platform, or he’s decided he must sacrifice the children to the demands of the teachers unions and the political left.
This is a scandal in plain sight.
As Mr. Henninger laments, read the Biden/Sanders Unity Task Force proposals. “For kids in the inner cities, it will not get better.”
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