I was recently informed that the DC School Choice program is quite close to being “not reauthorized”, which in effect will cancel it and send 1,700 students who have benefited from it back to public schools.
You can learn more about the program in this NY Times article.
You can watch the students appealing for the program to be saved:
From someone well-acquainted with the program:
It is little known that the House has “snuck” a measure to end the DC voucher system into a spending bill. This measure requires the “reauthorization” of the program, which will never pass with the current makeup of our Congress.
We believe that parents have the right to educate their children as they see fit, and for countless people living in poverty, Catholic schools represent the best way for their children to receive a quality education. In fact, there is empirical evidence of the “Catholic school advantage,” where Catholic schools consistently educate the poor better than our public schools. Even controlling for the fact that many might assume a parent sending a child to a Catholic school might have an added interest in their education and will help them excel, even controlled for this, kids do better in Catholic schools. And these schools are closing at an alarming rate….If the DC system fails, it is a huge blow to the many school choice campaigns throughout the country.
Additionally, the average cost of educating a child in public schools is $18,000 a year (much of that due to administrative overhead in the bureaucracy). Catholic schools are so much more efficient in their use of money, they save the federal and local governments an estimated $20 BILLION a year! Moreover, Catholic schools produce better citizens, also empirically documented, and in a country concerned with volunteer service, voting, participation in government, etc, we owe a huge debt to these schools. Holy Redeemer School, in the shadow of the Capitol Building, will close in 2010 if the voucher program is ended.
I support giving opportunities to children who otherwise are put in very poor schools. As an electrical engineering major, I took an honors Sociology of Education class in college, which really opened up my eyes (even as an atheist as I was at the time) to the horrendous inequalities in schools in rich versus poor areas. It is certainly a self-reinforcing system, one in which I benefited from by getting to go to good schools.
I have many close relations and friends who are or were public school teachers. All of them work harder than I do, for not-that-great pay, and really love their students (even the ones that are stinker-pots). This is not an indictment of their hard work and dedication but rather a question of whether the tax-payer funded public school system should have a hegemony over where students can go to school. Currently the only way to have your choice of schools is to be wealthy enough to pay the thousands in public school taxes and then on top of that the thousands for private school (parochial or secular). This program offers a solution for students whose parents are not wealthy.
One program at Notre Dame is involved in this program:
The Alliance for Catholic Education at Notre Dame is pushing hard for the retention of vouchers. For 15 years, they have had a M.Ed. for teachers who simultaneously serve two years in under-resourced Catholic schools. For 8 years, they’ve been preparing administrators for Catholic schools with their M.A. in Educational Administration. Each year, they prepare more teachers and administrators for Catholic schools than any other program in the country. They also have initiatives in many other areas, including doing consulting work for Catholic schools, an English as a New Language certification, partnering with schools in their Magnificat program, and they’re starting into school choice now. They stay on the front of all the political issues, and their founder, Fr. Tim Scully, CSC, was invited to the White House last year to attend a symposium on faith-based schools. Obviously, they had a sympathetic president in the White House before, and now, one who claims he will support faith-based initiatives, but has yet to prove it. Their website: http://ace.nd.edu.
I have done my best to keep this post positive during Lent, though it did by needs involve revealing the facts that this program is being quietly killed by our country’s current administration.
