Why Texas students need vouchers
Before today, I hadn't heard of the Austin Review, which bills itself as "The Voice of Reason for Central Texas." I have a very interesting missive in my inbox, though, written by Juan Lara, President of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (CREO), that was apparently published in the AR, although I can't find a link to it.
Anyway, the article tackles the thorny issue of the lack of minorities enrolled in Texas colleges. Affirmative action is dismissed for the band-aid that it is, and Mr. Lara instead addresses the problems with K-12 education for Texas's minority students, and comes out solidly on the side of vouchers and school choice:
With all of the controversy surrounding the use of university affirmative action policies, the poor education that many minority students are receiving at the elementary and secondary levels stands around the debate like an elephant in the living room. No one wants to acknowledge it, but the elephant is hard to ignore.
In 1999, the Texas Senate Finance Committee called the chancellors of the six largest Texas universities to testify and explain why so few Latino and African-American students were enrolled in their schools...The chancellors presented the following figures: In 1996-1997, there were slightly more than 93,000 Hispanic 18-year-olds in Texas. Of those, only about 54,000 had graduated from high school. Of those graduates, only 13,529 had taken the SAT. The number possibly prepared to attend an elite university (both scoring over 900 on the SAT and ranking in the top 10 percent of their class) was a mere 2,582 students. The picture was equally grim for African-American students...
The state can't prosper with an uneducated workforce, and unless Texas does a better job of educating its low-income students, too many Texas residents will remain paralyzed in poverty. Academic gains in the public schools are coming painfully slowly...
A bipartisan group of legislators has proposed a pilot school choice bill, known as the Texas freedom scholarship program, to address both academic achievement and overcrowding problems in our public school system. Districts qualifying for the pilot program are large urban districts where a majority of students are educationally and economically disadvantaged. Academic research from scholars at Harvard University and elsewhere demonstrates that school choice programs improve learning not only for students choosing to transfer but also for those remaining in the public system. Under such choice programs, schools no longer are able to take students for granted but instead must compete to convince parents that they will do the best job of educating the children.
Mr. Lara notes that the most "vehement" oppenents of school choice programs are - no surprise here - the teachers' unions.