F is For Failure

What are your feelings on failing schools? Have you been a student at one? Worked at one before? Would you send your kids own kids to them? What if you didn't have a choice? Imagine that you're a poor, hard-working parent that lives in a low-income urban area where the overall math proficiency rate for the entire public school system is 36%, and the reading proficiency is hardly better at 39%. What do you do? You have dreams of your child being able to attend college and have a chance to learn and participate in all the great extracurricular activities that children who go to good schools do.

However, you obviously are at the bottom of the economic class system in America so you don't have the money to pay to send your child to the great private and religious schools on the other side of town. Now imagine that Congress passes a school-choice program that allows financial vouchers to be given to low-income children so they can leave their failing school and attend a school that is up to par and can give them a shot at a better future. You are elated right? Finally all your prayers have been answered. You get to send your child to receive the good education that they deserve. Now imagine that four years later, the program that has allowed your child to grow in leaps and bounds scholastically, is cut and now your child must return to the very failing school that he or she left behind. You would undoubtedly be crushed.

This situation is a reality for the parents of about 2,000 D.C. school children. Despite the $100 billion that was allocated to education from the economic stimulus, On March 11, 2009, an amendment to continue the Washington, D.C. Scholarship Program was defeated in the Senate 58-39. After the 2009-2010 school year is up this program will no longer exist. It is unlikely that it will be renewed when it's term is up, because along with some members of Congress, public schools, teacher unions, as well as some civil liberties groups oppose the vouchers for various reasons. Public schools and teacher unions don't want them because they compete with their monopoly system. They say the vouchers threaten to undermine the public school system. The public schools in D.C. are a failure despite all the efforts over the past decade to help raise the academic achievement levels.

Civil liberties group don't like how tax payer dollars are going to help send some children to religious schools. And even though President Obama and D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty said that they think children already in the program should be able to stay at the charter or private schools that they are already at until they graduate from high school; the chances of that happening are as unlikely as the program itself being renewed.

I am extremely disappointed in Congress. I think it is so unfair to send these children back to fail. It's like giving up on them...it IS giving up on them. I know that there are more than just 2,000 children in the public school system there and that all children deserve an opportunity at a good education but it seems extra cruel to remove from the failing schools the children whose families you feel are least likely to ever be able to afford to send them to a good school just to send them back to the same grade F system. I really hope between now and 2010 someone on Capitol Hill wakes up does something to reverse these children's fate.