Information is currency for democracy.
- Thomas Jefferson
A day without sunshine is like, you know,
night. -
Steve Martin
Education is unique among consumer products;
when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labeled as
defective. - Kevin
Killion
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Courage is the most important of all
the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other
virtues consistently. You can't be consistently kind or fair or
humane or generous, not without courage, because if you don't have
it, sooner or later you will stop and say, "The threat is too much.
The difficulty is ...too high. The challenge is too great. ~ Maya
Angelou
The V-Word
V is for vouchers.
That’s right; I’m talking
about vouchers, if I may be so bold. Because
lately it seems as if the simple act of allowing
this word to fall from one’s lips is engaging in
something shameful, dirty even. So
what is it about this word that packs such a
punch?
Remember that memorable dinner
scene in St. Elmo’s Fire where, while
discussing the illness of a loved one, the
characters tentatively whisper the dreaded
c-word, cancer? As if the mere mention of
the word would suddenly invite the affliction
itself upon whoever dared to utter it?
Is voucher the
new cancer?
If you were to ask the heads
of our longstanding institution of public
education and any of its affiliated teachers’
unions and lobbyist organizations, their answer
to this question would be a resounding, “Yes!
Vouchers are a cancer on society and a threat to
everything holy in a democracy built upon equal
opportunity for all.”
Vouchers will lead to the
certain demise of public education
and an end to
civilization as we know it.
Terrifying, isn’t it? But what exactly is a
voucher? Here is a
straight-forward definition from the
Research Center at Education Week:
“Few topics stir up as much
debate in the education community as the concept
of providing government-funded aid—or
vouchers—to parents to send their children to
private schools.”
Simple enough - a voucher is
government aid to allow parents to send their
children to private schools. By definition, it’s
all about the money, who controls it and who
gets it. So why is it then, for such a
controversial word, that voucher seems to
be emerging as the term du jour for just about
any schooling option, be it public or private,
that represents any flexibility whatsoever for a
student, for any proposal that allows the money
to follow the child, and that public school
lobbyists will pounce upon and spin as a major
threat to the livelihood of our entire public
education system?
Are we being played?
If this seems extreme, before
dismissing this scenario as hyperbole, let’s
explore the facts.
Charter schools are now being referred to as
a voucher.
Public virtual schools? You guessed it -
another voucher.
A drop-out prevention plan? A voucher
scheme.
Options that would allow students with autism to
access an appropriate education, including
authorizing transfers from one public school to
another? Yet another thinly-veiled attempt at a
voucher scheme. In fact, at one point or
another, all of these proposals to improve life
outcomes for our Texas schoolchildren have been
branded “voucher schemes,” surreptitiously
designed to open the floodgates to a hostile
private takeover of public education.
Forget about the kids and
what’s best for them,
this is a flat-out conspiracy!
So what’s with the use of such
a broad brush? Could it be that the power of a
word rests mainly with those who use it and how,
such as in these derogatory and intentional
misapplications of the word voucher designed to
incite hysteria and polarize? Perhaps we should
ask
The View’s
Elisabeth Hasselbeck and her
co-host Whoopi to weigh in on this hot topic.
We’ll let the
Reverend Jesse Jackson opt out.
Isn’t it time we stopped
letting masterful manipulators and their
mindless minions wield this word as a weapon
while we shy away from it to avoid engaging in
this grade-school game of semantics? No longer
should we allow these deep-pocketed,
highly-connected playground bullies to
indiscriminately unload their arsenal of
v-words, ready to launch at the slightest
provocation as a cheap shot designed to
incinerate any child-centered proposal that
would provide desperately-needed meaningful
educational options to at-risk Texas
schoolchildren. Dare I say it?
It’s time to take the
V-word back.
From this day forward, what if
we were to push aside partisan platforms, reject
the rhetoric and embrace the word voucher to use
at our discretion when it actually
applies - when children who have been or are at
risk of being cleansed from their public schools
due to special needs that make them
“inconvenient” to educate must look outside the
tightly-controlled public options in order to
access an appropriate education? Now that’s
a radical move. So for the sake of these
children who are truly our most vulnerable
citizens, let’s all come together and say it
loud and proud:
We support vouchers.
Are you feeling giddy with the
freedom?
And when this, our newly
beloved v-word, is hijacked and bastardized by
those who lobby in the name of freedom to keep
these throwaway children imprisoned in a hostile
and inappropriate educational environment and
who, no matter what they claim, do not support
the right of all Texas schoolchildren to
have access to an appropriate education at
all times, here’s a replacement phrase to
use:
The V-Word