‘School Choice Is Under Attack’

Your article “N.Y. School Choice Is Under Attack in State Senate: Budget Proposal Would Block Plan to Lift Charter Schools Cap” highlights some of the interesting agendas of the parties involved in the debate [Jacob Gershman, Page 1, March 14, 2006].

All New Yorkers at present have the “choice” to send their children to whichever school they please, religious or private. In fact, New Yorkers can even choose to educate their children at home if they so desire.

What this debate is really about is the “choice” that a motivated, self-interested and well-organized block of New York parents are foisting upon those New Yorkers who either do not have children themselves or stoically pay their children’s non-public school tuition: the choice to have other New Yorkers foot the bill for their children’s schooling.

The intransigent teachers union could easily focus on this aspect of the debate and bring to light the “choice” that these parents are pushing.

Until education becomes the purview of the free market, we will have these fights, which are nothing more than how to divide a limited resource. Only in this instance, when the limited resource runs out, the government extends its long arm into the pockets of innocent taxpayers at the prodding of a devious constituency.

If you want to choose where your children are educated the choices in New York are plentiful. However, no one has the right to demand that others foot the bill.

MARK G. BRENNAN
Manhattan

‘The Folly of U.N. Justice’

While reviewing the embarrassment of the United Nations’ handling of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the editors ponder the existence and future of the U.N.-run International Criminal Court [“The Folly of U.N. Justice,” Editorial, March 13, 2006].

In what unfortunately cannot be taken as a joke, the question is asked whether the International Criminal Court – which has been active for three and half years but is yet to try its first case – is “waiting for accusations of war crimes perpetrated by an American or an Israeli to start working in earnest.”

Those days of waiting may be coming to an end. As Anne Bayefsky of the invaluable Eye On the U.N. (www.eyeontheun.org), recently noted, “On Friday, March 10, 2006 the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women – the U.N.’s highest body dealing with women’s rights – adopted only one resolution that specifically condemned the abuse of women’s rights by any of the 191 U.N. member states. That state was Israel.”

Ms. Bayefsky went on to note the deplorable condition and treatment of women in other U.N. member states, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Mali, and, of course, the Palestinians, which escaped any mention by the United Nations.

AARON SHAFER
Manhattan

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