When Jada Shapiro decided to raise her daughter from birth without diapers, for the most part, not everyone was amused. Ms. Shapiro scattered little bowls around the house to catch her daughter’s offerings, and her sister insisted that she use a big, dark marker to mark the bowls so that they could never find their way back to the kitchen.
“My sister wasn’t a huge fan,” she said on Thursday.
But “elimination communication,” as the diaper-free method of child-rearing is called, is finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City.
Ms. Shapiro, who is a doula, a birth and child-rearing coach, says it is practically now a job qualification to at least be able to offer diaper-free training as an option to clients. Caribou Baby, an “eco-friendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store” on the border of artsy Greenpoint and Williamsburg, has been drawing capacity crowds to its diaper-free “Meetups,” where parents exchange tips like how to get a baby to urinate on the street between parked cars.
Parents are drawn to the method as a way of preserving the environment from the ravages of disposable diapers, as well as reducing the laundering of cloth diapers and preventing diaper rash. Many of them like the thought that they are rediscovering an ancient practice used in other cultures, though they tend to gloss over the fact that many of those cultures had never heard of Pampers. But mostly, they say, they like feeling more in touch with their babies’ most intimate functions.
“I think for a lot of parents, the motivation is just to be more in tune with what their kids’ needs are,” Adriane Stare, proprietor of Caribou Baby and herself a diaper-free mother, said on Thursday, about a week after holding her most recent meetup. Another meeting was written about on Thursday on the news Web site dnainfo.com; the next is May 14.
This is one of those things that happened before Rome fell, right?
When I think of getting “in tune” with a child’s needs, I think about things like food, shelter, clothing, love, confidence-building, instill good values… Not teaching it the right way to take a whiz between parked cars.
(And what of the poor schmuck who later picks that route to get to his car?)
Nincompoopery like this makes me think of “Green warriors” who want to preserve rural villages from the ravages of technology, so they can continue to live in virtue, close to nature… and then you go ask someone in that same pesthole village if they’d like to have refrigerators, electric lights, air conditioning –and diapers!– and they’ll look at you like you’re nuts for asking and answer “Heck yes! When’s the delivery?”
June is a happy time for students, when school lets out and summer vacation begins. For some students and their parents, it’s a special moment: graduation time, when the children get to show their proud parents all the neat things they’ve learned, such as reading, writing, and hating Jews:
“I want to be a suicide bomber when I grow up!”
And what kindergarten graduation is complete without the kids putting on a play?
Next year we learn “Two Minutes Hate!”
These and other photos come from Saraya, the web site of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in an article called “Culture of resistance implanted in the hearts of the children of Gaza.” One of the children quoted showed the journalist he learned his lessons well:
One child, Hamza, wearing the uniform of the Al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad and carrying a wooden weapon, said “I love the resistance and the martyrs and Palestine, and I want to blow up he most Zionists in a process of martyrdom and kill them.”
“Process of martyrdom” means “suicide bombing,” for those without a program.
It’s often said the children are our future. If that’s the case in Gaza, it’s a future as imagined by George Orwell.
Translation and photos courtesy of Elder of Ziyon, where you can see many more.
Seeing a chance to strike a blow for freedom, capitalism, and oppressed child-lemonade vendors everywhere (as well as earn some good press), the people who run the Jekyll Island resort invited the girls who had their stand shut down by Marietta authorities to reopen their business on the island:
The Jekyll Island Authority invited the girls from Midway — 14-year-old Kasity Dixon, 12-year-old Tiffany Cassin and 10-year-old Skylar Roberts — to sell their lemonade at Summer Waves Water Park at the island state park. Island officials said the girls planned to be there Sunday.
The offer came after Midway police forced the girls to shut down their lemonade stand earlier this month. Police said the girls needed a business license, a peddler’s permit and a food permit to sell drinks, even in their own yard.
Jekyll Island staff not only invited the girls, but built them a new lemonade stand.
PS: In case you wonder why I harp on this issue, stupidity needs all the laughing, pointing, and mockery it can get. And these stompings of young kids’ fun are so mind-numbingly dumb that I can’t not mock them.
The news is grim, friends. I thought we had the threat contained to the Eastern seaboard (with that one tragic outbreak in Oregon), but it’s spread all the way to the heartland of America: a four-year old girl was operating a lemonade stand in Iowa… brace yourselves… without a license!
Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville last week, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.
