Thread: U.S. Justice Department sues Louisiana over private school voucher plan

U.S. Justice Department sues Louisiana over private school voucher plan

Posted by EAGNEWS on Aug 29, 2013 in EAG News,



NEW ORLEANS – Attorney General Eric Holder is drawing stinging criticism for his recent decision to sue the state of Louisiana over its school voucher program, on the grounds it’s leading to less-diverse public schools. Follow Joe For America on Facebook! holder1On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Justice “filed suit to block school vouchers for public schools students in school districts which remain under federal desegregation orders,” reports Fox8Live.com. Holder’s Justice Department argues the 2012 voucher law – which gives private school scholarships to low-income students from failing or subpar schools – is jeopardizing the racial integration of some historically segregated schools. In other words, Holder is suing to block the voucher law because “students who were the small minority in the school they were attending – blacks in primarily white schools and whites in primarily black schools – sought and received vouchers to leave the schools and attend more homogeneous schools instead, reversing desegregation progress,” writes ThinkProgress.org. If New Orleans federal Judge Ivan Lemelle agrees with Holder’s assessment, the state would be barred, beginning in the 2014-15 school year, from giving vouchers to students in 34 affected school districts, unless a federal judge signs off on it, reports NOLA.com. Getting a judicial waiver would require a significant amount of time, effort and evidence from the state, notes NOLA.com. That probably sounds good to radical teacher union leaders who will use any method to preserve public schools are their private domain – even methods that harm a child’s right to a quality education. Most clear-thinking individuals, however, say the DOJ lawsuit doesn’t make any sense. State Education Superintendent John White told NOLA.com that nearly all voucher recipients are black, and noted the irony in Holder’s attempt to fight racism by keeping minority students trapped in dysfunctional schools. White added that the state is legally prohibited from giving vouchers for use in schools that aren’t desegregated. Eric Lewis, state director for Louisiana’s Black Alliance for Educational Options, called the lawsuit “preposterous.” “(The voucher law) gave parents the ability to actually choose where they want to send their kids,” Lewis told Fox8Live.com. “And so this motion by the Department of Justice we think is wrong-sided and (we) would implore them to reconsider taking this action.” A Wall Street Journal editorial was even more pointed in its criticism: “ … The evidence from around the country is that vouchers enhance racial integration. Public school attendance is mainly determined by geography, so segregated neighborhoods produce segregated schools. Vouchers help poor minorities escape those boundaries to attend schools they otherwise couldn’t. … Today’s civil-rights outrage is the millions of poor kids who can’t escape failing schools whatever their racial makeup.” The WSJ editorial offered what’s likely the real motivation behind Holder’s head-scratching legal action. “Our guess – confirmed by sources in Louisiana – is that this lawsuit isn’t really about integration. It’s about helping the teachers union repeal the voucher law by any legal means, and the segregation gambit is the last one available.” No wonder Gov. Bobby Jindal called the DOJ lawsuit “shameful.” A court hearing is scheduled for Sept. 19, NOLA.com reports. By Ben Velderman at EAGnews.org


Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/08/u-s-justice-department-sues-louisiana-private-school-voucher-plan/#MRXIfU5O0TIocVxd.99



Worth repeating this story ....Wake Up America this is the dumbing down of our Children...Home school even if it is to just help re-enforce their education..

Does Allison Benedikt Think This Only Because Her Husband Does?

By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | August 30th, 2013 at 01:20 AM | 4



By now you’ve heard about this, I’m sure. Allison Benedikt thinks you and I are terrible if we send our kids to private school.
I actually do send my kids to private school.
I do have to wonder, though, if Allison Benedikt only thinks this because her husband thinks it. Benedikt’s husband is John Cook, the Gawker blogger. Last September John declared that private school should be banned.
In December of 2012, Allison admitted they were tapping out their resources to send their kids to preschool. That’s right. They were paying to send their kids to preschool.
And now this.
So why should I wonder if Allison Benedikt is easily led by her husband? Well, she has admitted before how malleable she is to his influence.

John fills my head with allllllllllllll kinds of bull****. Stuff about the Israelis being occupiers, about Israel not being a real democracy, about the dangers of ethnic nationalism—a term I really hadn’t heard applied to Israel before. (Okay, fine, I hadn’t heard it at all.) My parents worry that I’m being brainwashed. We get in huge fights on the same topic over and over again and have terribly awkward dinners where John insists on bringing up Israel and pissing off my Mom. I act as moderator and it is the worst. John buys every book about Israel that’s ever been published, and then reads them all so he can win any argument with my family. What he doesn’t realize is that my parents don’t do facts on this issue. They do feelings. Israel is who they are. Gradually, and then also all of a sudden, it’s no longer who I am—and I am angry.
John and I move to Chicago; my sister moves from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and marries that “friend” who she visited during my junior year abroad. She becomes an Israeli citizen. I stop believing anything my parents or Abe Foxman say about Israel. John and I get engaged. I change my home page from the New York Times to Haaretz, whose columnists seem to agree more with my Jew-hating fiancé than with my community-leading parents. John and I get married. We are now a united front against the organized Jewish community, and I find myself saying and thinking things that I’m not even sure I believe because I’m not really sure what I believe. Still, my sister lives in this place I’m railing against. I convince John that we should visit her. He’s not happy about it, but agrees to go. A week before our trip, the Israeli military assassinates Ahmed Yassin, a founder of Hamas. Israel is on high alert. We read that Jerusalem’s mayor is telling citizens to carry their guns on them at all times. John is freaked out, but I am sure that once we get there and he sees what it’s really like, he’ll be fine.

