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ARLINGTON--When they deliver
Should government discriminate in its efforts to make hurricane victims whole again?
Apparently, the National Education Association, the 2.7-million-member teachers union, and its political allies believe the answer is "yes."
NEA president Reg Weaver panned President Bush's stated intention of including private-school families in an education recovery plan following Hurricane Katrina. Details of how the assistance would be delivered to public and private schools remain to be worked out.
Although Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings emphasized this would be a strictly a one-year relief program targeted to "an unprecedented situation," Weaver labeled it a "flawed and divisive" voucher plan that would "undermine public education."
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, sided with the NEA. Media General News Service quoted him as praising aid to public schools but condemning any monetary assistance for families paying private-school tuition.
"This is not the time for a partisan political debate on vouchers," Kennedy asserted in a statement. But it's fair to ask which side is politicizing the issue of equitable restoration of educational services.
Organizations such as People for the American Way and the American Association of University Women echoed the NEA in calling for relief efforts to include public schools only--a policy that effectively would exclude thousands of private and parochial school students from help unless they switched to government-controlled education.
Do the NEA officials and their fellow apologists and lobbyists for Big Education care about the needs and preferences of displaced families as they seek the best possible schooling for their children?
In the four Louisiana parishes most severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, 32 percent of all K-12 students (61,000 out of 187,000) were attending private schools--a figure far exceeding the 11 percent private-school enrollment nationally.
As they pick up the pieces of their lives, many displaced families already are choosing private schools, where they can find them, according to U.S. Department of Education officials.
The effect of Congress enacting an exclusionary policy pushed by the NEA would be to force thousands of these families into public schools, no matter how crowded they might be or how ill-suited their curricula might be for particular students.
That would serve to make the education monopoly (of which the NEA is a major part) more formidable, but it is questionable how such a stance would help children.
Congress has acted on a bipartisan basis in recent years to approve tax-break initiatives such as Education Savings Accounts that help families choose either public or private schools. Why should compulsion now be preferable to choice as the official policy for families who have had so much sorrow and suffering visited upon them by one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history?
ROBERT HOLLAND is a policy analyst for the Lexington Institute.