An officer told Abigail Krutsinger’s father Friday that she couldn’t run the stand as RAGBRAI bicyclers poured into Coralville.
I mean, think what would have happened if the police hadn’t been there to shut down this rogue preschooler’s citrusy speakeasy? No business permit? The city wouldn’t get its cut! The consequences of no health inspection? Are you willing to risk an outbreak of cooties??
Whew! That was close!
Thank God the regulatory state that our dedicated public servants bureaucratic betters were on the job.
PS: Have you noticed that all these accused lemonade bootleggers have been girls? I smell a conspiracy…
PPS: Iowa, eh? I wonder where the candidates stand on the Lemonade Menace? Romney probably has his finger in the wind even now.
Norwegian police said Saturday that the death toll from Friday’s attacks has risen to 92 and confirmed that they have arrested a suspect whom they described as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.
In a news conference Saturday morning in Oslo, police confirmed that they had arrested Anders Behring Breivik, 32, on suspicion of orchestrating both the Oslo bombing and the youth-camp shooting rampage and had begun searching two apartments that he owns.
Breivik reportedly owns four properties including a farm on the outskirts of Oslo, allegedly to enable him to store legally a large amount of fertilizer.
Police would not comment on whether he acted alone but said no other arrests have been made. They said Breivik had no criminal record.
They would not speculate on his motives, but said, based own his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, he appeared to be a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.
Police say he was arrested by security forces at the Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya after the shootings. They said 84 people were killed on the island. At least seven were killed in the Oslo bombing.
Police Chief Oystein Maeland told reporters that they could not confirm the number of victims would stop at 92, adding that the attack had reached “catastrophic dimensions.”
He said officers were still “looking in the water around the island for more victims.”
It appears Breivik stalked the island for an hour-and-a-half, shooting the teens wherever he found them. The survivor accounts in the rest of the article are just horrifying. And there’s something dreadfully wrong with Norwegian law if the worst he can face is only 21 years in prison.
The issue of “why” remains unresolved and it likely won’t be settled for weeks, though it bears resemblances to both the attack on the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City for its anti-government angle and the massacre of children that occurred at Columbine and Dunblane.
The role of religion as motive is obviously going to play a role, however. Yesterday I hypothesized that this might have been an act of jihad — inspired by Islam. I wasn’t alone in my speculation, as the pattern of the attack fit previous jihadist operations: near-simultaneous attacks aimed at mass casualties (Bali, London, Madrid), the focus on children (Beslan), and a history of Islamic terror threats against Norway, including threats to kill government officials. Violent jihad is central to Islam. And lest anyone say that, even if this were an act of jihad, Islam wouldn’t permit the killing of innocent children, let me point out that Muhammad himself defined “innocent child” differently than we.
Now it appears that a narrative is building that this sociopath acted out of “Christian fundamentalism,” whatever that is. If that takes hold, and I say this as a thoroughly secular person, it would be grossly unfair and a slander against religious Christians because, unlike Islam, their faith forbids just this kind of action and makes it a mortal sin. The Fifth Commandment is, “You shall not murder.”
In other words, for Breivik to do what he did here or, more locally, for a Christian to gun down an abortionist, he necessarily acts against his religion. Not so with the jihadist, and I can see another false equivalence being created that needs to be pushed back against for the sake of moral and intellectual clarity and truth.
And the core truth at this time is that Breivik, regardless of whatever reason he did this, is an immensely evil human being, and that our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the Norwegian nation in this awful time.
After all, Muhammad married Aisha (his favorite wife) when she was six. But, lest you think him a lech, he did at least wait until she was nine before consummating the marriage.
From Saudi Arabia’s Iqra TV, listen as cleric Muhammad al-Arifi assures us that there is no minimum age for marriage in Islam:
Muhammad Al-’Arifi: There is no agreed-upon minimum age for the marriage of a boy or a girl. It depends upon their maturity. Let’s assume that someone wants to marry your 20-year-old daughter. But your daughter’s mentality and capabilities… She wouldn’t know how to handle it. You feel that her marriage is bound to fail, because she has no understanding of how she is supposed to behave. You think that this girl is not ready to get married. It would be best to wait two or three years.
We don’t want to marry her off, and then have her husband divorce her after 2-3 weeks, saying: “What is this?! This girl doesn’t know what to do, she has no appreciation of marital life. She knows nothing.” In such a case, it is better to delay marrying her off.
