The GOP is busy trying to come up with a theme to nationalize the 2010 mid-terms and I believe school choice should be one issue in the wider ‘Freedom Agenda’. The Freedom Agenda will usurp the Left’s favorite term “freedom of choice” and apply it to health care, education, and retirement, advocating returning to We the People our money and therefore the ability to make the best choices for our own lives.

I’ve long believed if the GOP focused on economic issues that the social issues would take care of themselves. Financially secure people tend to be more conservative in their behaviors because they have something to lose.

How hard would it be to position ourselves as the party of choice and the Democrats as the party against choice? Seems like it would be easy to run ads against the public school system and the NEA, against the Social Security system and against nationalized health care by promoting choice. After all, would we want the government to tell us what cars to drive, what music to listen to, what clothes to wear, where to live, etc? No, so why should they be allowed to make our lives most important decisions for us?

Republicans can’t make charter schools an issue for the simple reason that as a party they are simply not passionate about it.

Conservatives however are and can make it an issue.

This is they type of issue where the distinction between Republican and Conservative is important. Republicans who are not conservatives are aka moderates and as we all know, moderates lack passion because they are not emotionally invested in anything. Conservatives fight, moderates negotiate and their starting point is always, always, always from the Liberals position of strength.

Additional background since I grew up in New Orleans… Anybody there who can afford to do so and whose kids can score high enough on entrance exams sends their kids to private schools, almost all of which are Catholic. The public schools were virtually all cesspools that, if you were lucky, you might live long enough to get out of.

As Vlad says, this is an issue (along with vouchers) that should absolutely resonate among poor black voters. The rich liberals like Obama want to be able to send their kids to schools that cost more than most in-state college tuitions, while telling the riff-raff they have no choice in where to send their kids. It’s absolutely shameful, but satisfying the NEA takes precedence over educating kids.

seeing “minority” voters vote for Republicans at a 90% clip. I have about 1,000 words of snark to add, but I won’t.

to go to Helen Waite. We are sick of the democrats spend spend spend with NO results and NO ACCOUNTIBILITY. Teddy Kennedys’ NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS ANOTHER NO ACCOUNTIBILITY THE DEMOCRATS PUSHED. It is time to speak up for what works and the democrats sure the L doesn’t work but Baucus gave a drunk speak for healthcare that don’t work.
Why is obamas kids in private schools and obama takes away the voucher program in Washington , DC . Call a spade a spade.

The reason Republicans don’t really focus on charter schools, vouchers, etc., is that the people who would benefit most from these types of things are not swing voters.

The people who benefit most from these types of initiatives are lockstep Democrats, and will not deviate from their support of Democrats, because the Democrats promise (and deliver) more generous entitlements.

Think about it.

Rich white folks – have plenty of money to send their kids to private school anyway, and besides, they make up a tiny % of the total population.

Middle-income white folks (ie: swing-voters) – live mainly out in the burbs, where the public schools are already pretty good, or at least decent.

Black voters – live mainly in urban areas (or rural areas down South) where the public schools are the worst, standing to gain the most from these types of initiatives, but pacified into voting en-bloc for Democrats by programs designed to make them poor but comfortable.

The reason the GOP can’t get any traction on education, health care, energy, housing, etc, etc, is the GOP is all about ‘small government’. Small government is not an answer to much of anything as far as the general public goes. However, properly designed and implemented individually driven social marketplaces will, by definition, result in an effective and compassionate small government.

Social Marketplaces are one thing the Democrats really do understand. By design and philosophy, their Social Marketplaces are centralized, big government/union visions — the result is uncompassionate big government.

In the middle, you’ve to the moderates who basically want power with love… They’ve typically never heard any contemporary effective small government Social Marketplace conservative message — it’s not the moderates fault. Their ignorance on small government social marketplace solutions is related to the ineptness of conservative leadership understanding and marketing of individually driven social marketplaces.

One can expect the GOPs problems with all of these various social marketplaces (charter schools, health care, energy, housing, and more), to persist until the conservatives get a coherent core understanding of individually driven social marketplaces as their core message.

where are these charter schools getting thier money from? If the gets are low income as the qualify for free lunch they are probably getting even more from federal funds per student than the well off kids in the suburbs.

I don’t like the way those students were spoken to either. Is that they way to speak to kids? I’m sorry that isn’t how you talk to a child respectfully. They are not men in a halfway house. The whole free free free was wrong too.

