Obama is the worst choice ever made.

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Oh Hell No,

I will drop some of my “Devil’s advocate” role and agree that there is room for error and abuse in school choice/voucher plans. What I am curious about is if you have any better ideas on how to fix the situation.
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Light,

You won’t want to hear it, but I don’t find the system to be broken. I think that education is SO important that it should not be watered down by TRYING to make everyone’s exposure to it equal.

MY kids come first, period. It’s called genetic self-preservation. Most liberals don’t understand this concept, but I do. I want MY kids to be the smarter and more educated than the next guys kids. Becuase MY kid being smarter than YOUR kid means MY kid should be more successful than YOURS. Hopefully in their success, they will remember Dear Old Dad and the sacrifices he made and will take care of him in his old age. YOUR kids won’t be there for ME in my old age. Get it yet? I’m sure you are nice guy and I enjoy this debate, but The Game of Life is a competition. I don’t want to give anyone (no offense) a head start over me and mine.

Education can only progress at the speed of the least common denominator. Disapline first, learning second. Why should the under class be forced in to the middle class’s schools? Why shouldn’t all of us be forced into Obama’s kid’s school?? Do you see the slippery slope yet? Why does the buck stop at me? I know why bec the ELitES make the rules. I am their buffer against the underclasses. Fine, but where is my buffer? Shelling out extra to send my kids to private schools is my Alamo. Once the under class breach those gates, and ruin my schools too, I minus well join them and then the elites won’t have a buffer anymore. The more liberal members (Ayers, Obama, et al) won’t realize this untill it’s too late. At which point the complete ghettoization (and ruination) of this country will be complete.

SV are an attempt to fix a system that is not broken. If underclass children really wanted to learn they would regardless of peer pressure, parents lack of interest, etc. Pro-SVers try to claimit that NO ONE can learn in the under class schools. That is not true. Some kids do make it. Besides with all the affimative action support any kid that makes his way out already wrote his own ticket to the top.

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Oh Hell No,

I will drop some of my “Devil’s advocate” role and agree that there is room for error and abuse in school choice/voucher plans. What I am curious about is if you have any better ideas on how to fix the situation. It is all well and good to expose weaknesses in proposed changes, but we should not lose sight of the fact that education in America is seriously broken. If making schools accountable for crappy standards through “student flight” will not work, then what will? The problems in our educational system both reflect and amplify wider problems in society. I am not in favor of doing something just to do something, but I am definitely not in favor of throwing my hands up and going, “Oh Well! Nothing we can do about it!”

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Light,

My reference to Evanston was not a apples to apples. It just highlights an indisputable real world example of the breaking down of the middle class social stucture. The best part of the story was that it aired on NPR. They, like the liberal tax payers of that twon, were dumb founded and confused as to how this could happen to their utopian attempts of equity.

The main problem with your description of S.V.’s is the claim that they will only be used to get struggling families over the hump to that Shangri-la private school on the other side of town. For some reason you do not address the slippery slope problem of who is gets the help and who does not? What what will be the threshold of worthiness? Some people will get turned away. Those people will claim discrimination. Please tell me.

Let me bring it back to Evanston and Sect 8. Sect 8 and its predecessors were originally designed to assist military people comming home from WWII. Now look were it has denigrated to. It morphed into some grotesque form of entitlements / repriations for the under class who are numerous generations removed from the past wrongs. Private school vouchers have nowhere to go but to follow the same gold lined road of good intentions right into the abyss of failed policies. That is why I am against them.

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@Oh Hell No

I certainly understand your concerns about letting a flood of thugs swarm from good school to good school leaving a trail of disruption and destruction behind them. I also agree with you completely about parent participation being key to education. I would like to point out a discrepancy in your Evanston example though.

In your own words, Evanston brought the section 8 housing into the school district. It was a public school, the students were living inside the district. So the parents living in the section 8 housing used the easiest available option. They sent their kids to the local, free, public school. Evanston intentionally imported poor students, the poor students did not jump any hurdles just to invade that school. As far as I know, no school choice/voucher plans include letting students jump from district to district without residency.

School vouchers will not completely cover the expense of most private schools. It is designed to make the cost within the reach of more people, not just a blank check for whatever amount the school tuition might be. Also, it is a tax break (at least the last plan I saw was), so only people working hard enough to be able to properly use such a tax break would have any reason to use it. If they are content sitting around collecting welfare or selling drugs or whatever, a tax break has no meaning to them. Employed parents, intelligent enough to be able to make use of a tax break, and dedicated enough to jump through whatever bureaucratic hoops it will take to get the voucher, do not sound like the types of parents who would fit your description of “I don’t give a Flip!”.

As for the “school choice” part of most voucher plans. Yes, higher rated public schools would probably see increases of borderline or poor students. But I still have faith that parents who are truly worthless and lazy as it regards their children’s education will in large part be too lazy to bother with any more effort than going with the status quo.

I make no claims that School Choice and/or School Vouchers will magically separate the wheat from the chaff and solve all our education problems. But when compared to leaving the system as it stands, it would have to completely implode to do a worse job.

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Having had seven nieces and nephews, a son and grandson attending private schools, from our experience with private education, I see it a bit differently. All of the five private schools my family members attended demanded parent participation, that students adhere to a very strict code of conduct, participated in class and did the work assigned. Failure of both parents and students to meet their requirements resulted in expulsion.

All of these schools held annual fundraisors to pay tuition for families that couldn’t afford to send their children to these particular private schools. Private schools all over this city operate in the same manner. Vouchers would provide access for more students to escape bad public schools.