In the days of Prophet Muhammad and his companions, people would get married at a younger age. For example, how old was ‘Aisha when the Prophet Muhammad married her? I will give you a hint.
Member of panel of Saudi youth: She was seven years old.
Muhammad Al-’Arifi: And how old was she when he had sex with her?
Member of panel: Fourteen.
Muhammad Al-’Arifi: Fourteen?! No way, she was nine. You are getting married tonight and you still can’t count…
She was nine years old. People might think it is strange that he married such a young girl. But this was the age at which they used to get married. The proof is that when the Prophet told Abu Bakr that he wanted to marry ‘Aisha – what did Abu Bakr say? He said: “You are more than welcome, oh Messenger of Allah, but my daughter is already engaged.” At seven years old she was already engaged.
[…]
If a girl’s physical and mental build allows her to get married, it is okay for her to get married. There is no minimum age for a girl’s marriage set by Islam.
Al-Arifi tries to minimize the skincrawl-factor (1) by saying “this is how they used to do it, back then,” but arranged marriages of children to adults are still common in countries ruled by Islamic tradition, including Saudi Arabia. In fact, in 2009, a top Saudi cleric went so far to say that prohibiting the marriage of a 12-year old girl to an adult was unfair — to the girl.
And did you notice something telling about this panel? There was not a single woman on it. No one to give a woman’s point of view, because a woman’s point of view isn’t worth considering; she isn’t as intelligent as a man, you see, and so couldn’t really understand the subtle issues involved. This is one facet of the degraded state of women subject to Sharia law, which makes them little better than property under the control of men. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written movingly about this.
What is it with petty bureaucrats and children who want to make a few bucks? Is it a form of bullying? Should we alert Michelle Obama? Now a couple of martinets in Georgia have busted up a speakeasy are the latest warriors in the desperate fight against lemonade stands:
The girls had been operating for one day when Midway’s police chief and another officer cruised by. They had been trying to earn enough money to go to a water park.
The girls needed a business license, peddler’s permit and food permit to operate, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day or $180 per year.
Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.
Thank God the cops intervened when they did; who knows how many unsuspecting people might have bought a cold glass of lemonade on a hot summer day from girls who were –gasp!– unlicensed?
Really, what’s more “Norman Rockwell’s America” than some kids starting up a front-yard business? Like newspaper routes and washing cars, it gives a sense of responsibility, self-reliance, accomplishment, and teaches a little bit about business and capitalism. And shouldn’t we be happy that these girls wanted to earn the money on their own, rather than ask their parents for it?
Instead, they get a lesson in the dead hand of the State.
In the end, the young entrepreneurs took down their stand and did chores for the money, but they should never have had to. As much as I’m annoyed with the cops for not just showing some common sense (and maybe buying a glass or two), the idiots who passed these regulations need an educational kick in the keester. It’s one thing to regulate an adult’s business for health and safety reasons… but this?
What’s next? No kite-flying without filing a flight plan?
What is it with petty little bureaucrats and children’s lemonade stands? First it was some martinet in Oregon who made a 7-year old girl cry, and now a county inspector in Maryland not only shut down some kids’ stand, but he fined their parents $500:
You can make a fortune selling parking spots outside the US Open, but don’t even dream of setting up a lemonade stand.
A county inspector ordered the Marriott and Augustine kids to shut down the stand they set up on Persimmon Tree Rd, right next to Congressional. And after they allegedly ignored a couple of warnings, the inspector fined their parents $500.
“This gentleman from the county is now telling us because we don’t have a vendors license, the kids won’t be allowed to sell their lemonade,” Carrie Marriott told us, her voice trembling.
The kids can’t seem to understand it. “I don’t agree, I think the county is wrong.” “We’re sending the money to charity.”
A county official claimed there was some sort of risk because of traffic in the area, but the fact is that any vendor in the county, even a child selling ice-cold lemonade from his front lawn, has to register and get a license.
Give me a break. Is common sense that alien to government?
Indulging his taste for laughable moral equivalence, the Secretary General of the Arab League and possible future president of Egypt, Amr Moussa, called for a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect Gazans (read: “Hamas”) from Israel:
Arab League Chief Amr Mussa said Sunday that the organization would ask the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza, which Israel has pounded with air strikes in response to rocket fire.Condemning what it called Israel’s “brutal” aggression in Gaza, a gathering of the Arab League’s permanent delegates chaired by Oman called on the UN to convene its Security Council.
