School Choice Works
by Renny Hartmann
Issue 135 - July 8, 2009

Despite what my union, the National Education Association, says the Washington, DC, limited voucher program called Opportunity Scholarships has worked. Assessments show Scholarship students are often 6-9 months ahead of non-scholarship students, especially in reading, and at least on grade level in math. Unfortunately, only 1,700 of the 46,000 students were enrolled in the program.

The “fabulous” DC schools have a 46 percent dropout rate (compared to around 25 percent nationally) with the majority of seniors reading on the fourth-grade level (NAEP).To produce such sterling results, the city of Washington, DC (remember, under the direct supervision of Congress) spends nearly $16,000 per pupil, the highest rate in the US. DC is not NEA but the American Federation of Teachers union, where, someone may remember, a former union president is now serving a nine-year sentence for embezzling $250,000 that she spent on cars and furs while the student population’s achievement languished at an elementary-school level.

The total cost of this program for DC’s victimized public education students costs all of $1,750,000 annually for 7,500 vouchers for the less than 2,000 students enrolled, and they represent merely half the number who apply for eligibility. The piddling outlay. compared to general government expenses, was dropped from the omnibus budget bill, although this administration thinks nothing of “giving” the island of Palau $200 million to take Guantanamo detainees.

For the record and as comparison, Citizens Against Government waste reports a few expenditures your Congress and mine makes while it wants to deny DC children better educations: $1,791,000 for swine odor and waste management in Iowa; $2,192,000 for a Center for Grape Genetics, Geneva, New York; and $4,545,000 to study “wood utilization” in ten states. Does no one think Congress could eke out UNDER $ 2 million for 1,700 succeeding students?

In an independent charter school such as Mike Piscal’s View Park Preparatory Charter Schools, excellence has ranked them 8th among all public schools in California (charters are public schools but function primarily separate from their public systems). Piscal, a graduate of my former high school in Toms River, NJ, began nearly two decades ago in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles - with its 70 percent dropout rate and a plague of gangs - to develop an educational system that saw its first 2004 graduating class all receive college acceptances.

When Piscal began, he started with support from friends and family and his own credit cards. Now president of the Inner City Educational Foundation, where he spends much time fund raising, he is often a target of the California Education Association, because, as he said in a speech when he was inducted into the Toms River Schools Hall of Fame, “I can see 60 schools could become chartered and maybe even someday taking over the entire LA system.”

I had the personal pleasure of presenting him into the HOF that day. I believe that the only route left for education today - where a once vibrant system has been subverted by rigid unionizing and professional indifference - is independent programs like DC’s Opportunity Scholarships and ICEF’s chartered schools.

Renny Hartmann is a former public high school teacher.