Stop DC Vouchers 
Press release urging Senate defeat of voucher bill
September 23, 2003

DCPSWatch Home

Major Areas
DC Public Schools
Mayoral Takeover
Special Education

State Education Agency
State Education Office
Vouchers
WTU
Wilson S.H.S.

Calendars
Board of Education
School Year

Columns
Elizabeth Davis
Ron Drake
Erich Martel
Nathan Saunders

Directories
Schools

Letters

Links

Organizations
DC Education Compact
Parents United
Proposition 100%

Press

Search

DCWatch Home

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

September 23, 2003 
Contact: Melody Webb
202-276-9253

Stop D.C. Vouchers Urges Flood of Email To Key Senators, Support for Senator Kennedy and Praise for D.C. Councilmembers, Who are Standing up to Congressional Bullies Pushing School Vouchers on a Disenfranchised City

Senate To Begin Debate on Vouchers as early as Wednesday,Week!

Washington, D.C.-- As early as today, the United States Senate is expected to begin debate on S. 1583, congressional voucher legislation for Washington, D.C.. A vote could occur as early as Wednesday. Senator Edward Kennedy is leading the charge to protect the mission of public education - to give a publicly accountable education to all children - not a select few, as would the congressional voucher proposal to fund 1,300 voucher students with each up to $7,500 taxpayer-funded grants for use in private schools. 

Stop D.C. Vouchers director Melody Webb indicates that "Senator Kennedy continues the tradition of championing civil rights for the disadvantaged by opposing the measure to implement vouchers in D.C.. The voucher bill exists because D.C. residents lack full self governance and voting representation in Congress, and because Congress exercises oversight of the District of Columbia's budget - a role it plays over no other political jurisdiction in the country" 

As of this week, Ms. Webb advises voucher opponents to target the following Senators: Biden, Nelson, Bayh, Collins, Snowe, Dayton, Conrad, Dorgan, Nelson, Leahy, Pryor, Miller, Breaux, Feingold, and Carper. Stop D.C. Vouchers allows email to these members from its website.

Stop D.C. Vouchers urges public school supporters to flood the phone lines, fax machines and the email boxes of members of the Senate. "First, call 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121. Second, visit www.stopdcvouchers.org to send email. We urge those of you who have sent one or two emails, to please email your Senators once more. The more often they hear from you the better. Better still, from our website, you may email any and all 100 Senators."

Melody Webb, an attorney, a DCPS parent and graduate, founded Stop D.C. vouchers, which has been organizing parents and supporters of vouchers nationwide through both a grassroots and internet campaign has launched the 'Email 100' push to stop D.C. voucher legislation. "Email your Senator and email them all. If you are a D.C. resident, aim to email all 100. It takes approximately 10 minutes."

The District of Columbia's budget is a popular vehicle for congressional policymaking for the city that lacks full self governance and voting representation in the House and the Senate. 

In contradiction to the claim that members of Congress are acting at the behest of D.C. residents in seeking the voucher measure, last week members of the D.C. City Council wrote the Senate leadership condemning the voucher push. "At every opportunity, proponents of vouchers have paraded the support of a few of our colleagues in the District government for this measure. Nonetheless, we are compelled to repeat that majorities of the Council, Board of Education, and residents of the District of Columbia continue to oppose the use of public money on private school vouchers". The signers of the letter included Councilmembers Adrian Fenty, Vincent Orange, Carol Schwartz, Phil Mendelson, Jim Graham, and Sandy Allen. See the full text of the letter at http://www.stopdcvouchers.com/DCCouncilVouchers.htm

Vouchers are bad policy for several reasons.

• Voucher schools are totally lacking in accountability for discrimination on religion, gender, sexual orientation and disability grounds. Voucher schools provide no quality assurance guarantees and are not subject to regulation on any substantial number of measures."
• Voucher proponents argue that vouchers will give poor children greater choice. Some quality choice does exist in 42 charter schools and numerous model programs. To expand choice in D.C., Congress should fully fund the existing model programs of DCPS and replicate them -- Montessori programs, bilingual programs. If the private schools employ exemplary academic practices, let’s copy them – starting now. If the private schools want to pitch in, they can lend us their best and brightest teachers and administrators.
• If congressional leaders want to do their part, they should hold off on vouchers and aid the proliferation of model programs and permit public schools to implement the lessons they are already learning under the one year old federal No Child Left Behind law, a model of public school accountability. Let’s use the archetypal strategies of the private schools in the public schools. Let’s import the academic models, not export our children. We can copy their work; but private entities will never imitate our mission.
• Taxpayer funded tuition grants for private schools – vouchers – signal giving up on the public schools, sending children away to private alternatives. These entities can teach us a lot. However, they can only do this by working with the public schools, not trying to supplant them. For, their purpose is not public– to serve all students, from every walk of life. In a voucher scheme, it is not the District’s children, but private schools that will be able to pick and choose. 
• Vouchers do not work. A Government Accounting Office report issued under this administration says so. Vouchers do not spark improvements through competition; vouchers do wage a war of attrition against public funds available for public schools. 
• When vouchers draw students away, taking funding that pays for staff and services used by the children that remain -- vouchers are not spurring improvements; vouchers are wielding damage. A teacher's aid is not lost just to that voucher student who leaves, the aid is lost to the other children left in the class. A school nurse is not lost just to that voucher student who leaves; but to an entire school, likely in communities that lack adequate health care already. To them, this will be a double blow".
• Vouchers do not hold private schools accountable for raising test scores -- look at Milwaukee and Florida. Vouchers provide public funding for religious instruction. 
• Vouchers can not and are not universally available to all children and are fundamentally unfair for providing an 'out' for a select few, while leaving in D.C.'s case 67,000 children. Vouchers make no investment in the public programs that do work. 
• The way to spur improvements in public schools through competition is through the use of programmatic expansion awards that are given out to schools by way of a competitive grant-making process. The way it would work is this: by establishing outcomes, soliciting proposals from top public schools to expand their programs and awarding grants to the winners, who will successfully replicate the best practices of their own and model private and charter schools. That is how you expand choice in Washington, D.C..

Sincerely,
Melody R. Webb, Esq.