It’s unclear whether the four-year-old Washington [DC voucher] program is actually working. So far, the Education Department has found little if any difference in the test scores of kids who got vouchers to attend private school.
The implication here is that test scores are the only thing that matter in evaluating whether or not an education system is “working.” In reality, most people not only care how good something is, but also how much it costs. If we take cost into account, does the picture change?
According to
the most recent report on the DC voucher program, to which the AP is alluding, the average tuition charged by voucher-accepting private schools is $5,928. As I reported in the Washington Post and fully documented on this blog, total per-pupil spending in DC public schools was $24,600 in the 2007-08 school year. Even if we allow for the fact that the typical private school receives something like 20 percent of its revenue from sources other than tuition, this is still rather a big difference. Public schools are spending more than three times as much to get about the same academic result. Meanwhile, as the DC voucher study notes, parents are a lot happier with their chosen voucher schools than the city’s public school parents are with their schools.Parents are happier, and the program produces academic achievement at least as good as the district schools at less than one third their cost. For a nation in a bit of a financial bind, this seems to me like a program that’s working, even though it does have its faults and there are even better options.
posted by Andrew J. Coulson on 10.16.08 @ 12:43 pm
Filed Under: Education and Child Policy, General
Obama and the Cult of the Marxist Messiah from
For two decades, Barak Obama observed how effectively Wright transformed the christ myth into Black Power.
When discussing his alliances, his agenda, and his "faith," subterfuge is Obama's dominant trait. Surely then, it was with unintended candor he disclosed the nature of his interest in Christian verbiage. Openly identifying himself with skeptics of the secular Left, in The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote that "we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people." "When we abandon the field of religious discourse . . . when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced . . . when we shy away from religious venues and broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others [from the Christian Right] will fill the vacuum."
Barack Obama has identified himself with Christianity as a cloak for his political agenda. The founder of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, regarded churches as an ideal vehicle for advancing the Marxist cause. But to have credibility in organizing churches, young Obama needed to join a church.
Wright's own mentor James Cone, the founder of this Marxist religion of racial hatred, defined its core premise:
"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love." This year Wright defended what he has preached for decades: "I do not in any way disagree with Dr. Cone."
Known to all from grade school to college as "Barry," in 1980 he told family members to address him so no longer;[17] from now on, he is "Barack Obama" in solidarity with his Kenyan father, a Marxist economist.[18] Barry thus re-invented his identity as a symbol of his growing commitment to "social justice." His Dreams memoir itself is a fictionalized narrative, with names and chronology changed, key figures and events omitted, and others made up.
Exploiting what Obama regards as the christ myth, his campaign has derived his religio-political image from Wright's "theology" -- as a black messianic hero coming to establish social justice, repair racial inequities, heal America's broken soul and save the planet from the United States.
condensed from the article found at http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/obamas_religious_ruse_the_cult_1.html
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