It's not too hard to publicly embarrass a pro-bully adherent (though impossible to shame them).

by NancyP on Fri Mar 23, 2007 at 12:00:51 PM EST

There is some delayed-action machinery written into the "No Child Left Behind" Act that will soon force thousands of good public schools into a virtually permanent probationary status called "Program Improvement."

Side by side with this widespread mandatory probation phase, the President has set aside $300 M this year for his hoped-for voucher program.  As explained in one Ethics Daily article ( http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=8513 ), the money represents education budget amounts that might otherwise be used in programs which have been wholly cut or chronically underfunded.

From the standpoint of the fundamentalists, the Bush plan would make it possible for  parents with children in one of these "probationary" schools to receive federal money to send them instead to religious schools of their choice.

The Bush vouchers would provide money not only for fundamentalists whose poverty prevents them from giving their kids a strictly sectarian instruction - it would also aid those more well-to-do whose kids are already in private fundamentalist schools.

I think the religious right is looking for something that would literally "save" their children from the imagined "damning" influence of a good liberal education.  Now that the probationary phase of NCLB is kicking in, I wonder if it is only coincidence that we find Rapture semantics embedded in the title of the law - i.e. No Child Left Behind?  The Ethics Daily article stated that Bush himself named the program.

I recently read that Senator Kennedy is calling the President's voucher plan "a non-starter."  All well and good.  But there is too little public airing of the problems involved in the theocratic, anti-social and unconstitutional elements of the idea.  Given the amount of repetitive backstory we read in every nooze article on Iranian intransigence or on the rise and fall of this month's celebrity, I feel we ought to be hearing repeatedly that resistance to vouchers is central to a fully-fledged Western culture and not simply due to the whim of a liberal Senator from Massachusetts.

God bless the whole world - - No Exceptions
by John Anngeister on Fri Mar 23, 2007 at 06:03:27 PM EST