I spent many years tutoring and doing volunteer work in our public school system, I witnessed the deterioration of the system due to lack of discipline on both ends, parents and teachers. I don’t blame the teachers, their hands were tied. In the high schools, the students just ignored them, came to class if they felt like it, stood out in the halls swearing and banging on lockers while students in the classroom were trying to learn. Police officers assigned to each floor only got involved when there was a fight. It was a mad house not an institution of learning.

In our neighborhood elementary school, a small group of students made a habit of threatening teachers, one female teacher was punched in the face by a student that was as tall as she was. His punishment? He had to sit in the office for the rest of the afternoon. A fourth grader stole car keys from a teacher, went joy riding through our neighborhood, the teacher was punished, the kid? nothing.

You think other students don’t fear what’s going on in their schools? Is it right to lock them into a system that can’t or won’t provide for their safety or classrooms free of distraction while they try to learn? Shoot, I never let the kids have television or a radio on during homework time and they certainly didn’t have to fear anyone under our roof.

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@Oh Hell No,

Well, if the school vouchers came with government mandated open enrollment standards for all private schools, I could see your point. The last time I read about school voucher plans, there was no mention of demanding that any schools lower their standards, only vouchers to help parents afford them if their child could gain entrance.
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Light,

There is no entrance critieria execpt for being able to pay the bill. I’m talking about private religious middle class type schools. Not Obama’s kid’s school (we know THAT school’s entrance critieria–and it is not something a voucher can help with). In my world if you can pay the bill you can go. Vouchers are slippery slopes. If money is the only critieria, and free money is given out and anti-discrimination rules apply then then the flood gates will be blown open. No one can hand pick the deserving out of the under class. That would be descriminatory. The a-hole class falsly believe the school provides education. The truth is a family structure that promotes learning, responsibility and respect provides the education. There is no magic pixie dust in Obama’s kid’s school. Obama will demand excellence and the school will respond.

Do some research. Look into Evanston, IL public HS. Evanston is a very liberal town. To promote die-versity, they opened their town up to an increase in Section 8 housing vouchers. The children of those welfare recipients chose to use the free to them high ranking public HS, which was once tops in the state. The Sect 8 kids did not get smarter the school got dumber. Now their numbers are falling like a rock and the school lowers their testing standards to try to get the Sect 8 kids to make the grade. But they still can’t. Evanston had town hall meetings with their tax payers to try to figure out why their school is going to sh-t, and their liberal blinders are getting the way. They still don’t get it. Harvard won’t care if your school is die-verse but crappy, they will only care that its ranking tanked………….

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Larry you are in for a big deception! Obama moving to the right? You got to be kidding!

You have been too long in college with leftist teachers. Obama wants to kill capitalism in the States; this is his goal and all of his associates. He wants to install communism… you will see. I hope you will at least recognise that you have been fooled by this born manipulator when he will reach his goal.

How will he do this? He will start by destroying the economy, pretending he is trying to fix it. Example: His will bail out the automobile industries and other stupid things like that. When the country will be in a very severe depression, he will change this country to communism, it will be very easy. But I hope that he will be stopped before he is sworn in. I hope they will get his Kenya birth certificate and kick him out of the country.

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@Larry Weisenthal:

“Obama isn’t going to get a free ride with the media.”

Larry – I really don’t know how you can say this and be serious. The mass media *has* to continue giving Obama a free ride, otherwise his house of cards comes tumbling down. There is so much dirt on Obama — his background, his communist, racist, socialist, corrupt, terrorist friends, his campaign fraud, his voter registration fraud, his voter fraud, his lies about lobbyists, his lies/flip-flopping about pretty much every issue during his campaign — that the mass media has no choice but to cover his @ss for the next 4 years in order to guarantee his re-election. And you and I and everyone else known damn well that the goal of the mass media — now that they have succeeded in their first goal of getting him elected — is to make sure he is re-elected. And the only way they can guarantee that is to cover for him and give him a free ride for the next 4 years until November 2012.

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It’s an entirely legitimate criticism. I’m personally in favor of school vouchers. And Obama is being hypocritical.

Why would Obama be against vouchers in the campaign? Well, being in favor would cost him votes with the teachers’ unions. So he was being a politician.

Why did John McCain flip flop on his prior criticism of the Bush tax cuts and switch from favoring comprehensive immigration reform including a “path to citizenship” in favor of a “secure the borders first” policy? He was being a politician.

That’s what politicians do. They do stuff like that to get elected.

And you guys are shocked… SHOCKED!

I look for Obama to have some sort of epiphany and shift his position on this, just like he’s moving to the Right on everything else.

Anyway, I notice also that no one gave the supposedly pro-Obama, “liberal” Washington Post any credit for editorializing against the obvious hypocrisy.

Obama isn’t going to get a free ride with the media. But he’s also going to continue to shift his positions until he’s locked up the leftward 65% of the electorate and marginalized the GOP on the Right. Because he’s a very skilled politician that his critics should not underestimate.

You guys are opposing him on principle. He’s changing positions out of pragmatism. The more Clinton moved to the Right, the more he was hated by the Right for usurping their turf. I think that you guys would have less contempt for Obama were he to govern as the “socialist” which you proclaim him to be than you’ll certainly have if he adopts more and more positions consistent with your own points of view and claims them as his own.

I think this voucher issue is a great canary in the coal mine, which will show exactly what this guy is trying to do.

- Larry Weisenthal

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