Betraying D.C.'s Children
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Go ahead and try to explain to Janet Butler why a voucher won't make a dime's worth of difference in the life of a District of Columbia schoolchild. But you'd best be prepared when she pulls out a pretty potent Exhibit A: her daughter.
Today 17-year-old Noree'na Jazzmine Dowtin is headed off to college, and she speaks excitedly about her dreams of becoming a doctor -- a gynecologist/obstetrician, to be precise. And while teenage daughters and their mothers famously disagree, on this issue this mother and daughter see completely eye to eye: Without the lifeline provided her by a private voucher from the Washington Scholarship Fund, Jazzmine would have been another D.C. education casualty. "I would have been swallowed up," she says.
Alas, not everyone supports the current congressional
push to let others just like Jazzmine escape one of the most
dysfunctional school districts in the nation. A telling vignette
outside last week's meeting of the Senate Appropriations Committee
illustrates the hypocrisies. Back in 1997, both Republican Arlen
Specter and Democrat Mary Landrieu voted for D.C. vouchers, though the
move was later vetoed by Bill Clinton.
But now, at the moment of truth, with a president in
the White House who has made clear his eagerness to make such a bill a
reality, Sens. Specter and Landrieu upset a critical Appropriations
Committee vote by switching from yea to nay. What makes their flip-flop
especially nasty is that this move to undercut choice to the
overwhelmingly black and Latino students of the district comes from two
white senators who each chose private schools for their own children. Even a child can spot the contradiction. Outside the
committee's meeting room last week, nine-year-old Mosiyah Hall, a D.C.
public school student himself, politely asked Sen. Landrieu where she
sent her own children to school. "Georgetown Day," came the response, a
reference to one of Washington's most exclusive private schools.
Mosiyah's mother says an obviously agitated Sen. Landrieu then came
over to a group of local mothers to explain that a voucher would be no
help for them here, because even with the $7,500 voucher this bill
offers, they still couldn't afford Georgetown Day. "It was an ugly moment," says Virginia Walden-Ford,
head of D.C. Parents for School Choice and one of the moms
demonstrating. Ms. Butler's been there herself. Her first daughter
had no problems with the D.C. schools. But by Jazzmine's time, more
than a decade later, she says the system had grown cold and
unresponsive. She tells of making appointments with teachers who never
showed, and of showing up for what she thought were parent-teacher
meetings that turned out to be appeals for more money. The last straw
was when she found out that Jazzmine's entire French class was spending
its time in the hallway because the school didn't have a teacher. Academics weren't her only concern. She worried too
about peer pressure and the temptations of drugs and sex in a system
insufficiently attentive to its charges. "With me being a single parent
I didn't want to come home to a latchkey kid with a belly [pregnancy]
and everyone saying, 'I don't know what happened.'" She tried home-schooling for a while. And just when
hope was running out, the Washington Scholarship Fund delivered. Now in
its 10th year, the privately administered fund is at any one time
helping about 1,200 D.C. children with vouchers that deliberately pay
only a portion of tuition costs, to help ensure parental commitment.
The $3,000 they awarded Jazzmine didn't pay the full freight, but it
did provide the margin to get her to Emerson Preparatory School, the
capital's oldest coed college prep school. It proved a godsend. "Parents of private school kids
can go to their school and say, 'I expect,'" says Ms. Butler. "What a
difference that was." The folks at the Washington Scholarship Fund are proud
of Jazzmine's success, but they report hers is one of many stories of
lives changed by the opportunity even a modest voucher can bring. One
of their students this year even earned an appointment to the U.S.
Naval Academy in Annapolis. In a D.C. school district where two out of
every five kids never see a high school diploma, moreover, the kids who
started with this program in grade school are now beginning to graduate
from high schools, and almost all these are headed to college. "And
because we choose our recipients by lottery we can't be accused of
creaming off the top," notes C. Boyden Gray, the former White House
counsel who now serves as a Fund director. In the intervening years since the Senate last
considered -- and passed -- a D.C. voucher measure, many of the old
excuses for opposition are no longer valid. The Supreme Court has
upheld their constitutionality. Congress is even allocating new money
for this program, so it doesn't take away from the public schools. And
this time around too the D.C. voucher bill has strong local support
from key figures including the mayor and head of the school board. Even
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), who says she's never voted for a
school choice bill in her life, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post
saying it's time to try one in D.C. It's no longer Ms. Butler's fight, but she feels for
the thousands of other Jazzmines still out there. And she believes the
D.C. school system should have to begin to earn the $15,000 per kid it
now gets automatically because of its monopoly. "If they want it, they
should have to work for it," she says. "That's the American way."
Someone should tell Sens. Landrieu and Specter. Mr. McGurn is the Journal's chief editorial
writer. Updated July 24, 2003