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August 13, 2008
Obama Wants to Pull the Ladder Up After Him
Posted by Dave Blount at August 13, 2008 8:27 AM
Barack Obama has had more going for him than his daring name and trendy ethnicity. He never would have gotten where he was but for school choice. But now that he's joined the elite, he wants to pull the ladder up after him, lest others follow. As Pittsburgh's Valley Independent observes:
When Barack Obama was young and poor but lucky, he received a scholarship to Honolulu's prestigious Punahou School, an elite private K-12 school where tuition now tops $16,000 a year.
Today, Sen. Obama sends his two daughters to a private school in Chicago that costs $15,528 a year — for kindergarten.
And yet our presumptive president disses school choice because, while "it might benefit some kids at the top," it "leaves a lot of kids at the bottom."
Typically of liberal Newspeak, Obama is saying the exact opposite of what he means — which is that he wants them left at the bottom, on behalf of his generous supporters in the malignant teachers unions that are systematically destroying education in America:
It's not privileged kids who need school choice; they can afford private schools or can move to neighborhoods with decent public schools. It's the poorest kids — those stuck in wrecked inner-city districts — who choice helps the most.
Charter schools, voucher plans, opportunity scholarships and other alternatives exist in our broken cities, but they are still too rare and don't begin to satisfy the demand.
Obama — himself a poster child for the efficacy of school choice — has a unique chance to invigorate the public-private debate in education. Instead, he panders to teacher unions by expressing disdain for the "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."
It's easy to translate the liberal dialect into English. When they say "change" and "hope," they mean "state-imposed stasis" and "despair."
On a tip from Oiao.
