Guest post by Sister Toldjah. On Twitter as @sistertoldjah.
Fox News reports on efforts from Obama’s DOJ to halt Louisiana’s school voucher program, and the push-back efforts of Gov. Jindal and other state officials in response (bolded emphasis added by me):
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is fighting back against the Obama administration’s push to stop his state’s school voucher program, which allows children from low-income areas to attend better performing schools.
The Republican governor’s office announced Thursday the State of Louisiana has filed a motion to delay a petition from the Justice Department that is trying to stop the state from distributing school vouchers in any district that remains under a desegregation court order.
In papers filed last month in the U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the Justice Department said Louisiana distributed vouchers in 2012-13 to nearly 600 public school students in districts that are still under such orders, and “many of those vouchers impeded the desegregation process.”
Jindal argues the Obama administration is pushing to stop the program to satisfy their union allies at the expense of poor children seeking a better education. He says the administration’s claim the program is violating a desegregation law is a “backwards” argument.
“Despite the fact that 90 percent of students in the program are minorities and 100 percent of students are from low-income families, the President and Attorney General are trying to deny equal opportunity to these children by using rules that were set up to prevent discrimination,” Jindal said in a press release. “It’s backwards and immoral.”
[…]
In arguing that the voucher program had hurt desegregation efforts, the Justice Department cited an example of Independence Elementary School in Tangipahoa Parish. It said the school lost five white students because of the voucher program, “reinforcing the racial identity of the school as a black school.”
It also said Celilia Primary School in St. Martin Parish School District is a majority-white school in a majority-black district, and it lost six black students because of vouchers, “reinforcing the school’s racial identity as a white school.”
State Education Superintendent John White told the Times-Picayune last month that almost all the students using vouchers are black and “it’s a little ridiculous” to argue that students’ departure to voucher schools makes their home school systems less white. He also said it’s ironic that rules established to combat racism were being called on to keep black students in failing schools.
Boom!
Isn’t it fascinating to watch how far the left will go to deny school choice opportunities for parents, especially when you consider their motto for decades has been all about “the right to choose”? We saw that play out here in North Carolina during the (ultimately successful) push by the GOP-led General Assembly (our state legislature) for more school choices for parents. Democrats absolutely flipped out over the idea of education money being funneled away from public schools in order to give low-income families more educational choices. Apparently to the left, the “right to choose” should only be extended to women who want to terminate innocent unborn life and not to mothers and fathers who want the option to educate their kids in a school NOT of the state’s choosing.
You really can’t make this up.
(Cross-posted from my blog)
