All In Favor of Equal Opportunity!
December 3 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, The Left, Unions, US CourtsLouisiana Judge Timothy Kelley sure is a fast writer. Only hours after the end of a two-day trial, the Balzac of the judiciary rolled out a 39-page opinion striking down the state’s pioneering voucher program as unconstitutional. Could it be that he knew how he was going to rule before the trial?
The state district judge in Baton Rouge ruled that the program is illegal because it pays for the vouchers through the state’s Minimum Foundation Program, which “equitably distributes” state funds for individual school districts. He conceded that the vouchers are intended to help students escape awful schools, but he said this “ignores the good of the individual students who are left behind in those schools deemed underperforming.”
In other words, better that all students fail together, rather than let parents take the money that is supposed to go to public education and try to get their child actually educated. This is the kind of perverse egalitarianism promoted by the teachers unions that brought the lawsuit. No student can ever escape their clutches, lest parents discover that maybe there’s a better way.
Louisiana’s program only covers about 4,900 students because in its first year it was limited because of space constraints. The size of the voucher differs by districts, but in many cases the cost of private tuition is less than the state allocates per student as part of its Minimum Foundation Program. The 11-year-old student we wrote about last week, Gabriel Evans, received a voucher of only $4,315 to attend a Catholic school.
The good news is that Governor Bobby Jindal and the Institute for Justice plan to appeal and have reason to think they’ll prevail. The Minimum Foundation Program already includes funding for non-district-operated public schools and uses state money beyond an “equitable” amount. The appeal notice will also suspend the trial judge order until the appeal is heard so the students won’t have to change schools midyear.
But that hardly mitigates the disgrace that a reform passed on a bipartisan vote to save children from one of the developed world’s worst school systems has to go through such travails. Where are the liberals who claim to favor equal opportunity?
A version of this article appeared December 3, 2012, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Lost in Louisiana.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.