The Justice Department’s perverse but impeccably progressive theory can be called “osmotic transfer.” It is called this by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which is defending Wisconsin children against Washington’s aggression. The department’s theory is: Contact between a private institution and government, however indirect or attenuated the contact, can permeate the private institution with public aspects, transferring to it, as if by osmosis, the attributes of a government appendage.
Wisconsin’s school choice program was pioneered by an American hero, Mississippi-born Annette Polly Williams, who died Nov. 9 at age 77. During her three decades in Wisconsin’s legislature, she overcame the opposition of fellow Democrats to offering education choices to low-income parents. At the end of her life, however, she saw an African American attorney general, serving an African American president, employing tortured legal reasoning in an attempt to bankrupt private schools that enlarge the education options of disadvantaged children.
Children are accepted for the choice schools randomly, and no child accepted by the lottery can be rejected by a school until its capacity is filled. The parents of admitted children are informed by the private schools — about 85 percent of them religious — if the schools cannot afford to offer to those with disabilities as rich a menu of services for the disabled as government schools offer. If the parents consider this unacceptable, they can return to public schools. Tony Evers, superintendent of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, fully shares the public education establishment’s hostility to school choice, but he acknowledged in 2011 that his agency had never received a complaint from parents alleging discrimination against a child with a disability.
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