Vouchers for District Schoolchildren
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
The April 29 editorial "Vouching for Vouchers" puzzled me. It praised "home rule" and supported the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides grants for low-
income children to attend private schools. But it dismissed Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton's opposition to the measure, and it ignored the fact that in 1981, D.C. voters defeated a similar plan by a crushing 89 percent to 11 percent (not to mention the fact that voters around the country have decisively rejected vouchers at the polls 26 times).
Alan Barth, who served for almost three decades on The Post's editorial board, was right when he wrote in a March 3, 1971, op-ed piece: "Americans have every right . . . to send their children to private schools . . . But they have no more right to ask the general public to pay for such schools . . . than to ask the general public to pay for the . . . church in which they are free to gather."
Whatever educational services can be provided by nonpublic schools can also be provided by well-managed, adequately funded public schools.
If the District were a state and had a constitution like Virginia's, this voucher issue would be dead.
KENNETH A. STEVENS
Savage, Md.
ยท
