-By Warner Todd Huston
The move for school choice is not only growing in Illinois in general but in Chicago in particular as politicians and parents both see the downward spiral of the public education system picking up speed.
With the costs of public education soaring but neither the rates of graduation nor proficiency growing accordingly, parents are desperate to find a way for their children to gain a better education.
The state is pumping millions upon millions into the bottomless pit of education and taxes are edging higher every year to support the spending habit. As an example, Illinois school district U46 (west of Chicago in the Elgin area) has $600 million in bond debt and this is just one of the nearly 700 school districts in Illinois.
So, as the system founders, many experiments have blossomed. We all know that charter schools have grown rapidly in the Chicago area, but there are other schools such as Leo Catholic High School in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood that are serving as perfect examples of school choice. Leo is a prime example of a private high school that is a wildly successful example of education at its finest.
The school is not fully supported financially by the city’s Catholic system but has since 1926 served students as an independent high school operating in what is now one of the city’s most depressed neighborhoods. The school started back when Auburn Gresham was a heavily Irish-Catholic part of the city but now serves an entirely African American student body. (Edit to note: The Archdiocese of Chicago does support Leo and has provided over $2M in direct, financial operating support for the school between 2009 and 2015, but doesn’t pay all the school’s expenses as it does the schools it has direct control over.)
The school has been such a success that for the last six years 100% of its students have been accepted into a college or university and 96 percent have gone on to pursue higher education.
Continue reading “
School Choice Finally on the Agenda in Illinois”
One of the biggest solutions reformers have to fix our failing schools is to give parents vouchers that can be used to send kids to the parent’s choice of schools. But one union-backing school superintendent in North Carolina is so against any solutions outside those offered by unions that she is going to the absurd extreme of saying that vouchers would be used to “train terrorists.”
Liberals and misguided establishment Republicans (like Florida’s Jeb Bush) are pushing a new education program called Common Core, a policy that will do no less than spit out good little government automatons. But it isn’t just this new scheme of education. It’s been happening for years and all over. Commons Core just accelerates it. We are getting more evidence of this every day and this week we find our schools are teaching kids that government officials must never be questioned. So much for government being our servants.
The President’s Department of Justice is taking the State of Louisiana to court over its school voucher program and the lawsuit is such a bad idea that even the left-wing Washington Post is criticizing the administration for the slight, saying that AG Holder wants to “trap poor, black children in ineffective schools.”