How do you turn someone into a lifelong Democrat? Give him a public school education.
Whenever I wrote about public schools in my job as an op-ed columnist for the NY Post, I would get letters stating that the above was the Democrats’ “secret weapon” for maintaining power. Since I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories, I viewed such letters as overwrought.
Besides, you don’t need to be conspiratorial when you’re achieving the same ends in broad daylight.
A report issued by America’s Promise Alliance, a non-profit group dedicated to improving children’s lives, states that seventeen of the nation’s fifty largest cities had graduation rates below 50%. “When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe,” said former Secretary of State Colin Powell, founding chair of the alliance.
It’s a catastrophe some forty years in the making, Mr. Powell–and it comes courtesy of the Democratic party and its undying allegiance to public school unions.
All across the country, these unions have routinely dumped millions of dollars into Democratic campaign coffers, year in in year out. The payoff? A public school monopoly with any hint of competition–vouchers, charter schools, home schooling, etc.,–undermined or banned at every opportunity.
Hypocrisy? Chelsea Clinton attended private school, and so do both of Barack Obama’s daughters. Racism? The worst performing schools in the nation are invariably in the inner city where blacks are the majority population. The future? More of the same, because job protection and union contracts trump accountability and performance standards.
For Democrats it’s a win, win: unions will continue to pony up gobs of campaign cash to preserve their status quo, and under-educated kids will grow up with a better than even chance of embracing the Democratic ideology of depending on government to solve their problems for them.
Conspiratorial? Nope. Just good ol’ fashioned Democrat Party politics–at our children’s expense.
atahlert@comcast.net