Years ago, George Wallace stood in an Alabama schoolhouse door to keep black children from getting in for an education. Today, John McCain should stand in front of an inner-city schoolhouse door demanding that the children be let out for an education. Wallace became an enduring symbol of the terrible system of segregation that kept people down for too long. McCain can become a new symbol of people being liberated from another terrible system that has also kept them down for too long.
How many more generations of inner-city children will be cheated by intransigent public education unions of the tutelage they need to share in the American dream before somebody stands up and demands the liberation of school choice? Half of the inner-city children who should graduate from their local public schools won’t, and many of those who do get diplomas will barely be able to read, write and calculate at minimally acceptable levels. These public school products will enter a world in which most will be unable to get and keep good jobs, many will become wards of the state, either by way of the welfare or the penal systems, and, most tragically, more will pass their dysfunction to the next generation.
And think of the legions of successful doctors, entrepreneurs, scientists, corporate executives, homebuilders, engineers and public servants these lost generations of America’s inner-city children could have become.
As Bill McGurn pointed out in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, their champion will have to be McCain because Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are trapped in the political chains of the education unions’ uncompromising agenda. Many, if not a clear majority, of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this August will either be members of the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers, which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two decades fighting proposals to open inner-city schoolhouse doors through opportunity scholarships, vouchers and other forms of school choice. And for the most part, the unions have blocked these efforts, dooming millions more inner-city kids to bleak futures.
The solution is to empower parents to choose their children’s schools. Putting the power of education choice will bust the monopoly of the education unions and force all schools, public and private, to compete for paying students. Such competition will give inner-city parents and children the freedom to break the chains of generations of poverty and failing public schools. This is the first civil rights issue of the 21st century.
