Further proof of educrat hostility to school choice comes from Albany, New York, where “A Better Choice” (ABC) is offering to rescue 650 kids — an entire student body — from the worst school in the city. Giffen Elementary is a miserable failure, and ABC, with more than a million dollars offered by Virginia Gilder, a New York City investor and philanthropist, is providing its hostages a way out: scholarships for everybody, good for 50 percent of private-school tuition up to $ 1,000 annually, for three to six years, depending on the age of the student. The program will begin in the next school year.
Giffen parents are responding, naturally, with glee and gratitude. Not so the local education establishment. ABC, said one functionary, will be “cherry- picking some of our best students.” (Half of the student body is currently unable to meet the state’s minimum reading requirements.) The president of the Albany school board said that the public schools are “the only system that I . . . would encourage students to get into.” And a teachers-union mouthpiece (who refers to ABC as “A Big Con”) declared, “These people [are] lobbying to take money away from their public schools.”
So, thanks to Mrs. Gilder, and with no expenditure of public funds, 650 kids will have a chance for a good education — and the education establishment hates it.
