“Bill de Blasio’s War for Poverty” is outlined by Bobby Jindal in the New York Post:
The mayor’s open warfare against Eva Moskowitz, who founded a network of 22 charter schools, has all the markings of a petulant tyrant holding low-income students hostage. De Blasio has said, “There’s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should get free rent” — as if the 6,700 students in the charter schools she runs were a mere afterthought in his personal vendetta against a fellow Democrat.
Last May, he told a teachers-union forum that Moskowitz “has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.” Yes, by all means, let’s not “tolerate” someone behind a movement to empower parents and students with more — and better — education choices. This woman who is making it possible for low-income kids to have an equal opportunity for a quality education must be stopped.
In Louisiana, we know a thing or two about government authorities meddling in parents’ right to choose the schools that are best for their children. President Obama’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit trying to impede our program that gives parents of low-income students in failing schools an opportunity to attend a better school. Fully nine in 10 students participating in the program are minorities, yet the Justice Department seeks to block the program on the grounds that it would lead to racial segregation. The lawsuit would be funny if it weren’t so sad — and if the lives of so many young African-American children weren’t at stake.
Lost in all the outrage manufactured by Mayor de Blasio is one simple fact: School choice works.
In New York, four in five charters outperformed comparable public schools in recent state tests; Moskowitz’s schools scored in the top 1 percent in math, and top 7 percent in English. In the president’s hometown of Chicago, one network of charter schools boasts a college graduation rate three times the average of Chicago public schools.
Yet these achievements are no matter to the left, which still clings to the shibboleths of a one-size-fits-all, Industrial Revolution-era education agenda dictated by government and teachers unions.
Read the whole thing. How do we drag the left out of the 1930s and the Cargo Cult of the New Deal and its Texas-sized successor, the Great Society?
Update: Deroy Murdock of NRO on “Bill de Blasio: George Wallace on the Hudson.”
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