The fraud continues

You don't think you can
go to Andover with a voucher
do you?

Republicans Propose National School Voucher Program

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Published: July 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, July 18 — With Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joining them in a show of support, Congressional Republicans proposed Tuesday to spend $100 million on vouchers for low-income students in chronically failing public schools around the country to attend private and religious schools.

The legislation, modeled on a pilot program here, would pay for tuition and private tutoring for some 28,000 students seeking a way out of public schools that fail to raise test scores sufficiently for at least five years.

The proposal comes as Republicans are showcasing issues intended to energize their party’s conservative base before the midterm elections. Congressional leaders said it would probably be taken up only next year, when Congress is supposed to update the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind.

Congress has so far approved only limited programs using taxpayer dollars to pay for private school education: the program here, and one to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The new legislation was introduced after an Education Department report released Friday, which showed that students attending public schools generally did as well as or better than comparable students in private schools.

That report examined test scores of 700,000 fourth and eighth graders at public schools and those of 25,000 private school students. It found that when students of like economic, racial and family backgrounds were compared, public school students did as well as or better than those in private school in fourth grade reading and math and in eighth grade math. The exception was eighth grade reading, in which private school students did better.

Opponents of school vouchers seized on those findings. Citing the report, Ralph Neas, president of the liberal nonprofit group People for the American Way, said: “The goal of this movement isn’t to help students. It’s to achieve vouchers at any cost.”

Ms. Spellings, at the news conference, called the report’s sample small and its results “basically inconclusive.”

She said she had learned of the study — put out by a branch of the Education Department — only through the newspapers on Saturday and had not read it. She said that the Education Department had not tried to bury the report, as a teachers union leader had charged, by releasing it on a summer Friday. “My philosophy on reports out of the Department of Education is that we shouldn’t do it on a Friday,” she said.

Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences at the Education Department, said that the secretary’s office had received the report for review two weeks before its release.

Voucher aren't popular with black voters. They want public schools which work. Sure, you hear people ask for them, but no pol has lost their seat over it.

Why? Because, black children are the stalking horse for vouchers. The real goal is to fund segregation academies which sprouted up after Brown v Board of Ed. Then you have charter school antics as well.

So they're lying to keep the fundies happy.

I say sue this program out of existance because it's a fraud.