DOJ
has asked that courts that have any jurisdiction over desegregation orders
concerning Louisiana school districts to have the power to approve or deny actions
regarding the state’s voucher program. This program allows for students from
low-income families attending average to failing schools, with preference given
to students attending failing schools, to have the state pay tuition up to a
certain amount for them to attend other, mainly private, schools at their
request contingent on availability of slots. Such underperforming schools exist
in at least 22 of the 34 districts under these orders, where the federal
government wants courts to be able to halt families’ access to voucher use if
this would have the effect of increasing the proportion of the majority race at
that school.
Understanding the stupidity of this policy begins at the very reason why
courts intervened in these instances: because there had been a history of
racial discrimination in them, as evidenced by the presence of nearly or
entirely all-white or all-black schools in them with rules specifically
creating this. That is, policy-makers made a conscious decision to create these
mono-racial schools because they intended to put black children into inferior
schools, that even if these schools were not inferior inherently this
discriminated, and that the presence of such schools in such districts today
presumes, without exculpatory evidence, that this intentional discrimination
continues. These practices are considered odious because they shortchange black
children’s educational opportunities, and therefore life prospects.
Applying this worldview in isolation to the voucher policy, this means
if in a majority black, underperforming school disproportionately low-income
whites use the voucher program – even if far more black children in absolute numbers
at that school also do so – then this has the effect of increasing the
percentage of blacks in the school. Accordingly, this can be used to show
discriminatory intent, and a court could block this on that basis.
Using Ouachita Parish as an example, which is one of the largest
districts affected by this request, its Robinson
Elementary in Monroe is graded D, meaning its students would be eligible,
pending availability, for the program, and a number would be with 96.9 percent
of them eligible for the Title 1 free-reduced lunch program. The school’s
racial breakdown of its roughly 480 students is 2.1 percent white, 97.9 percent
black. Let’s say 40 students from it were able to secure vouchers to Monroe’s Catholic
elementary school Our Lady of Fatima, 36 black and four white (keeping with the
state statistic that 91 percent of all voucher users are black children), and
attendance remained the same. That means its ratio would change to 1.4 percent
white, 98.6 percent black.
For this, according to DOJ a court could declare the entire district in
violation, because the voucher program had the effect of increasing the
proportion of black children at the school to become even higher. Never mind
that disproportionately (nine times the
number of) black children than white ones would benefit from a program designed
to improve their educational chances. Never mind that the choice was not made by
the district to increase this proportion, but by the separate and entirely
voluntary decisions mostly of black families.
Yet there are those who would be itching to call this a resegregation
of schools, despite the fact that it achieves the opposite of segregation’s
goal to put black children in an inferior learning environment and that
policy-makers, through drawing of district boundaries or other intrusive
practices, had no chance even to express intentional segregation as it was voluntary
choices made by families only that brought this about. Think about the
fantastic nature of what passes as cognition behind the equation they impute
here – more black children given a better chance to succeed equals racist punishing
of black children generally.
And there’s deep irony in all of this, for one motivation decades ago
when desegregation began to roll across the state in white families sending
children to private schools was to avoid desegregated public schools. Yet because
of the very high proportion of black students among voucher users, this
actually has the effect of increasing minority populations generally at private
schools, which typically have few minority students. Yet now DOJ wants to
increase the possibility that this doesn’t happen.
But to many liberals, DOJ’s stance is perfectly reasonable, because their
agenda has nothing to do with helping the individual and everything to do with
using the individual to further their own aims. It’s more important to them to
maintain the Soviet-style monopoly model of education than to facilitate choice and
competition because their model unchallenged makes it easier to mold
individuals they can control and to maximize control of resources by government
by continuing to pump taxpayer dollars into schools no matter how poorly they
do. That’s how they can withstand the cognitive dissonance produced by the Alice-in-Wonderland
assertion now propagated by DOJ that better educational opportunities are
racist.
While that view may be good enough for the ideologues, those who can
think for themselves understand that when one child has a better chance to
learn, all children are better off. Maybe the adults who were failing them won’t
be when they find their subsidies cut on the basis of their poor performances,
but society as a whole will be. And free thinkers refuse to go along with the
face absurdity proponents hope that courts essentially would adopt, that greater
school choice is by definition racist.
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