The meeting would “consider the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip on an urgent basis to stop its siege and impose a no-fly rule on the Israeli military to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip,” the Arab League said in a statement
Because, of course, what Israel does to protect its own people is just like what Qaddafi is doing to his own people in Libya. And yet, I can sympathize with Amr; if there’s no no-fly zone over Gaza, those evil Israeli bullies might retaliate for Hamas firing an anti-tank rocket at a bus load of schoolchildren:
The condition of the 16-year-old critically injured in the anti-tank missile attack on a school bus in the Negev on Thursday remains unchanged, Dr. Itzhak Lazar of Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center told Army Radio Friday morning.The boy suffered severe head trauma and received artificial respiration while unconscious when an anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip struck a school bus in the Negev on Thursday.
The missile, which was fired by Hamas, hit the bus moments after most of the children got off, while it was driving near Kibbutz Saad, about 2.5 km. from Gaza. Only two people were on the bus when it was hit – the driver, who was lightly injured, and the boy, who was en route to visit his grandmother. The bus driver is a friend of the family.
Immediately after the attack, Palestinians fired more than 45 mortar shells and Katyusha and Kassam rockets into Israel.
Whose “brutal aggression” are we talking about, Mr. Secretary General?
Hamas should consider itself lucky that, unlike Hamas, Israel is civilized and won’t give the Gaza Strip the carpet-bombing it so richly deserves.
RELATED: One of the Katyushas fired into Israel was intercepted by the IDF’s new “Iron Dome” tactical missile defense system, showing that missile defense can work even on a short-range, tactical level. McKittrick at Closing Velocity has more on this important development.
As violence in the cartel wars grows worse in Mexico, more and more Mexican families are sending their children to school in the United States. For school officials in border districts, this means having to deal more and more with children suffering severe mental and emotional trauma from the horrors they’ve witnessed. In the El Paso Independent School District, counselor Susan Crews describes having to deal with children who’ve been through Hell:
In border cities, it’s common for students from Mexico to go to school in the U.S. Some were born in the U.S. but raised in Mexico, and their families feel they’ll have better opportunities if they go to an American school. But in recent years, motivation to cross the border has changed. Horrific drug-related violence in Mexico is forcing some families to flee, often in a hurry.
Susan Crews, lead counselor for the El Paso Independent School District, has seen what witnessing that violence can do to a child.
“I have students whose mothers have been decapitated,” Crews says. “I have a student in one of the middle schools — when he visited his family in Juarez there were three heads on sticks along the path were he goes.”
Crews is a grandmotherly figure who wears her hair in a bow-shaped bun atop her head. She says never in her 43 years as a counselor has she encountered such hellish stories.
“The counselor had contacted me because this eighth-grader was having a trauma reaction,” Crews says. “He was not able to control his bladder; he was not sleeping at night.”
Crews is the woman the district sends when there’s a major trauma at a school. In the past two years, she’s responded to the deaths of four students — all killed in Mexico.
“My experience has been atrocious,” she says. “I mean it’s just been overwhelming in my opinion.”
Perhaps a measure of the scale of the problem, Ft. Hood Ft. Bliss in El Paso has been offering training in counseling those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — the kind they offer to soldiers returning from a war.
Another in our “Teach the children” series of posts on the misuse of children’s television to educate Muslim children in Jew-hatred. In this clip, the host of “Ammo Alaa” educates a toddler and a guy in a rabbit suit about why Jerusalem really belongs to the Arabs:
TV host: Let’s see how we should answer the disgusting Jews, who say that Jerusalem belongs to them. What proof do we have that Jerusalem is Islamic? We tell our friends that… Am I making you fall asleep, Mr. Sa’d, or what? Wake up Sa’d… Have a carrot… First of all, we tell the Jews that the Arabs lived in the blessed city of Jerusalem, more than 2,000 years before the first Jew settled in there.
2,000 is a very big number. Not one year, not two, not ten, not a hundred – 2,000 years. That’s the first thing. We tell them that the Arabs lived in Jerusalem 2,000 years before the first Jew set foot in it. Okay? Okay!
The highlighted portion is a frequent lie told in the Islamic world: the truth is that the site of Jerusalem had been inhabited since roughly 4,000 B.C. and that, by the middle of the second millennium B.C., it was a Canaanite city. It was conquered by King David around 1,000 B.C. — all this long before the Arabs came rampaging out of Arabia in the 7th century A.D.
