School Choice Is Not A Religious Issue

A recent study by Professor Paul Seidenstat of Temple University concluded that 72 percent of all Philadelphia public school parents are in favor of school choice. Among African-American parents with children in the public schools, the figure rises to 90 percent.

In light of these dramatic figures, anyone who advocates the view that the movement is primarily a creation of the Catholic Church is guilty of promoting a shallow caricature of the larger social forces driving the historic push for school choice in Pennsylvania.

Imagine the former dictators of East Germany arguing that Western governments were really behind the East Germans' efforts to flee the totalitarian system of Eastern Europe. Such a view would provide a convenient rationale for machine-gunning people as they climbed over the Berlin Wall in order to "protect" them from worse harm at the hands of the sinister capitalistic system on the other side. But such a view ignored the basic reality that the movement to escape communism was primarily driven by a desire of ordinary people to flee the failure and disaster that such a system had brought to Eastern Europe.

As is the case with the current education monopoly in America, the signs of desperate dissatisfaction among ordinary people was proof that the movement to escape the status quo was not being led from the outside but was the product of the failure of a system that operates as a giant government-run monopoly.

I encourage you to use the pages of your newspapers to explore the tremendous diversity among the vast numbers of non-Catholics deeply committed to the movement for school choice in Pennsylvania.