Fresh from his overwhelming re-election victory, Gov. Bobby Jindal has unveiled an audacious education reform agenda that built around an expanded school voucher program, new charter schools, a rigorous teacher evaluation system and a revamped tenure system. With the Louisiana state legislature set to go back into session this coming March, the governor is expected to win broad support for many of the proposed changes.

If so, the voucher program, which is now limited to New Orleans, would go statewide. Low-income families with a child enrolled in a school that has received a C rating or lower could use public dollars to cover the cost of private school tuition.

Jindal also favors using the new “value-added” teacher assessment to deny automatic tenure for teachers that do not received high marks. Beginning in the 2012-2013 school year, 50 percent of evaluations for teachers in academic classes will be based on the LEAP and iLEAP test scores, while the other 50 percent will be based more on subjective criteria built around classroom observations to determine how effective instructors are in motivating students. A pilot program that involves nine school districts and one of the charter schools is already underway.

“This is historic change and an important step forward for our education system,” said  Brigitte Nieland, vice-president and communications director of the Education and Workforce Development Council for Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI). “For the first time, teachers will be evaluated based on how their students perform. This is about transparency and accuracy.”

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It’s not every day you will see a governmental body, in this case a school board, create competition for itself.  But that’s precisely what the Douglas County, Colorado school board did.

It created a unique, if not unprecedented, voucher program, allowing tax dollars to follow Douglas County students to the school of their choice.

Every single school system in America should adopt this model.  Sadly, parents who need school choice the most tend to live in troubled urban school districts that fight to keep children trapped within geographic boundaries.

But in Douglas County, leaders understand students have a right to the education of their choice, even if it is not within the public system.

John Carson, president of the school board, said recently at a National School Choice Week event celebrating the move: “We all realize that we’ve made two big mistakes in public education.  There’s no choice – or limited choice – there’s not enough competition, and we’ve ceded so much of our children’s education to special interest groups.  And that needs to end.”

Bravo.  If only we had more governmental leaders like Carson, just imagine the improved impression that Americans would have of public education today.

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When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker curtailed collective bargaining privileges for public sector workers (formerly known as public servants), it resulted in all-out political war in Madison.

Walker won the showdown, and now the state can get its financial house in order.

But that doesn’t mean Walker is done taking on the unions.

One of the governor’s next goals is to improve the state’s public education system by giving more kids access to quality schools. That means expanding Milwaukee’s wildly successful voucher program to even more families. And that means a raucous showdown with the teacher unions.

As part of his budget proposal, Walker wants to lift income restrictions on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program so that families earning up to 325 percent of the federal poverty line would quality for vouchers, the School Reform News reports.

Walker also wants Milwaukee voucher students to have access to all private schools in Milwaukee County, not just those within the city.

The voucher program was established in 1990, and is the oldest program of its kind in the nation.

The reality is vouchers are working in places like Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. because it gives kids a way out — an alternative to the drop out factories known as public schools.

The Milwaukee voucher program has been enormously successful. EAGtv recently visited a school in Milwaukee that takes kids of all races, economic backgrounds and social classes and  prepares them for life. The school, Eastbrook Academy, graduated its first high school class last spring, and reports that each graduate is currently studying in a four-year college program.

Those who value “social justice” should be the biggest supporters of school choice and vouchers. As EAGtv’s Milwaukee story shows, school choice benefits kids by allowing them to attend a school they otherwise couldn’t afford.  It’s “spreading the wealth around,” in the form of quality schooling.

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Let’s understand why school choice is important. As in the free marketplace, competition creates better schools, public as well as private, better teachers, and thus reforms education- unlike pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into public schools to get nothing in return, which is what we do now. School vouchers do not carry any additional expense for a state because they primarily transfer money between schools, a fact that worries most union-loving Democrats because taxpayer money would likely be diverted from failing public schools to charter and private schools.

Advocates of school choice had three good reasons to rejoice within the past week. As reported here, on Capitol Hill, while House Democrats voted to protect public sector unions, Republicans passed the SOAR Act, which followed through with their pledge to reinstate the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, the hallmark school choice program for low income children in the nation’s capital. While it remains to be seen whether the Senate will vote to pass the SOAR Act and, if so, whether the President will sign onto it, the Republicans are sticking to their conservative agenda and using their constitutional authority to promote reform of education through an expansion of charter schools and private school vouchers.

Meanwhile, taking the lead among the states, Indiana’s Republican-led state House passed the most expansive school voucher program in the nation, pushing ahead with school choice not just for low-income families, but for those in the middle-income bracket as well. Parents earning up to $60,000 will be eligible for vouchers and, within several years, there will be no limit on the number of children who can receive them. Despite a five-week walkout to Illinois by Indiana state House Democrats, the bill is likely to pass since Republicans control both Houses and the governor’s seat.

The third portion of this triple crown lies in a positive, but painfully narrow, decision by the Supreme Court. On April 4th, the nation’s highest court decided, in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, that tax credits that pay for children to go to church-affiliated schools cannot be challenged on constitutional grounds.

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It’s budget time again. And Democrats are once again taking down and dusting off all their human shields and straw people, in order to convince those Americans, who are still unable to think for themselves, that they will die if the government doesn’t provide them with every form of aid from the day of their birth.

