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Redstate
Department
of Justice fighting… to
keep poor kids in bad Louisiana schools
By Moe Lane
August 24th, 2013
Of
course they are.
The
U.S. Justice Department is
suing Louisiana in New Orleans federal court to block 2014-15 vouchers
for
students in public school systems that are under federal desegregation
orders.
The first year of private school vouchers “impeded the desegregation
process,”
the federal government says.
Thirty-four
school systems could be
affected, including those of Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. John the
Baptist and
St. Tammany parishes. Under the lawsuit, the state would be barred from
assigning students in those systems to private schools unless a federal
judge
agreed to it. A court hearing is tentatively set for Sept. 19.
The
statewide voucher program,
officially called the Louisiana Scholarship Program, lets low-income
students
in public schools graded C, D or F attend private schools at taxpayer
expense.
This year, 22 of the 34 systems under desegregation orders are sending
some
students to private schools on vouchers.
The
Obama administration is
couching its ongoing need to keep as many African-Americans poor and
uneducated
as possible in more favorable (read: less morally depraved) terms: the
Justice
Department is pretending that they’re worried that taking black kids
out of
black public schools and putting them in white private schools will
make the
former more segregated. I
suspect that
the original official reaction to that bit of mendacity was originally
a good
deal more red-haze-across-his-vision (same article):
State
Education Superintendent John
White took issue with the suit’s primary argument and its
characterization of
the program. Almost all the students using vouchers are black, he said.
Given
that framework, “it’s a little ridiculous” to argue that students’
departure to
voucher schools makes their home school systems less white, he said. He
also
thought it ironic that rules set up to combat racism were being called
on to
keep black students in failing schools.
It’s
only ironic if you don’t
remind yourself: teachers’ unions have campaign money, and minority
kids do
not.
Read
this and other articles at
Redstate
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