{"id":6678,"date":"2006-02-22T10:11:19","date_gmt":"2006-02-22T15:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6678"},"modified":"2006-02-22T10:11:19","modified_gmt":"2006-02-22T15:11:19","slug":"tierney-vouches-for-a-bad-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/tierney-vouches-for-a-bad-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tierney ‘vouches’ for a bad policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s stuck behind an annoying pay wall, but the New York Times’ John Tierney wrote a very annoying column<\/a> about private school vouchers yesterday that warrants a little fact checking. Tierney makes two broad assertions about Milwaukee’s 15-year-old voucher program: that the system has been a sterling success and that African-American families everywhere love vouchers.<\/p>\n

…Milwaukee’s voucher program has been so successful over the past 15 years that it’s won a wide array of converts — except among the Democrats terrified of teachers’ unions. […]<\/p>\n

[Democrats] in Wisconsin and elsewhere [face] long-term problems. How long will blacks vote for a party that opposes the voucher programs they strongly favor?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s take these one at a time. First, describing Milwaukee’s voucher program as “successful” is more than a little dubious. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report<\/a> found that test results showed minimal improvements for students who transferred to publicly-subsidized private schools. Eventually, embarrassed voucher proponents didn’t like the test results — so they convinced the legislature to stop collecting the data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For that matter, the program has been rocked, repeatedly, by scandal. The system includes no accountability<\/a> for the private schools that receive tax dollars and the results have been discouraging. One school that received millions of dollars was founded by a convicted rapist. Another school reportedly entertained kids with Monopoly while cashing $330,000 in tuition checks for hundreds of no-show students. The principal of another voucher school used tax dollars to buy himself a Mercedes. Actually, he bought two.<\/p>\n

Robert Pavlik, director of the School Design and Development Center at Marquette University, a pro-voucher group, admitted that only about 30 of the 115<\/a> schools in the voucher program consistently offer a quality education.<\/p>\n

Somehow, Tierney neglected to mention these details.
\n
\nSecondly, Tierney insists that African-American families love vouchers so much, they will inevitably turn on the Democratic Party. As proof, Tierney points to … nothing in particular.<\/p>\n

This is nonsense. It’s not a tough pitch: voucher opponents believe a quality public education system will benefit everyone. Voucher proponents believe education should be privatized with a system of unaccountable private academies.<\/p>\n

Where is the overwhelming demand that Tierney sees in the African-American community? It doesn’t appear to exist. Indeed, the nation’s largest civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, all strongly oppose vouchers.<\/p>\n

But those are institutional positions, what about individuals? Well, about five years ago, California and Michigan each held statewide elections on voucher plans. If African-American families wanted vouchers, this was their chance. After the votes were tallied, however, it wasn’t even close.<\/p>\n

While all voters in California rejected the voucher plan by a 2-to-1 margin, an exit poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times showed that black voters opposed the plan by an even bigger margin — 68% to 32%.<\/p>\n

In Michigan, all voters opposed a similar statewide plan by a margin of 69% to 31%. According to an exit poll by the Detroit News, blacks statewide rejected the proposal by an even wider margin, voting it down 4 to 1. In the city of Detroit, voters rejected the scheme 72% to 28%.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there’s a historical element that Tierney doesn’t seem to recognize. Vouchers were first put in place in the United States to prop up private segregationist academies in the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling desegregating public education. White families that didn’t want their kids going to school with black kids asked the state to pay the tab for private tuition.<\/p>\n

It’s quite a legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s stuck behind an annoying pay wall, but the New York Times’ John Tierney wrote a very annoying column about private school vouchers yesterday that warrants a little fact checking. Tierney makes two broad assertions about Milwaukee’s 15-year-old voucher program: that the system has been a sterling success and that African-American families everywhere love vouchers. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}