Let Your People Stay -- AWESOME Op Ed in tomorrow's NYT!

The Op Ed page of the New York Times -- how AWESOME!  Tierney hits home repeatedly:

- Milwaukee's voucher program has been so successful over the past 15 years that it's won a wide array of converts — except among the Democrats terrified of teachers' unions.

 

- how can Democratic leaders keep preaching their devotion to public schools while sending their own children to private schools, as Governor Doyle does? He's what I call a Lypsy, an acronym for Let Your People Stay.

 

- "Those people you saw at Coretta Scott King's funeral are not going to change," he said. "My generation pushed for social change through government solutions, but younger blacks are much more interested in private initiatives. They understand that the public school system cannot by itself be the solution to educating low-income children."

 

- "If the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little guy, where do we get off opposing a chance to help those with the least of all?" he asked. The answer he's heard from his party is that supporting vouchers can end your career if the teachers' union supports a candidate against you in the Democratic primary.

 

- But Fields, who represents a predominantly black district in Milwaukee, is that rare Democrat who will stand up for his constituents against the union. "If they run someone against me, so be it," Fields said. "I'm willing to leave it up to the voters to decide who really cares about African-Americans, and who's just spitting out rhetoric."

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February 21, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

Let Your People Stay

By JOHN TIERNEY

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/opinion/21tierney.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

MILWAUKEE

If you were a Democrat watching Coretta Scott King's funeral, you could congratulate yourself on the party's role in past civil rights struggles. But if you saw what's been on television in Milwaukee in the past month, you'd wonder what's become of your party.

Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, looks like public enemy No. 1 for African-American schoolchildren. "He's throwing away my dream," one Milwaukee student says in a TV commercial supporting the city's school voucher program for low-income families. Another commercial shows a black father on the verge of tears saying: "School choice is good enough for the governor's family. I ought to be able to have it, too."

Radio audiences have been hearing an ad calling the voucher battle "one of the greatest social justice issues we have in the country." The speaker is Ken Johnson, an African-American who leads Milwaukee's school board.

You read that correctly: the head of the public school board supports giving students in his system a chance to escape public schools. That would be unthinkable in most cities, but Milwaukee's voucher program has been so successful over the past 15 years that it's won a wide array of converts — except among the Democrats terrified of teachers' unions...