But the facts remain. According to "School Choice 2003" – the Heritage Foundation's annual look at school choice in the states and a handy guide for anyone interested in choice in education – the District spent $11,009 per pupil in 2001-2002. No state matches that. It paid teachers, on average, $47,049 per year. Only two states – Rhode Island and New York, both with extremely high costs of living – match that.
And what does it get for all this money? Squat – or close to it. In math, 76 percent of fourth-graders performed at the basic or below-basic level on national tests taken in 2000, and just 3 percent performed at the "advanced" level. In science, 72 percent of fourth-graders performed at the basic or below-basic level, and just 3 percent were at the "advanced" level.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Students in District schools are not achieving. And something needs to be done – now.
This may seem like a local matter, but it's not. Similar battles, with hauntingly similar rhetoric, are fought all over the country over vouchers. Opponents say they fear a crumbling of the wall between church and state and a loss of something shared by nearly all: the public-school system.
Surprisingly, though, vouchers help the public schools around them. In Milwaukee, the only place in America with a true-blue voucher program, the competition has lifted scores in the public schools, as well as for all the city's children, according to Carolyn Hoxby, a Harvard economist who has studied the program.
It's not a matter of ideology. It's a matter of that question again: Are your children and grandchildren getting the education they not only deserve but need? The answer in the District, by any reasonable measure, is no. So do for them what you did for yourself 50 years ago: Reach out for something better. Fight until you drop for that passport out of poverty. And don't let any politician beholden to a union talk you out of it.