mmcirvin | (Reply)

From:

Mike Frank of the Heritage Foundation was on Weekend America this weekend and I found part of the discussion kind of surprising:

Q: What do you think your group, your constitutuency, puts forward as a way to refashion the state, the regulatory state?
A: Well, for example, I mean education, we've advocated for a long time various forms of taking the assistance and making it relate directly to the child. That could be in the form of charter schools, where if a group of teachers wanted to reconstitute a school they don't need to get an official school building built by government contractors. They could for instance lease space in an office building that may be empty.
Q: Are you saying what will come from Katrina is a resurgence of popularity in charter school?
A: Charters, vouchers, child-centered assistance. Given the wide-spread acceptance that the New Orleans school system (if you want to harp on that for a minute) was such a failure for so many of the 80,000 kids in that system, we can certainly do better, and whatever was going on in the last 40 years, all the waves of reform, didn't make much of a difference when two-thirds of the kids are below basic in both math and reading.

That's looking at the hurricane through some pretty specific filters.