That fever pitch

Our kind of ‘choice’ rally

THE FORMER president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the widely respected Johnny Taylor, wrote an op-ed piece last year about charter schools and other improvements that have been made in public education lately. It was a doozy. And at least one line deserves repeating here:

“If the NAACP continues to reject the educational opportunities school choice provides [kids], they risk becoming irrelevant—or worse, an enemy of the very people they claim to fight for.”

Not a whole lot of gray area there. Call Johnny Taylor blunt, but who can afford to be delicate when the futures of so many kids are at risk?

There was more than one kind of “choice” rally in Little Rock this past week, and the better one was held at the Capitol rotunda on Wednesday. There, kids and adults chanted “School Choice Now!” and a good time was had by all.

Yes, school choice. Whether that school is the neighborhood elementary, a charter down the road, a private school, an online program, or home schooling. There are advantages to all. But the biggest advantage for students might be the competition that’s been awakened in the education establishment over the last generation or so. Competition, it seems, works even in education.

But it’s driving those with ties to the status quo nuttier. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has called charter schools the “polite cousins of segregation.” The NAACP, with left-ish allies in the unions, has backed a moratorium on new charter schools (thus Mr. Taylor’s rebuke). And as popular as school choice is in this state, you can still find opponents here and there. For example, take state Sen. Joyce Elliott, please:

“It’s a well-funded, well-orchestrated fever pitch that sounds like a really good idea,” Sen. Elliott said of the schoolchoice movement. “But, in practice, it dilutes the ability for all our kids to have a quality education.”

Tell that to the hundreds, maybe thousands, of inner-city or rural parents who are on waiting lists to get into charter schools in Little Rock and the Arkansas Delta. But we suppose there will always be opposition to school choice as long as our betters think they know more about the needs of students than those students’ parents.

Yes, there is a fever pitch when it comes to charter schools in this state and across the nation. Parents are burning up to get their kids inside one.