The New Robber Barons

The New Robber Barons, the teachers' unions, exploiting children for their own financial gain, robbing them of their chance for a decent education.

The heirs to George Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door.

The teachers' union IS the Democrat Party.

WSJ, Rotten Apples:

If there were lingering doubts that teachers unions are the worms in the apple of the American education system, take a look at the monumental setback for school reform in Florida this week.

On Monday the unions in Tallahassee bullied all but one Democrat and four Republicans in the state senate to kill a school voucher bill that has already had a sterling record of success for thousands of children in districts with failing public schools. If that decision isn't reversed by Friday, one of the most heralded school reform measures anywhere in the country will be dismantled, and 775 school kids, 90% of whom are minorities, will be returned to the warehouses that are failed inner-city schools. A related voucher program that serves 18,000 learning disabled kids is also in jeopardy.

The program at issue is Governor Jeb Bush's seven-year-old "Florida A+ School Accountability and Choice Program." For the first time, schools have been graded on the reading, writing and math progress made by the children they are supposed to be teaching. (Imagine that.) Any school that received an F in two of four years is deemed a failure, and the kids then get a voucher to attend another school, public or private.

One immediate impact -- according to researchers at Harvard, Florida State, and the James Madison Institute -- has been that the mere threat of competition caused many inner-city school districts to improve. The percentage of African Americans who are now performing at or above grade level surged to 66% last year, from 23% in 1999. No union-backed school "reform" has had that rate of success -- not more funding, not higher teacher pay, not smaller class sizes, and so on. Two school districts in the state failed the program and the families were given vouchers. Those children have since made big academic gains.

But in one of the most absurd legal decisions in modern times, the Florida Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that the voucher program violated the "uniformity clause" of the state constitution guaranteeing a high-quality system of public schools. Because the performance of the voucher kids was superior to those in public schools, the court ruled that education was not uniform -- or in this case not uniformly miserable. As they used to say in the Soviet Union, everyone gets to share their poverty equally.

The decision wasn't reversed Friday. Short one vote, the legislature went home.

The kids will have to go back to their failed schools.