The title of this article comes from a comment made by my friend Kevin Chavous who appeared on the PBS NewsHour April 1st with National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel to discuss the Indiana Supreme Court decision upholding the largest school voucher system in the country. Here's the full statement:
"Well, we know what works. Yes, we know what works.
Accountability works, higher standards, higher expectations. And part of the challenge is we have got to figure out the best way to fly the plane while we fix it. Fixing it is all the things that Dennis talked about even more. We have got to look at work rules. We have got to look at paying at our quality teachers more and firing the bad teachers.
But as we have seen since "A Nation at Risk" 30 years ago, that's going to take years of work. In the meantime, half the kids of color are dropping out of American schools. Our good schools aren't as good as they used to be. And even before I finish this sentence, Hari [PBS reporter Hari Sreenivasan], a child is going to drop out.
What do we do to help those kids that we know are consigned to bad schools? In the D.C. scholarship program, we know that 94 percent of those kids who are getting those vouchers are graduating; 89 percent are going to college. And 100 percent of those kids who come from families with a combined family income of $24,000 dollars came from schools that were failing.
So, at the end of the day, we have got to fly this plane while we fix it. And to do the accountability stuff and the long-range stuff, some of the things that Dennis talked about, it may take another 30 years. But we can't afford as a nation to let the sameness of what we have been doing continue to cripple our children and our future."
I love the urgency of Mr. Chavous' remarks. We know we are tens of thousands of high quality education seats short in the nation's capital. So as we allow competition to fix our public education system why don't we expand the Opportunity Scholarship Program to assist many more than the $1,600 children currently enrolled in the plan?
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