× Dana Goldstein reports, the ideology behind school vouchers is being debated beyond America's borders:
Undoubtedly, Canadians are far from immune to the combustible racial discussions with which Americans are so familiar. But what's strange about the Afrocentric education controversy is the way in which Canadian media have, almost without realizing it, absorbed the twists and turns of the American "school choice" debate, some of them ideologically-motivated and intellectually dishonest.In January, for example, Canadian newspapers and television networks reported on a pro-Afrocentric-schools lecture by former Milwaukee public schools superintendent Howard Fuller in front of the conservative Economic Club of Toronto. Milwaukee is the location of the largest private school voucher program ever enacted. Currently, over 17,000 students there, the great majority of them low-income African Americans, participate in the program. "The fact of the matter is that you already have separation," said Fuller, who is black. "Poor people in Toronto are not swimming in the mainstream." About the Milwaukee voucher program, he claimed, "Thousands of lives have been saved because this program exists."What Fuller didn't mention is that independent assessments of Milwaukee's voucher program have consistently shown that students attending private schools on the government's dime perform no better academically than socioeconomically similar children in traditional public schools.
Read the rest and comment here.
--The Editors
