The Bush education plan is too timid

We need to give families a choice -- and that means vouchers and charter schools.

By Arianna Huffington

Apr 16, 2001 | When it comes to the budget, education is clearly President Bush's fair-haired child. While most federal programs are being sent to their rooms without supper, Bush's signature issue is being treated to an 11.5 percent spending increase. But the response is completely inadequate to the magnitude of the crisis.

Bush may be willing to spend $600 million more on elementary school reading programs and $320 million on developing annual assessment tests for reading and math, but he has failed to address the key question: After spending all those millions on remedial reading and testing -- a very expensive way to re-re-reconfirm just how badly our children are failing -- what do we do next?

The answer is what we should be doing right now.

What we are facing is nothing less than an educational catastrophe, with 37 percent of fourth graders unable to read. The statistics get even grimmer when broken down by economic and racial groups. Sixty-three percent of African-American fourth graders are functionally illiterate, as are 60 percent of poor children.

Given this "educational apartheid," it is not surprising that African-Americans are at the forefront of demanding revolutionary measures to solve a crisis that is devastating their children's chances for a productive future. Mikel Holt, who chronicled the landmark battle for school choice in Milwaukee, has no illusions about what is at stake. "The old civil rights movement got us to the lunch counter," he says. "The new civil rights agenda is: Can our kids read the menu?"

And young African-American leaders are rallying around this agenda: "It's one of the last remaining major barriers to equality of opportunity in America," Newark, N.J., City Councilman Cory Booker told me. "We're not going to fix our schools by tinkering with them. It's going to take radical changes, and we have to be willing to experiment 'by any means necessary' -- including with vouchers."

Next Page: "School choice is widespread -- unless you're poor"

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