While the country watches the Super Bowl, I sit here on a Sunday evening confused and saddened by the state of education in America.
A 22 year-old Rhodes Scholar nominee with impressive credentials was turned down for a teaching job in Atlanta because he would “serve as an unrealistic expectation as to what high school students could strive to achieve or become”, wrote the principal.
Taking the story at face value would lead you to believe the principal is crazy. Read it skeptically and you could conclude that Marquis Harris left out important details. Is it true? Was it something in particular about Harris that the interviewers didn’t like and this was just an excuse?
Or does the bureaucrat of a principal really believe that excellence and achievement are “unrealistic expectations” for black students (I assume the high school in question is predominately black)? If true, parents should be outraged!
I was dismayed to read the lead to this story in the Washington Post:
Hundreds of children in the District will be able to attend private schools at taxpayer expense beginning this fall under a plan approved by the Senate yesterday. [My emphasis mine]
Taxpayers in D.C. already support an inept government-run school system that appears consistently at the bottom of the list on standardized test results and a red tape-infested city government. But the Washington Post spins the lead of a story on what is actually exceedingly good news to give the gullible reader the impression that the voucher plan is a useless waste of his money.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. At least I can read, which is more than you can say for some of the kids in the District of Columbia Public Schools. My friend Casey Lartigue, an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute, compares liberal politicians to slave owners:
Voucher opponents fear the test of allowing citizens to choose for themselves if they want to remain in D.C. public schools. When people complain that the schools will be “robbed” by children being able to go to private schools, what they are saying is that, given a choice, parents would prefer that their children be educated elsewhere and that they should be forced to remain where they are. As much as slave owners bragged that slaves enjoyed their lives, the “man-stealers” were not willing to test that devotion by giving them the choice to leave.
Slave owners prevented slaves from learning to read. Why? Because education is and will always be a key to freedom and success. It’s not an exaggeration to compare bureaucratic pencil-pushers like the District’s non-voting delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ted Kennedy to slave owners. I do it all the time. And I mean it.
