Just yesterday, the Senate trounced the effort to create a kind of “voucher scheme forever” for the District of Columbia.  The vote was 58 opposed and 39 in favor.  The issue will not ever go away, of course, because the facts apparently don’t matter to a significant minority of people.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, voucher plans do not work.  Some of the parents in the DC program actually don’t like the program, many parents eligible for it don’t even apply, and in general the students themselves have mixed reactions (but don’t feel particularly safer in their new schools than they did in their old ones.)  But, I digress with the facts.

The irony of my previous argument was lost on you and some of our
posters.  I don’t really think Senator Jon Ensign or Senator Jim DeMint
(two vocal advocates of vouchers) are “socialists”.  I was just
pointing out the hypocritical interest these two and others have in
“equalizing” opportunity only in regard to school vouchers.  They
aren’t leading any fight to “equalize” health care for all children;
they aren’t spearheading the effort to make sure that women are paid
the same as men for the same work.  They have an ideological point to
make about public schools.  They don’t like them.  Therefore, they want
to replace them with a repeatedly failed alternative that just happens
(I’m getting breathless here) to have a direct financial benefit to the
mainly religious private schools that get the funding.  DC is the petri
dish for lousy ideas these and other Senators would like to promote all
over the country if they had the chance.