In other words, John Cook hates Israel and his wife is so malleable — admitting it no less — that soon she too hates Israel.
In September of 2012, John Cook admits to hating private school. In December of 2012, his wife admits they have stopped contributing to their 401(K)s in order to send their kids to preschool and are looking forward to the kids being in public school because of the financial burden, then in August of 2013 John Cook’s wife admits to thinking people are bad if they send their kids to private school.
Is she brainwashed or just stupid? Perhaps we should embrace the healing power of “and.” In any event, it seems both John and Allison are more jealous than self-righteous and they hide their jealousy behind contempt for those who can afford to send children to private school.
I thought feminists didn’t need to be led to positions by men.

Update: Worth noting this piece in the Atlantic in which Allison Benedikt admits her husband has the power to order her to tweet.



http://www.redstate.com/2013/08/30/d...-husband-does/


Now here is John Cooks piece:




John Cook School
9/13/12 3:00pm






There's a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis





The ongoing (but maybe soon to end?) teachers' strike in Chicago is being viewed by many as an early skirmish in a coming war over the crisis in public education—stagnant or declining graduation rates, substandard educations, dilapidated schools, angry teachers, underserved students. There is one simple step that would go a long way toward resolving many of those issues: Make all schools public schools.
It's an oft-noted irony of the confrontation in Chicago that Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to the private, $20,000-a-year University of Chicago Lab School, which means his family doesn't really have much of a personal stake in what happens to the school system he is trying to reform. This is pretty routine behavior for rich people in Chicago, and there's a pretty good reason for it: Chicago's public schools are terrible. If you care about your children's education, and can afford to buy your way out of public schools, as Emanuel can, it's perfectly reasonable to do so. Barack and Michelle Obama made a similar decision, opting to purchase a quality education for their daughters at Sidwell Friends rather than send them to one of Washington, D.C.'s, deeply troubled public schools.
A lot of Chicago parents with the resources to do so have followed Emanuel's lead: 17% of schoolchildren in Chicago attend private schools, and so don't have to trouble themselves with whether or not their local public school has air conditioning, or a library (160 do not), or classes with 45 students. Those kids that don't attend private schools tend overwhelmingly to be from families with less political power and resources than Emanuel's: 87% of them are from low-income families, and 86% are black or hispanic.
Nationwide, where 10% of the nation's students—and 16% of the white ones from families making more than $75,000 per year—attend private schools, the stratification is similar. White and asian students enroll in private schools at twice the rate of black and hispanic ones, according to Harvard University's Civil Rights Project. Nearly two thirds of private-school students are from wealthy families. In the nation's 40 largest school districts, one in three white students attends private school (the number is one in ten for black students).
So you can see why there's a problem. Here's the solution: Make Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama's children go to public schools. From a purely strategic and practical standpoint, it would be much easier to resolve the schools crisis if the futures of America's wealthiest and most powerful children were at stake. Wealthy people tend to lobby effectively for their interests, and if their interests were to include adequate public funding for the schools their children attend, and libraries, and air-conditioning, those goals could likely be achieved without having to resort to unpleasant things like teachers' strikes.
This would of course be a radical and highly disruptive step. It would involve forcibly transferring ownership of all existing private schools to the school district in which they reside, and readjusting local tax schemes to capture the tuition parents currently pay (the nationwide average is $8,549 per year, which means a total of $47 billion is spent each year on opting out of the public education system). Then access to the newly "nationalized" schools would have to be distributed on some fair basis to local students, with the wealthy kids who don't make the cut into their old schools being sent to the regular ones, without air conditioning or libraries. And resources would have to be redistributed within the school districts so that the resources formerly lavished on private schools could be spent shoring up the failing public ones.
This is not an original idea. Billionaire wise hobbit Warren Buffet once told school reformer Michelle Rhee that the easiest way to fix schools was to "make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by random lottery." In England, the notion of banning private education—while highly unlikely—has long been a part of the political debate entertained by major-party candidates.
And while it would have the practical effect of forcing school boards and municipalities to be accountable to their privileged elite as well as their poor families, there's also a moral argument for banning private education. Put simply: Equality of opportunity demands that children should not be penalized—or advantaged—by the accident of their birth. Educational benefits, which are the most crucial resource when it comes to determining the life-outcomes for children of all backgrounds, shouldn't be distributed based on how rich your parents are. They should be distributed equally. Even if we stipulate that radical inequality is OK for adults—once you are out in the world, you rise or fall by the work of your own hands—when it comes to children, it's perverse to dole out educations based on arbitrary circumstances completely beyond their control.
And that's what private education does: It allows parents to purchase better life-prospects for their kids simply because they can afford it. (The real estate market and the property-tax-based funding model for public schools do the same thing—being able to afford a home in a good school district, which is then funded by taxes levied on that valuable home, is structurally very similar to paying tuition for a private school.) Of course, the act of simply raising children in a wealthy home is a form of purchasing them better life-prospects than poorer children. And attempting to equalize that dynamic would be impossible without unacceptable governmental intrusions into the child-parent relationship.
But educational benefits are something that we as a nation have long held should be afforded to all children, irrespective of their backgrounds. And we've further held that withholding access to those benefits based on race or ethnicity—in other words, on morally arbitrary circumstances over which the children have no control—is wrong. Our current system of private and public education effectively distributes the best educations to those who were born into the right families, like Rahm Emanuel's. He shouldn't be able to buy his kids a better shot at life than his constituents can afford.
[Image via Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock]



http://gawker.com/5943005/theres-a-s...schools-crisis
http://www.redstate.com/2013/08/30/d...-husband-does/