While West Germany was building Mercedes, Porsches, and VW bugs, the Communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain built the Trabant. The automobile “smoked like an Iraqi oil fire and cost a year’s wages,” as one wag had it. No turn signals, no seat belts, no fuel gauge — also, no competition. The Communists who ran East Germany decided you would drive a Trabant or take the bus.
Wisconsin Democrats are like those Marxist central planners. They hate school choice, would croak it in its cradle if they could. Like Tennessee Ernie’s coal miner, they owe their souls to the teachers unions. Gov. Tony Evers vetoed Republican legislation giving taxpayers a tax credit to donate up to $1,700 to private school scholarships.Every Democrat in the Wisconsin legislature voted against it.
Tony also refused to fight for a bill called the Demonstration Public School Act. “With a broken heart,” Madison education reformer Kaleem Caire pleaded, “I must now ask you to reconsider.” After the all-progressive Madison school board rejected his proposed charter school 15 years ago, Mr. Caire founded One City Schools, a voucher school focused on minority students.
No turn signals
Assembly Bill 818 would have committed $4 million to, in Mr. Caire’s words, “establish a teaching hospital-like model for K-12 education.”
Kaleem Caire
Just as teaching hospitals improve medicine through combined treatment, research, and training, One City acts as a laboratory that develops innovations, validates them via a formal UW research partnership, and freely shares them with every public school district in Wisconsin. …
The $19,232 per pupil allocated by this legislation would still leave One City far behind the actual per-pupil expenditure of $29,160 in the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Without the heavy hand of government, Democrats — mortgaged to the teachers unions — worry that parents will desert their failing schools. Indeed, Wisconsin public schools lost 14,087 students this school year while a record 60,972 students — all low-income — chose … CHOSE! voucher schools. Because only 18% of black students are reading at grade!
I think about the children who enter our schools two or more years behind in reading. Their parents work long hours and hold multiple jobs, many struggling to maintain transportation and keep a roof over their heads in Greater Madison’s increasingly expensive housing market. Yet, with our support, their children are climbing the mountain and getting closer to reaching their North Star. — Kaleem Caire
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Increasingly, our government-run schools are failing students like a Trabant at an EPA emissions test site. That’s why arrogant, top-down Democrats fear school choice. They can’t compete.
Nowhere is Democrat/Progressive hypocrisy regarding education more evident than in Madison, where, at the behest of the teachers’ union, voters approved over half a billion taxpayer dollars to build brand-spanking new schools in a district that is losing students, a district with abysmal student test scores, a district where the racial achievement gap is the size of the Grand Canyon, a district where kids (especially if they belong to an approved minority group) can assault teachers with impunity, and above all a district that knows it can get away with anything, despite its periodic bleating about how much it values “transparency.”
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