Educational Funding, Educational Reform, Family & School - General & Miscellaneous, Education Policies, Educational Finance, Education - Parent & Teacher Relationships, Privatization & Educational Vouchers
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Overview
Frustrated and angry that their children are not getting the solid education their tax dollars should provide, parents everywhere have lost faith in the public school system. A testimony to this frustration, low-income parents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, seized their district's school choice initiative and used it to renounce public education, demanding the right to send their children to successful schools where learning counts. School choice offers parents an alternative to public schools - hope for those trapped in a system that refuses to change. This is the story of the inner-city parents who took advantage of that alternative, despite relentless opposition from school boards, teachers' unions, local politicians, even the NAACP. In Break These Chains, author Daniel McGroarty gives a blow-by-blow, heart-wrenching account of what happens when low-income parents fight institutionalized poverty - and win. It is also a stunning illustration in microcosm of how school choice can dramatically improve the education of children in America.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1990, Milwaukee launched the nation's first voucher program providing publicly funded cash grants that enabled low-income students to attend the schools of their choice, public or private; the program's scope was extended to religious as well as nonsectarian schools in 1995. School choice, a concept adamantly opposed by most liberals and by the National Education Association, earns high marks in this detailed account of the Milwaukee experiment written by McGroarty, former special assistant to President Bush, deputy director of White House speechwriting and now a Washington communication consultant. Countering the charge that vouchers further harm the disadvantaged and tilt students into segregated schools, he observes that Milwaukee's voucher program has been extremely popular with African American and Hispanic families, and he finds a diversity of cultural viewpoints and ethnic composition in the schools selected by students and their parents. Vouchers, he maintains, offer disadvantaged students alternatives to inferior public schools that the well-to-do have long enjoyed. This study will fuel the debate but, given the intransigence of both sides, is not likely to win many converts. 35,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; first serial to American Spectator. (May)Ray Olson
If school choice raises your blood pressure, McGroarty's presentation of Wisconsin's choice experiment may be the read of the year. In the Wisconsin scheme, minority students from the poorest sections of Milwaukee use money from the state to attend selected private schools in their neighborhoods rather than city public schools. Now in its fifth year, the program has been under constant legal fire from the state education department that is supposed to defend it, from the two teachers' unions, from "citizen" organizations actually populated by school and union officials, and from activist groups, including the ACLU, the NAACP, and People for the American Way. Keeping it alive have been the black welfare mom turned state legislator who pushed through its authorizing legislation, a black newspaper editor who considers its opponents guilty of liberal racism, the principals of the heavily minority small private schools involved, libertarian public interest attorneys, a sympathetic governor, and the participating kids' parents, who give it 98 percent approval. A real David-and-Goliath story.Book Details
Published
May 1, 1996
Publisher
Prima Pub
Pages
288
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780761505075