Kennedy vs. the Children
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Senator Kennedy has been on the offensive for the past week, attacking one element of the president’s reconstruction program after another. His latest cause is education. The president has proposed offering displaced students vouchers that they can use at any school, even religious institutions. Mr. Kennedy decries the proposal as blatantly ideological. “This,” the senator opines, “is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers.” But the question is, why not? The fact is that the old public education monopoly wasn’t working for the children of New Orleans. And if it takes a hurricane to blow the facade off the public monopoly, so be it. One of the few silver linings to the Katrina is that it represents an opportunity to start anew.
Before Katrina, public education in the Big Easy was a shambles. Run by a dysfunctional school board and a string of four superintendents in as many years, leaders had only recently discovered a $25 million hole in the budget and brought in private consultants. Test scores were in the basement. It’s not a leap to believe that abysmal public education was one of the many factors perpetuating the extreme poverty laid bare by Katrina’s floodwaters. Mr. Bush proposes giving students trapped in New Orleans schools a way out. His proposal sends the message that displaced students shouldn’t be subject to the luck of the draw in respect of how their new communities will educate them. They should be able to take charge of their own fates.
Mr. Kennedy is resisting any change, a tack that is objectionable on two fronts. His particular insistence on cutting off religious-school students from any voucher benefit has already stirred legitimate protest from religious parents and groups, as The New York Sun’s Meghan Clyne reports this morning. More broadly, Mr. Kennedy’s closed-mindedness is exactly what the Gulf Coast doesn’t need. The monopoly public schools and housing projects and welfare checks that have been the norm failed manifestly to solve the problems plaguing New Orleans. In proposing ownership- and entrepreneurship-based rebuilding programs, including vouchers that allow students to take “ownership” of their own education, the president has recognized this. If Democrats are going to oppose him, let them at least come up with some ideas of their own.
