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April 13, 2007

Morning Shots

AP: Bush Defends No Child Left Behind Act

President Bush, acknowledging public frustration over his No Child Left Behind Act, said Thursday the point of the law is not to punish schools that fall short, but to help them.

Bush suggested the White House and its allies must do a better job of explaining the goal of holding schools accountable.

Congress is working on renewing the law, which remains unpopular in many districts nationwide.

“It is important for all of us to make it clear that accountability is not a way to punish anybody,” Bush told supporters of the law in a meeting at the White House. “It's an essential component to making sure that our system, our education system, frankly is not discriminatory.”

Cincinnati Enquirer: Supporters scurry to save vouchers

A week before the application deadline for the second year of Ohio’s EdChoice school voucher program, a fight is brewing in Columbus to keep school vouchers alive in Ohio.

Gov. Ted Strickland wants to eliminate the year-old voucher program before the start of the next school year. He said that would save the state $13.8 million a year, which could be spent on public schools.

But dozens of parents and students who receive vouchers traveled to Columbus this week and last to testify and hold press conferences defending the program.

“We don’t want to lose these vouchers,” said Chanda Heard, a Madisonville mother whose three children attend Christ Emmanuel Christian Academy in East Walnut Hills.

“You feed somebody filet mignon for an entire year and now you tell them have to go back to eating Spam? I just can’t see my kids going back into Cincinnati Public. I just can’t see it.”

Tallahassee Democrat: Civil-rights leader: Give parents choice in schools

An icon of Florida's civil-rights movement told students, parents and education administrators Thursday that giving poor families school choice is ''a continuation of the dream'' that black leaders envisioned 40 years ago.

''All of us who are here want what's best for our children, our parents and our state,'' the Rev. H.K. Matthews said as he surveyed the placard-waving crowd in the plaza between Florida's old and modern Capitols.

''This is a flashback of the old movement,'' said Matthews, whose civil-rights activism extends back to his presidency of the Pensacola Council of Ministers in the early 1960s. ''It's a continuation of the dream.''

Gov. Charlie Crist, House Speaker pro tempore Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, and state Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, promised to work for passage of bills expanding and protecting the corporate tax-credit system that lets companies give part of their business taxes to scholarship-funding organizations.

The Florida Supreme Court last year threw out ex-Gov. Jeb Bush's system for using state tax dollars directly for ''opportunity scholarships.'' Supporters of the corporate program fear that another lawsuit might scuttle those scholarships, too.

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