Pity Poor Adrian Bushnell

Late in the morning of Friday, February 29, Miami (Florida) Edison High School was besieged by dozens of police cars and vans. Officers in riot gear were seen rushing into the building and within minutes live TV film from a WFOR-TV helicopter showed dozens of students being led away in handcuffs. Police officials described the situation as a “large scale disturbance.”

This was not an uprising in a Baghdad market or an attack on a funeral procession in Islamabad. This was an insurrection in an American high school, led by teenage thugs with rap sheets longer than their arms. But what makes this sad event so meaningful is that Miami Edison is typical of thousands of failing secondary schools in cities across the nation. 

According to a New York Times story in early 2007, of those students who took the ACT college admissions test in 2005, only 51 percent achieved the C-level benchmark in reading comprehension, 41 percent in mathematics, and 26 percent in science. 

In response to this horrible record of under-achievement in public education, Republicans have for many years proposed a system of school vouchers that would allow parents to take a pro-rata share of the money that local school districts would spend on each of their children and use it to pay tuition in the private school of their choice – either parochial or nonsectarian. The principal motivation of vouchers would be to inject an element of competition into public education, requiring public schools to compete for education dollars.

The concept has met with little success in Congress because of opposition from teachers unions, primarily the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington and both bedrock constituencies of the Democrat Party. However, state and local governments, the “laboratories” of American government, have begun to experiment with voucher programs.

For example, the State of Florida, with a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature, enacted a school voucher program in 1999 called Opportunity Scholarships. Under the Florida program, parents became eligible for cash vouchers, up to the school district’s per-pupil expenditure – nearly $4,000 per student, per year – if the school in question received a failing grade from the state in two out of any four year period.

In the six years of its existence, the program attracted some 733 students in 53 schools. One such student was Adrian Bushnell. Without the voucher program, Adrian, who is black, would have spent his entire high school career attending troubled Miami Edison, the school wracked by violence this past week, which has a ninety-four percent black student body and a small minority of non-Hispanic and white students.

Instead, as John Tierney of the New York Times tells us, Adrian’s parents took advantage of the Opportunity Scholarship program and enrolled him at Msgr. Edward Pace, a Catholic high school with a 24 percent black student body, where Adrian accumulated a 3.1 GPA as a sophomore in 2005-06. 

Besides helping Adrian, who was planning on a college career after graduation, the Florida program was also a boon to students in public schools such as Miami Edison. Because the tuition in many private and parochial schools is less than what the public system spends per student, more money was left for each student in the public system. According to Tierney, studies have shown that “failing Florida schools facing voucher competition have raised their test scores more than schools not facing the voucher threat (emphasis added).”

But all of this is now but a memory for Adrian Bushnell and 732 other Florida students. On January 5, 2006, a Democrat-dominated Florida Supreme Court, in a 5-2 decision, ruled that the Opportunity Scholarship program was unconstitutional. The two Republican justices dissented, using such non-judicious terms as “nonsensical” to describe the majority opinion.

The lawsuit to scrap the voucher plan was brought by anti-voucher parents and joined by liberal organizations such as the AFT, the NEA, the ACLU, and, much to their eternal shame, the NAACP. Had they been joined by the trial lawyers, gays, and lesbians they would have had the entire Democratic Party as litigants. 

The reasoning behind the majority decision? The majority ruled that the program violated a Florida constitutional provision which requires the state to provide a “uniform” system of public schools. In other words, if private schools achieve better results they cannot, by definition, be part of a “uniform” system. Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice explains, “The five Democrat justices decided what decision they wanted to reach and worked backward from there.”

As John Tierney laments, groups such as the NAACP, that once battled the segregationists’ fiction of ‘separate but equal…’ signed onto the notion that there is something admirably ‘uniform’ about a public school monopoly that keeps students like Adrian Bushnell trapped in segregated, inferior schools.

We don’t know what has happened to Adrian Bushnell. If he is on schedule he would be set to graduate in June 2008. But even if he has been able to survive the daily horrors of Miami Edison, what kind of education has he been able to acquire while sharing the classroom with thugs, gangsters, and drug peddlers? What Democrats have done to black kids in Florida can best be described as a mugging. At the very least, liberals and Democrats have withdrawn a critical lifeline in their access to the American Dream and they make no apologies for having done so. Pity poor Adrian Bushnell and everyone like him.