Those working to give Florida kids a good education deserve some props for noting the fact that liberals support those efforts, and have for decades.
Ron Matus, policy director at Step Up for Students, along with Doug Tuthill, a former teacher union president and now president of Step Up, for several weeks have been writing and blogging about liberal support for school choice.
As an advocate, Matus hopes to get all the support he can from either side of the aisle and didn't think it should be viewed strictly as right v. left.
“From 1964 to 1984, the Democrat Party formally supported the public funding of students in private schools,” Tuthill wrote.
The 1976 party platform actually endorsed “parental freedom in choosing the best education for their children” – precisely what school choice is all about.
Prominent Democrat thinkers such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote at length on the subject, echoing what Milton Friedman said in the 1950s when he first advocated school vouchers.
In 1977, Moynihan had a bipartisan bill to provide tuition tax credits to children in private and parochial schools, but union bosses persuaded the Carter administration to kill it, Tuthill said.
There was also an unsuccessful liberal-led effort to implement choice in California decades ago. As teacher unions gained power, support for choice eroded on the left. Bill Clinton flip-flopped on choice under union pressure and recently Hillary Clinton did a 180 for the same reason.
The fact remains that, despite lingering support, virtually all opposition to school choice still comes from the left.
Liberals continue viewing public education as a job program for adults and a revenue-raising vehicle for the Democrat Party.
For, while liberals rail about the evil of “money in politics,” the biggest source of their funds is teacher unions.
Liberal politicians vote to take more money from families and dump it into the public schools. The money goes mostly to jobs and paychecks for adults, and the teacher unions get a percentage of the paychecks. They, in turn, kickback millions to the campaigns of liberal candidates.
Sweet. But how does that help children trapped in failing schools?
Specious arguments used by liberal opponents are easily refuted and their lack of concern for poor, black children particularly is glaring. Jeb Bush said the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that the overall college-enrollment rate for African-American students who obtained vouchers in New York City increased 24 percent compared with their peers in traditional public schools.
Personally, I'm offended by the implied argument that opponents know what is good for children better than the parents of the children do.
School choice helps students, helps taxpayers and helps the public schools. Florida school boards and superintendents have dropped out of a lawsuit but the union bosses and their fellow travelers continue trying to crush the burgeoning movement.
Support from reasonable liberals past and present makes the greed and selfishness of today's school choice opponents all the more obvious.
Lloyd Brown was in the newspaper business nearly 50 years, beginning as a copy boy and retiring as editorial page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. After retirement he served as a policy analyst for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
