Some Shreveport Times journalists got a reminder of Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s
hypocrisy on education in a recent meeting with her as she cruised through the
state’s Gannett affiliates, ammunition that, in particular, Republican Gov. Bobby
Jindal might find useful should he determine her office suitable as the
next act in his political career.
To
the assembled scribes, Landrieu reiterated her criticism of Jindal’s
backing of the new voucher scholarship program, where students of lower-income
families from low performing schools are given an amount less than what the
state pays public schools to educate them to attend any willing and eligible
school of their choice, even if a non-public school. She said again that it was
too big of a part of state education reform and not accountable enough.
But at both policy and
personal levels, on this issue Landrieu speaks with forked tongue. When a
Senate candidate in 1996, she then expressed unqualified support for the
general idea that government should “Provide parents with vouchers to send
their children to any publicly funded school,” according to Project
VoteSmart’s National Political Awareness Test. But shortly after election,
she apparently had repudiated this preference, for she opposed consistently legislation
that eventually would bring such a program to the District of Columbia.
Even then, when that
program, which now almost has been strangled by Democrats, became a reality,
she hedged again, by co-sponsoring an amendment
that would apply certain strictures to the program – including proposing an
accountability program that looks close to the one Louisiana has adopted for
its version. Not that Landrieu seemed to have had a problem with this plan –
only months
ago she had favorable words for the accountability measures taken by the
state’s original voucher regime, isolated to Orleans Parish, which essentially
were extended to the plan now covering the entire state. Yet she continues to
criticize it these very similar accountability measures when writ
large to the statewide implementation.
Regardless, more telling
than her policy inconsistency is her following the familiar formula of the left
in telling the world to do as she says, not as she does. By the time she was
opposing the D.C. program she was sending her adopted son (to be followed by her
adopted daughter) to private schools in Washington. Educated herself in private
schools enabled by her family’s wealth, her considerable assets now allow her
to do the same, yet if it comes to having government provide a chance for
lower-income families to have their children escape inferior schools, she’d
just as soon pull up the ladder.
Thus, in a contemplated
2014 Senate contest she has teed up for Jindal (or other opponents, but
especially Jindal since he so openly advocated for the new program and his
children have gone to public schools) a big, fat pitch for him to hit out of
the park. He can point out her policy shifts on the issue, ask her to explain
her opposition to the program he helped ushered in that doesn’t seem really different
from what she set out as standards for one, and then query her why poorer
families being disserved by public schools should not, as she has advocated, get
the same chance to achieve as do wealthy families like hers.
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