Libertarian Leanings

You too, George?

If ever there was a non-issue, this is it.  But Bush hits on income inequality to promote continued education reform.

"The question is whether we respond to the income inequality we see with policies that help lift people up, or tear others down," Bush said. "The key to rising in this economy is skills -- and the government's job is to make sure we have an education system that delivers them."

Turning the tide

According to George Will, school choice is gaining ground.  In Arizona has a program where individuals get tax credits for donating to private scholarship organizations.  This program has benefited more than 22,500 of Arizona's low income children in the past decade.  On the pretext that this represents unconstitutional support for private religious schools, opponents filed suit against it, but lost in both state and federal courts.  Since then the Arizona legislature has expanded the program by authorizing dollar-for-dollar tax credits for corporate contributions to private, nonprofit school tuition organizations.  Opponents are challenging that.

The public-school lobby, which apparently has little confidence in its product, lives in fear of competition - the fear that if parents' choices are expanded, there will be a flight from public schools. But the tide is turning:

Newark's Mayor Cory Booker, a member of the board of the national Alliance for School Choice, proposes a scholarship program similar to Arizona's. New Jersey corporations could get tax credits totaling $20 million a year collectively for scholarships for low-income students in five cities with especially troubled schools.

New York's new Democratic governor, Eliot Spitzer, proposes lifting the cap that restricts the state to a mere 100 charter schools. This common-sense idea - lowering a barrier the government has erected to limit innovative schools that compete with the government's existing system - is welcome, but not as bold as what Mayor Bloomberg is doing with the nation's largest school system, New York City's, with 1.1 million pupils. He is dividing large schools into smaller ones, emancipating many principals to be educational entrepreneurs under a system that holds them accountable for cognitive results.

The logic of Bloomberg's reforms is that public money should follow wherever students are attracted by competing schools. So school choice is gaining ground in the city that has historically been ground zero for collectivist, centralizing liberalism.