Voucher Crusaders Sweating Bullets

["Horn, James" <jhorn@monmouth.edu>]

Tierney and the Earthquake Under the School Voucher Formation

Prometheus 6 provides a good antidote to John Tierney's desperate scrambling in the Times to salvage his Party's school privatization crusade. Since the research study was whispered out last Friday showing private schools no better than public ones, and some religious schools much worse, Tierney's has been marched out to announce a new rationale for vouchering America and crushing the public schools. No longer is school privatization about getting children out of failing schools and into better ones--it is now about saving American taxpayers money by giving a reduced amount of public dollars to private church schools to provide the same quality of education that was a national disgrace, according to the cons, when it was done in a public school.  Never mind that these discount church schools that don't require teachers but, rather, script readers, offer none of the social and psychological and media and counseling and transportation services that are essential in most communities, especially in schools with large numbers of the kinds of children with lots of melanin that Tierney would like to stuff into religious indoctrination camps.

I have just one question for Tierney: Would he send his own child to one of these 3 thousand dollar a year church schools? I think I know the answer, and I suspect it would be the same one if I were to ask him if he would send his child to one of the poverty-riddled public schools?

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Posted by Jim Horn to Schools Matter at 7/18/2006 10:34:00 AM