So far we have the Obama administration declaring that at least 70,000 children will die if the Republicans pass their spending cuts. No hyperlink to the authoritative study on how they came up with this number because, well, there is none. But, if children could be endangered in any way due to a cut in a program, could we skip the farm subsidies so that we can still make sure kids don’t die if we can help it? Make a note of that.

Then we have all the women who will be dying of breast cancer because they won’t be able to avail themselves of a mammogram at Planned Parenthood if this organization is defunded. Trouble is, Planned Parenthood doesn’t seem to offer mammograms. Oops.

Nancy Pelosi says the nation will lose 1,000,000 jobs if the Republicans pass their cuts. In Democratic lingo, that’s lost and destroyed, instead of saved and created. But, they use the same math to get their numbers.

Such concern for children and families. Yet, on Wednesday of this week, no concern was shown by the House Democrats when Republicans passed the SOAR Act (H.R. 471), which reauthorizes and expands the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, the hallmark school choice program for low income children in the nation’s capital.

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I have to say, I never thought I’d read a blogger on NRO endorse the notion that all of the money you earn belongs to the state. I certainly never thought that read it twice in a year. But here we are, again . . . and I feel compelled to engage in an excruciating debate with Robert VerBruggen of Phi Beta Con.

Question: Is there any substantive difference between the government cutting you a check and cutting your taxes?

VerBruggen agrees with the Progressives on the Supreme Court I wrote about recently: Nope, all your money is the government’s!

But his odd insistence that government checks and tax cuts are the same began months ago, when he expounded more extensively if not coherently on this same subject.

I attempted to illustrate where he had gone wrong in his thinking by taking his positions to an extreme. To my surprise, VerBruggen agreed with my modest proposal to eliminate all charitable tax deductions and credits and capitulate comprehensively to the welfare state

More specifically: “The feds should eliminate the charitable tax deduction and send out the average (tax-forgiven) amount donated per adult to every citizen in the country to donate as they wish!”

VerBruggen supports a “charity entitlement” over charitable tax deductions. He favors a “social security” model for “kind of a ‘forced charity’” over tax deductions.

I’m not sure if he’s thought his rather radical and odd argument through to the end point.

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments in an appeal of a 9th Circuit decision, Winn v Garriott, a challenge to one of Arizona’s education tax credit programs. It’s been getting more press than I’d expected, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today. That’s great news, because the case is far more important than just saving a program that improves education and expands educational freedom.

The 9th Circuit’s reasoning arrogates to the state all property , dissolving the distinction between public and private funds as well as public and private choices. It is a disturbing, dangerous decision.

They assert that tax cuts are the equivalent of government funds, a conclusion possible only if one assumes that all personal income belongs by default to the state rather than to the individual who earned the money. It asserts as well that when taxpayers and parents privately choose to support religious educational organizations, they are in violation of the First Amendment. This reasoning blatantly ignores the logic and plain meaning of the 2002 Zelman decision upholding school vouchers, among others.

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To close out 2009, the Democrats, who supposedly care so much about ‘the children,’ gave the DC children a special gift–they killed the successful voucher program–effectively banishing them back to horrid DC public schools.  As I reported on New Year’s Eve 2009:

The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape. The Heartland Institute reports:

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

Yet, despite the clearly positive results and the proven success of this program, Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jose Serrano, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Secretary Arne Duncan worked together to kill the OSP. Funding the program only for existing children shrinks the program each year, compromises the federal evaluation of the program, denies entry to the siblings of existing participants, and punishes those children waiting in line by sentencing them to failing and often unsafe schools. [emphasis mine]

The final report on the OSP program was issued in June 2010.  An editorial in the Washington Post agrees that ending the program should not have happened and deserves a second chance:

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Harry Reid’s comments have prompted a warning… to Republicans!

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton is warning Republicans against trying to make hay out of Harry Reid’s comments about Barack Obama’s skin color and lack of a “Negro dialect.”

The nonvoting member of Congress said Reid’s opponents “will not find a welcome mat in the black community” if they try to seize on his remarks.

Thanks to the white washing of black history by liberal academics, the Democrat Party, and the media, Republicans don’t have a welcome mat in the black community now. Talk about a threat with no teeth….

That said, Eleanor Holmes Norton (IF she can be intellectually honest with herself) should look at all the things Democrats like Reid have done TO blacks instead of for them.

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An interesting document found its way to my inbox last weekend. It was a PowerPoint presentation of an analysis done by the New Jersey Education Association, regarding its efforts to re-elect Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.

The document can be found at NEAexposed.com.

Citing “Electile Dysfunction,” meaning the polls were telling them that voters, including teachers, weren’t as enthusiastic about Corzine as they would like, the union’s Director of Government Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, proposed a double-dose remedy: “A robust member-to-member campaign,” followed by “an independent communications campaign to inoculate the public.”

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Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:

Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.

NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:

Chanin’s honesty was, in a way, refreshing. For too long the NEA, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have been hiding their intentions behind the guise of student advocacy, using children as human shields to block criticism.

But the truth is that the NEA and AFT are huge national labor unions with political agendas and have a great deal of influence with state and national lawmakers.  NEAexposed.com and AFTexposed.com are designed to bring attention to those facts.

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