CHICAGO TRIBUNE |JUN 16, 2021 AT 5:00 AM
Column: Want to end urban hopelessness? Support real school choice.
By JOHN KASS
Shaka Rawls, principal at Leo Catholic High School, participates with students in a cleanup effort June 4, 2020, along 79th Street in Chicago. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
Violent crime is spiking in big cities across America. And what is the response of the ruling Democratic political class?
As crime rises, as the mothers weep, the politicians decry the hopelessness that they attribute to systemic racism. They demand beleaguered taxpayers and businesses invest more in the neighborhoods.
It is a stale liturgy led by the faithless, the politicians reading lines from a tired script, the politically savvy activists clamoring for more resources to increase their power. And children lost in the river of violence are washed away, their names forgotten while others on the banks will inevitably take their place.
In Chicago, more than 1,587 people have been shot this year alone, (some 200 more than last year at this time). The mayor and the other political actors form a chorus.
They condemn gun violence. That’s much easier, politically, than calling it “street gang violence.” Calling it gun violence allows them to coalesce with progressive anti-Second Amendment forces.
If they called it by its real name, “street gang wars,” they’d be expected to do something concrete. They’d have to question the wisdom of catch-and-release Democratic prosecutors and judges. But they won’t do that because they’re all on the same team.
Yet there is one policy that could end habitual urban hopelessness that leads to violent crime. It would give motivated parents a fighting chance to help their children. It would be revolutionary in Chicago:
Real school choice.
By this, I mean parents would be allowed to take whatever tax dollars are spent on their children at underperforming public schools and instead use those tax dollars to pay tuition at better-performing private schools of their choice.
Want to end urban hopelessness? Unlock the potential in the children. Quit teaching them they’re victims who can’t learn. Offer them a chance. Support their families.
Real school choice would have tangible benefits, and neighbors would see that it works and consider it for their children too. And that is a political problem.
Because real school choice would break the monopoly of government educrats who wield power by supporting urban public education that serves the politicians, the vendors with clout who sell products and services to schools, and the powerful teachers unions.
Who comes in last in big-city public education? The children. The kids are the powerless cash cows in this scheme. The vendors and the unions support the politicians. It is a cynical game that ruins cities.
It is among the chief reasons I’ve become a conservative. I’ve covered school strikes; I’ve seen union and City Hall politics from the inside out. The cynicism has been overwhelming. It infects a great city. And after decades of watching politics here, I believe that there is no other way forward than school choice.
Is it the hill to die on? Why not? It is the civil rights issue of our time. And the fact you don’t hear much about it in cities where public education is disastrous, where mostly minority school children are failed by the political class, tells you how dangerous it could be.
Not dangerous for the kids. Dangerous for the politicians.
Because in Chicago, as in most big cities, generations of families have been underserved by failing public schools. Not all of them — Chicago has elite public high schools — but the schools that are physically in decay, run by inexperienced administrators and dominated by teachers who have checked out, just waiting for that pension. Democrats preach about systemic racism, so let’s address it.
What could be more systemically racist than a system endorsed by the political class that for generations has failed minority children and their families, but keeps the politicians and their public union allies in power?
With real school choice, students could use that tax money to attend, say, Leo Catholic High School on the South Side, where teachers and administrators are deeply engaged in working with students in and beyond high school.
Or Urban Prep Academies, a public charter school with results that should make it a model, not a teardown. Yet that’s how the teachers unions treat successful public charter schools serving minority kids — as threats.
Small steps have already been taken to give kids a better chance in life. One is a scholarship program called Invest in Kids, which offers tax breaks to those who donate. The scholarships go to needy families. There was a 2017 bipartisan agreement in Illinois to create the program. Gov J.B. Pritzker, the weak, indecisive Democrat enthralled by the public teachers unions, tried to kill it. He compared it, derisively, to a corporate tax loophole. The teachers unions saw the scholarship program as a threat to their power.
Fortunately, a bipartisan group of legislators saved Invest in Kids. And the Tribune Editorial Board played an important part. Not only was it saved, it was extended.
But that’s not enough. We need real school choice across America, for all children and their families.
Some of you may know that I have family in Canada, our neighbor to the north, a nation often mocked for its rampant and precious progressivism. But even in liberal Canada, there is school choice. And public schools flourish, though without a monopoly, they’re forced to maintain standards and improve on them.
My friend, professor and political scientist Charles Lipson, writing in Discourse magazine, supports the idea because vouchers encourage new schools to open, drive out those that don’t meet parents’ needs, and “shift public resources swiftly and decisively toward the best schools and away from the worst, as determined by the parents themselves.”
It will work, Lipson argues, only if resources follow the students, not the schools. But that can happen only if voucher programs are large enough to help needy families cover all the costs.
The money is out there. President Joe Biden and the Democrats in Washington are proposing trillions and trillions in spending on cynical political programs masquerading as infrastructure to help them get reelected in 2022.
Democrats talk incessantly of systemic racism, yet rely on the teachers unions as election time muscle to get out the votes. You might want to ask yourself: What are children, if not the infrastructure of a nation?
Want more John Kass? See all his columns and find his weekly podcast here.
[email protected] | Twitter @John_Kass
Founded in 1993, the Center for Education Reform aims to expand educational opportunities that lead to improved economic outcomes for all Americans — particularly our youth — ensuring that conditions are ripe for innovation, freedom and flexibility throughout U.S. education.