But I guess that’s too complicated for a kid’s show and it wouldn’t fit the antisemitic narrative, so we’ll stick with the convenient lie, instead.
Bear in mind that this program aired in Egypt last December, not years ago, unlike the previous clip. Think this isn’t fertile cultural and intellectual ground for the Muslim Brotherhood?
RELATED: Along with “Mr. Sa’d” the sleepy rabbit, Islamic children’s TV has a nauseating habit of using cute animal characters to teach antisemitic lessons. In the past we’ve had Farfur the mouse, Nahoul the bee, and Assud the Jew-eating rabbit. (I wonder if he’s a cousin of Mr. Sa’d?)
I guess their motto is “Educating tomorrow’s genocidal maniacs — today!”
You want to know just how enlightened and tolerant the Islamic world is? Watch as a Saudi Egyptian toddler on Iqra TV in 2002 is praised for how well she’s learned her lessons in antisemitism:
But then, women are little better than chattel in Islam, so why not use them as living bombs?
The Taliban and al Qaeda have established female suicide bombing cells in remote areas of northwestern Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan. The female suicide bombers have struck in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The existence of the cells, which appeared evident after female suicide bombers attacked twice over the past five months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was confirmed by a 12-year-old Pakistani girl named Meena Gul.
Gul, who said she was trained to be a “human bomb,” was detained by Pakistani police in the Munda area in Pakistan’s northwestern district of Dir, according to the Times of India.
“Gul said that women suicide bombers were trained for their deadly task in small cells on both sides of the porous border and were dispatched to their missions with a sermon, ‘God will reward you with a place in heaven.’”
Oh, and did I mention some of the women are just girls? Yes, for the valiant jihadi, it’s women and children first. Preferably in the same person.
A long time ago, someone explained to me the First Rule of Texas Common Law: “He needed killing.”
Well, these barbarians need killing.
RELATED: These “holy warriors” also exploit emotionally abused women, the elderly, and the developmentally disabled. Such wonderful people.
Libertarian Reason.TV gives the President an “F,” and I have to agree. Narrated by Nick Gillespie, the video flunks Obama in three areas:
More money for no improvement
Policies that limit choice, when school choice has been proven effective
Unions before education
Watch the video for an explanation:
With regard to the second reason, I’ve written before about the rebirth of the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina and how a voucher system enabling school choice has lead to greatly improved test scores there.
But don’t bother a progressive reactionary, such as the President, with empirical evidence.
More than two years ago, I wrote about a mind-numbingly offensive UK government program to spot early signs of racism in infants and pre-school children:
Does your three-year old sometimes refuse to play with others? Does he occasionally turn his nose up at new foods? Could it be that, rather than simply being behavior normal to all toddlers, these are early-warning signs that your baby is a racist??
Well, two years and a quarter-million children later, we now know the vast size of this generation of tiny Klan members:
Three-year-olds being labelled bigots by teachers as 250,000 children accused of racism
Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged ‘racist’ language, it was claimed last night.
Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.
More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said.
Writing in Prospect magazine, she said: ‘The more we seek to measure racism, the more it seems to grow.
‘Teachers are now required to report incidents of racist abuse among children as young as three to local authorities, resulting in a massive increase of cases and reinforcing the perception that we need an army of experts to manage race relations from cradle to grave.
‘Does this heightened awareness of racism help to stamp it out? Quite the opposite. It creates a climate of suspicion and anxiety.’
There’s an old saying: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.” Convinced that racism is everywhere, these multicultural loons are tarring thousands of young children as little proto-fascists. Are they now to be watched throughout their school years? Counseled against the dark racist thoughts that lurk ever within them? Taught to suspect the culture and the parents who must have instilled these hateful prejudices in them? Why not just take them away from their parents and indoctrinate raise them in community creches?
Maybe, just maybe, if a three-year old doesn’t want to eat curry, it’s because he doesn’t like it, not because he hates Pakistanis.
When the (Social) Democrats were shoving ObamaCare down our throats, one of the trumps they played was the Absolute Moral Authority Card: do it for the children!
Now that ObamaCare has passed, insurance companies have to deal with the new costs imposed by the legislation. Since the government threatens to break their legs if they raise prices, there’s only one rational response: cut services.
And thus it is that insurance companies are eliminating children-only plans.
