On Jan. 14, President Bush criticized Senate Democrats for opposing his plan to provide tax support for sectarian private schools. Bush is wrong;
Senate Democrats are right.
If Bush would just read the history and English textbooks commonly used in the growing fundamentalist private schools, he would drop his voucher plan like a hot potato. These texts exude bigotry and hostility toward Catholics, Episcopalians, Quakers, Unitarians, Humanists and others.
Bush seems not to understand that adding private schools to the public payroll would require either tax increases or serious cuts in the budgets of our already severely strained public schools.
He also seems not to grasp that providing transportation to ”schools of choice,” public or private, would further raise school costs. Transporting students to non-public schools now costs Pittsburgh $900 per year per student. Bush`s voucher plan would violate every citizen`s constitutional right not to be taxed for religion, force us to pay for schools not under meaningful public control (taxation without representation), and compel us to support the various forms of discrimination and selectivity common in nonpublic schools.