This is just a temporary fix, vouchers and charter schools are still gov funded and unfortunately they will lead to private schools having less freedom.
I will never understand why conservatives support birth-12 tax funded education and GWB expanded that funding from the fed gov even more.

I agree education is where we should reach out into the black community. There are a lot of sterotypes of the parents being illiterate but I’ve found the moms and grandmas are SO supportive of any educational achievements. Amazingly supportive.
I saw we tutor reading and support real private education like homeschooling or small parent operated or church based schools that do not accept vouchers or gov $. Set up libraries in churches or donate good books to the libraries. Try to get libraries to have more homeschooling resources. Contribute to organizations that have homeschool scholarships. Why not help them towards more independence- they don’t need to just accept what the gov has to offer to educate their kids. It really saddens me when I see words like “forced” or “no choice” coming from conservatives. We shouldn’t view people like that at the mercy of the govenrment when they do have a choice…it’s like viewing them as animals or something. Just because something might be harder for one group than another does not mean they do not have a choice to take that action.

Our so-called “leadership” has no guts. They can’t make ANY issue a winner until they take off the gloves and fight the way Democrats do.

FORGET the “high road”. It doesn’t win elections OR issues.

The Constitution is silent about education. States have that responsibility and the feds have no authority except that which the feds have usurped.

I advocate school choice with members of my state’s senate. I will be speaking with my state representative about soon.

If we want a Conservative movement, it must be based on Constitutional solutions.

Sorry to seem a bit miffed by this, but education is not a battle to be fought on the Federal level except to get the Feds out of it. Pulling teeth anyone???

The only possible way for the Feds to be involved in Education is outlined in the final paragraph of Article I, Section 8 where the Constitution speaks of Departments or Officers of the United States, but that really doesn’t speak to the point because it is prefaced by exclusionary language, imo.

I guess I have come full circle in one post…I do that sometimes.

So much so, that the Boulder Valley School District tried to shut them down. They took it all the way to the CO Supreme Court but lost, spending nearly half a million dollars doing it. Funny thing about that? Charter schools are chartered by each school district. There aren’t any in the BVSD area, because they don’t allow them.

Typical Democrats, they don’t want something and have to try to make sure nobody else does it either.

The same week that the President signed his daughters up at Sidwell Friends the ended the D.C. voucher program to stop poor kids from going to his daughters school. If a white republican president did that he’d be run out of town by sundown. President Obama got away with so much without press scrutiny.

This should not be too surprising from the family that brought patient dumping to poor neighborhoods from Mrs. Obama’s hospital. How many sick and injured were sent away from the UC hospital to wait at other nearby clinics while the sick became sicker?

after then Governor Bush let Charter Schools be created. There good but it seems that the Leftists that run the Teachers union and to an extent the TEA(Texas Education Authority) have demonizing them down. They have success but we need to have the unions out of the way so we a can have some choice. That’s the one thing that we need.

more than anything else accounts for their “success.” The only people that care are people that care. Parents with a family culture that cares about education will manage to impart some education to their children no matter what bad schools and popular culture try to do to them. The kid may turn out to be a horrible disappointment, do all the wrong things, but s/he will do so with at least a somewhat educated habit of mind.

The people served by those God-awful urban schools mostly don’t know or care that the schools are God-awful; they didn’t finish school, nobody they’re related to finished school, nobody they know finished school. Likewise the mother and father(s) of the child(ren) are not married, do not live together, and may not even be known. You are not going to make such people vote for you by offering them charter schools or better schools of any sort; they don’t care, school is just another hassle at best viewed as a babysitter that you don’t have to pay for.

As a purely political question, the issue is whether you can get more support from suburbanites by offering them some improved education for their kids than the increased opposition you’ll get from teachers and other unionized employees. My guess is that it depends on the state. In non-union states, you can probably make a winning issue of better schools. In union states, “better schools” will be seen as code for non-union schools and school boards not hand-picked by teachers’ unions so you’ll get the vehement and total opposition of all unions and their Democrat running dogs.

