Supreme Court gives go-ahead for school vouchers!


I'm a black man who has a pleasant, middle-class career doing work I love. But it had nothing much to do with any nonsense about "pulling myself up by my bootstraps." Others gave me a boost. Especially my parents, migrants from the rural south who never even finished grade school. They begged, borrowed and stole to send me and my siblings to Catholic schools. As a result, I learned how to read, write, count and think.

I lucked out in being born to a couple of unusually determined parents. But every poor kid in America deserves the kind of chance I got. School vouchers could offer this sort of opportunity to millions of kids; a chance to escape dismal public schools, get a decent education, and then step out into the wider world.

And that's why today's Supreme Court ruling on school vouchers is perhaps the greatest, most liberating court ruling for black people in the past quarter century. If we can just get states and municipalities to follow up on it, it could be as big as Brown v. Board of Education in its potential to liberate black Americans.

It is for us to follow up, and demand that voucher programs actually be launched in school systems around the country. The fact that these programs can no longer be pre-emptively declared "unconstitutional" means that merely launching a voucher campaign will strike terror into the hearts of the education bureaucrats, forcing them to finally launch meaningful reforms. Thus even areas without vouchers will benefit from them.


105 posted on 6/27/02 8:44 AM Pacific by ArcLight