Liberals tend to want to educate their own children, preferably in the best private schools. YOUR children are another story.
George Will’s column today reports on the educational plight of Octavia Lopez, 17, who was in a failing school until a school-choice program, enacted under Governor Bush, allowed her to attend Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School. The Florida Supreme Court (remember them?) has ruled against the program. The court says that the state has an opportunity to provide quality education:
“This, even though many public schools are providing nothing of the sort; the public school that Octavia would have to attend were she not at Archbishop Curley has been rated by the state a failing school for three consecutive years. And even though the state can continue to utilize private schools for educating some disabled students. And even though, by the court’s reasoning, it is unconstitutional for the state to use the OSP to help Octavia receive a fine education at Archbishop Curley, the constitutional mandate about `high quality education’ requires consigning her to a failing school. And even though there is no evidence that the drafters of the Constitution’s language or the public that ratified it thought it meant what the Supreme Court now says it means — that in providing quality education, the state must enforce a public-school monopoly on state funds. Actually, the Legislature’s committee that drafted the `uniform’ language rejected a proposal to prohibit vouchers.
“The court’s ruling was a crashing non sequitur — that the public duty to provide something (quality education) entails a prohibition against providing it in a particular way (utilizing successful private educational institutions). The court’s ruling was neither constitutional law nor out of character, and it illustrates why the composition of courts has become such a contentious political issue.”
Ironically, the only hope for a failing system of public education is the competition that vouchers would force upon it-but the teachers’ union, with the approbation of liberals, whose kids are in the best private schools, use the courts to fend of the challenge.