Last week, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, fresh off its controversial decision to sue the state of Texas of its voter identification law, sued the state of Louisiana to block its school voucher program largely designed to help minority children. The DOJ sued to stop 34 school district from giving out private-school vouchers, claiming that such vouchers slowed the “desegregation progress.”
A full 90% of the children who benefit from the voucher program are black. The remaining 10% came from 22 school districts under desegregation orders handed down five decades ago, which prompted the DOJ to state, “the voucher recipients were in the racial minority at the public school they attended before receiving the voucher.” As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “Justice is claiming that the voucher program may be illegal because minority kids made their failing public schools more white by leaving those schools to go to better private schools.” As black kids go to better schools, the schools left behind become less integrated, the logic goes. So keep those black kids in those failing schools.
Typically, vouchers enhance integration by allowing educational opportunities to children who have not had them before. But that’s not the point. The point is that teachers unions lose leverage when kids opt out of their failing school systems. And Eric Holder’s DOJ will do anything to help their union allies out.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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