Following up on this report, Reason.TV takes another look at the sweeping reforms of the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina, changes that saw the enrollment at Charter and other private schools climb to 70% of the city’s students. In this case, the documentary focuses on one private academy and the satisfaction of teachers, parents, and students with their new arrangements:
Granted, this is only one case and it’s meant to showcase the benefits of a voucher system, but, given the empirical success as measured in test scores and the parents’ reports of how much their children look forward to going to school, isn’t something like this worth trying in other poorly performing districts, such as LA Unified?
From Reason.TV, a short documentary about how unions blocked a bill in Sacramento that would have made an easily administered drug quickly available to children suffering from severe seizures:
I’m certainly no expert on the issue, but it’s hard for me to believe the unions’ objections outweigh the need for swift treatment of children in an emergency.
Aw, come on! You’re going to shut down a 7-year old’s lemonade stand because she didn’t have a $120 business license? Are you nuts? What’s next? No dirt-lot softball because the kids aren’t wearing regulation knee pads?
Even the granola and Birkenstocks crowd in Oregon wouldn’t stand for it:
The people staffing the booths next to them encouraged the two to stay, telling them the inspectors had no right to kick them out of the neighborhood gathering. They also suggested that they give away the lemonade and accept donations instead and one of them made an announcement to the crowd to support the lemonade stand.
That’s when business really picked up — and two inspectors came back, Fife said. Julie started crying, while her mother packed up and others confronted the inspectors. “It was a very big scene,” Fife said.
Sense finally prevailed: the Multnomah County Chairman apologized for his martinet inspectors. No word on if the inspectors were ordered to much-needed common sense classes.
LINKS: Allahpundit thinks the Republicans should buy the picture (see initial link) and slap it on every flier and mailing from now until Election Day. At Big Government, Bob Ewing sees this as an example of licensing gone wild. More from Sister Toldjah.
Get a good education, get a better life. It’s been part of the American dream almost as long as there’s been an America. From the Irish and Italian immigrants in the East to Asian and Hispanic newcomers in the West, parents have worked their butts off so their kids could go to good schools and have what they themselves didn’t.
So why is it that President Obama denies the poor children of the District of Columbia that same path to a better life? Why did he kill a voucher-scholarship program that greatly improved graduation rates? Why did he act in the face of strong evidence to the contrary?
According to an evaluation released yesterday by the US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has “significantly improved students’ chances of graduating from high school.” The same study finds that “parents had higher satisfaction and rated schools as safer if their child was offered or used an OSP scholarship.”
With these dramatic success indicators, it must be no surprise that DC OSP is the only federal education program that the Obama Administration is intent on killing.
Dr. Matt Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute reports:
“…students who were randomly selected to receive vouchers had an 82% graduation rate. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the students who didn’t receive vouchers. Students who actually used their vouchers had graduation rates that were 21% higher. Even better, the subgroup of students who received vouchers and came from designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI schools) had graduation rates that were 13 percentage points higher than the same subgroup of students who weren’t offered vouchers–and the effect was 20 percentage points higher for the SINI students who used their vouchers!”
So, naturally, the Obama administration’s Department of Education killed the program. Why? Part of it is, of course, due to the progressive-statist philosophy that underlies the administration, the Democrats, and their allies in the teachers’ unions: government technocrats are best able to provide educational opportunity that reaches the most people and is “fairest” to all, rich and poor. That made some sense as a theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as efforts were being made to broaden the reach of education and improve quality through standardization. But, as the recent post-Great Society history of public education has shown, larger and larger public school systems are not providing uniformly good or even safe schools to our children. Indeed, as DC shows, they’re often miserable failures.
Another reason for Democratic and, in particular, the administration’s hostility to free-market voucher programs is the heavy influence of teacher’s unions as Democratic activists and donors: both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers give the vast majority of their donations to Democrats, as well as contributing workers to local campaign offices. In return they expect the Democrats to protect union fiefdoms, regardless of whether they’re actually providing a good education and preparation for a better future. This is the Chicago Way: groups over individuals, and whoever gives you the most money and support gets the payoff.
Facts and children be damned.
AFTERTHOUGHT: And isn’t it odd that the President’s children attend one of the toniest, most exclusive private schools in DC? One that the poor children of DC no longer have a chance to go to, now that Obama has killed the voucher program? Bet that makes parents in the District happy.
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