Last week,
the Black
Alliance for Educational Options
staged a rally of parents, children, and supporters of the state’s scholarship
voucher program that allows families whose children endure underperforming
schools to be given the resources to choose an alternative provider that may
not be a government school. Due to a recent judicial decision, the funding mechanism for the program now requires a
separate appropriation, and these individuals wanted to remind legislators to
ensure continued funding.
This apparently upset state
Sen. Yvonne
Dorsey-Colomb:
“We made a big thing last year about teachers are here, not in school”
when the teachers were in Baton Rouge lobbying against vouchers, Dorsey-Colomb,
D-Baton Rouge, said.
She said the same people who were “screaming” last year brought “little
children here” wearing “Legislators You Promised” T-shirts.
“They were not in school learning something. They were here as
lobbyists,” Dorsey-Colomb said.
What she appeared to refer to happened last year
when areas of the state where existed strong union presence were able to provide
the infrastructure to have teachers from those places to get to the Capitol to
rally and testify against reform legislation, enough that these had to curtail
or even to shut down classes for that day. Then, reform supporters asked why
these teachers had abandoned their classrooms to engage in protest.
Naturally, Dorsey-Colomb raised nary a peep about that then. Nor did
she when months ago
students, parents, and teachers protested in New Orleans about decommissioning
schools that consistently performed miserably. Neither is this silence anything
new for her: for example, in 2007 she
made no public condemnation when unions encouraged so many teachers to leave
their classes in the lurch to attend a rally to wrest more salary money out of
taxpayers that classes for 120,000 students had to be cancelled. To say her
outrage is selective is an understatement.
And there’s another hypocritical aspect to her faux concern. Legislators, she among them, all the time are
receiving groups of schoolchildren to the Capitol; you can’t swing a dead cat
without hitting some legislator asking a body of committee to recognize the
presence of such groups during a regular session. They are out of school
presumably to learn about the political process. How is that any different than
this rally, except that their presence signifies support for an agenda that
Dorsey-Colomb abhors? (And it’s quite possible none of the children attending the
latest rally were even required to attend classes that day; presuming they are
already enrolled in private schools through vouchers, these schools already may
have ended their school years.)
More interesting are the reasons for Dorsey-Colomb and her ilk’s (she
and 14 others in the Senate voted
against the bill last year that made the program statewide) abhorrence of
providing choice in education to students who need it most. Certainly two of these
jump out in analysis. First, it makes special interests and their ideological
supporters less comfortable, for the program forces them to pay more attention
to education and less to acquiring power to be used to transfer the maximum of
the people’s resources to them and those they represent. In exchange, those
interests keep this ilk in positions of power.
Second, better education threatens the liberal power base. The program
improves education as a whole not only because it gets children into better
schools, but it also encourages those poor schools to improve or to be replaced
by other operators who do a better job. It seems like a win-win situation,
except for liberals because better quality education better enables people to
shed the direct income support and preferential treatment that mark their
dependency on government, a condition that is the mother’s milk of liberalism’s
power base. Liberalism exists on the fiction that American society and its
economic system are so rigged in favor of certain presumed interests connected
to wealth that only powerful, intrusive, redistributionist, and activist
government can correct the nonexistent flaws.
Better education explodes this myth, through superior learning and the
experience that extends as a result of it. For these elites that trade in this
fantasy world, a low-performing educational system helps to ensure the
existence of a sufficient pool of voters who don’t have the cognitive capacity to
be taken in by its blandishments, and that they stay trapped in an environment
of low information and low interest about the political world that makes them
more easily mobilized by these elites for their cause.
But it’s not just, or even primarily, preservation of their political
positions that drives sentiments of those like Dorsey-Colomb. There’s something
more personal to it that causes such hyperbolic rhetoric: shame and anger. BAEO
is comprised of black leaders and a large majority of children in the program
presently come from black families. Yet Dorsey-Colomb, who is black and
represents a heavily black-majority district, voted against the program and
condemned the rally participants.
What events like this do is call out her and other black legislators
who voted against the program and who may seek to defund it. The program is
there to help their constituents and many children in vulnerable situations,
yet they turn their backs on them and out special interests ahead of them. Compounding
the sentiment is some black legislators did the right thing and have supported
the program – with four of nine in the Senate and seven of 22
in the House voting for the enabling legislation – showing that they were willing
to dispense with ideological imperatives on this matter. And when something
like this rally reminds them of their shameful behavior while others had the
guts they didn’t, responses based on anger at being called out result.
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