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| "We Don't Want to Fight" | SecEd Launches Vouchers, Bureaucrats Run Interference |
Government Fails to Educate NJ Kids
by Christopher Chantrill
July 19, 2006 at 4:27 am
WIDOWER VAN-NESS Crawford and a number of other parents have sued the State of New Jersey to demand the right to take their children out of failing schools and send them to the school of their choice.
Filed as Crawford v. Davy the suit aims to be a landmark case that establishes the right of parents to educate their children.
Obviously widower Crawford and his triplet 16-year-old sons that attend the failing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School in Newark have been selected by school choice activists as poster boys for school choice. But the point remains: why can New Jersey schools not educate children when they are spending $10,000 to $20,000 per year per student? What gives them the right to spend the money on Crawford’s sons rather than Crawford? If they are going to piss the money away on his kids why not give the money to him and let him piss the money away?
According to Kristen A. Graham, the activist groups backing the suit are “Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group; the Black Minister's Council of New Jersey; the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey; and Excellent Education for Everyone, a New Jersey group that supports school choice and vouchers.” The co-plaintiffs joining Crawford have been selected from around the state, as you might expect.
Leaving aside the church vs. state aspect of education, there is the basic nature of government. Government responds to problems and throws money at them. But government has no interest in solving problems. If ever a problem would be solved then the funding would go away. What would be the point of that?
Thus when school fail our kids the school lobby demands more money. Why don’t we say that if you fail to educate our kids then we are going to take the money away and give it to someone else?
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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