Yes, as was stated several times above, charter schools often only cater to demographics that frequently vote Democratic anyways, but you must understand to what extent teacher unions dislike charter schools and school choice. Unions oppose school choice because it simply makes union power grabs look bad in comparison. For example, let us compare a unionized state like Minnesota to a right-to-work state like South Dakota. In Minnesota, I was required to be affiliated with a teacher’s union in our district. Our union had weekly meetings that you were required to be at. These meetings consisted of little more than endless complaining about seniority and benefits. Never once were the concerns of making our school environment better for learning ever brought up. It was always about “me” and what “I” could get from the school district. Our teachers’ union bragged about how well paid our senior salaried teachers were. This was true, but it came at a great expense to our students and infrastructure. Our school district literally did not have a single computer available to students that could reliably save a document and print it or had reliable internet access. In fact, the teachers’ union was counter productive to such an extent toward a good education environment that according to our contracts we were in working agreement violation if we stayed after school to help students with their work because it was supposedly a violation of our salaried agreement. Let us now contrast this with South Dakota where I currently work. I am currently president of our “teacher’s association,” which is strictly a collective bargaining association for contracts. Not a single member of our school district is associated with a teachers’ union. We meet roughly twice a year to discuss negotiations, minus the politics. Yes, we make less money than teachers in Minnesota, but our class sizes are less than half that in Minnesota, and we are infinitely more technologically advanced on the classroom level than Minnesota school districts. Our school district provides tablets to all of its high school students, and our entire campus is wireless accessible. All of our classrooms are equipped with Promethean boards or various other interactive projector setups. Now if a charter school would set up shop next to my old Minnesota district or next to my current South Dakota district, which district do you think would lose more students and teachers? Unionized schools cannot compete very well with charter schools and nonunionized schools because they still have the freedom to adapt to student and parental needs and concerns. You need to look at how school choice undermines unions at the district level to understand its national implications and why it should be pushed nationally as an issue for the GOP in 2010 and beyond. It serves as the corrosive agent that eats away at the power of these corrupt and greedy unions, and it gives teachers an opportunity to get out, which is something the unions dread.

I’m still thinking this issue through.

First I support charter schools. But I have some reservations about them.

For one, charter schools are still state controlled. While I support charter schools as an alternative to failed traditional public schools, I also support private, parochial and home schooling. They must be packaged to together. There is strength in numbers and we the other three must be considered.

In Boston, of course, and perahps other places, the unionization of charter schools has begun. Im not privy to the actual school charter and the union rules. But the independence of charters is somewhat illusory and something to consider. State controlled is state controlled, no matter how its packaged.

Liberals can use charters to co-opt conservative ground. They did this with school choice. They stole the issue, with the caveat that the “choice” had to be with other public schools. I wonder if charter schools are going to be used in a similar manner to co-opt choice and vouchers to the detriment of private or parochial schools. (I’m not sure I want vouchers to be used for parochial schools though, as I worry about the strings that may be attched).

I’m still trying to figure out the union takeover of CLCS charter school in Boston and what it means in the long run.

Are the choice compromise that some districts begrudgingly allowed to deflect full choice. Maintaining funding and union involvement is the reason. Gotta keep that headcount. Many charter schools either failed or preformed no better than public schools because they were still state run. They were used to quell the voucher movement. But somewhere along the line it ran out of steam. Everyone knows that private and home schools are vastly more successful and that is what should be emphasized. Not the charter school deflection.

as such…the establishment won’t champion the issue because they don’t want to be associated with SoCons…We’re an embarassment to the establishment and giving us what we want…even if it’s a good and right thing has the effect of making the establishment look like they are pandering to us…this is something to be avoided at ALL costs!

The “Big Tent” analogy isn’t the correct one…the correct one is a MAGNET…we need to be a MAGNET that draws these independents in who are sick and tired of what’s going on in Washington—Fred Thompson

Gives wide results across the country. Here in NC, there are about 1800 public schools, somewhere near 800 (smaller) private and parochial schools, and the state has set a limit of 100 charters. A sop to the NEA, and a trivial impact on education in the state. Whenever someone mentions “vouchers” or “school choice” the Dems say: “But, we have a Charter School program!”

Also, the state has structured Charters so that anyone with any experience in a private school (anyone who actually knows how to RUN an independent school) can’t start a charter school. And the charter schools have to fight to be included in each of the myriad different funding sources– sometimes they win, sometimes not.

It is time to get into education. Take a page out of the left’s playbook.

We have proven that it is much tougher to de-program someone as it is to indoctrinate them with the truth right out of the gate.

ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Because knowing the truth doesn’t prevent the intellectually challenged sheep from voting differently. Remember the post of the documentary on Detroit? Since 1961 (48 years) dominated by democrat/socialist dogma, the sheep still haven’t figured it out. Add to that the most brainwashed / no common sense generation of voters we have ever had in histor,y and what do you get? Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.