Why Ted Kennedy is an idiot

After hearing of the Supreme Court decision unholding the Constitutionality of school vouchers, CNN reports and quotes Senator Ted Kennedy as saying:

Private school vouchers may pass constitutional muster, but they fail the test when it comes to improving our nation's public schools.

It's flat wrong to take scarce taxpayer dollars away from public schools and divert them to private schools. Despite the Court's ruling, vouchers are still bad policy for public schools, and Congress must not abandon its opposition to them.

They're not "private school vouchers," Ted. They're vouchers that allow a parent to choose what school to send their child to. They're not an attempt to improve public schools, except in encouraging them to clean up their act and actually do the job of teaching, something they're horrible at right now.

Of course, since this is a report from CNN, that's the major quote in the entire story.

And I guess neither read this article:

A study conducted by Rand Corp., American Institutes for Research and several government entities -- called the CSR Research Consortium -- found that California's efforts to reduce the size of school classes produced mixed results. Moreover, the report cautioned that so many variables were involved that it was "difficult to isolate the effects of any single one."

Nevertheless, class-size reduction "roughly translates to moving a student who was at the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile" -- only a slight improvement.

Of course, class-size reduction is a major liberal movement because smaller classes will mandate more teachers, which translates into large teacher unions, which means more political clout. This same article contains this tasty, relevant bit:

Harvard University's Paul E. Peterson has found that voucher programs are raising students' scores in Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York City -- and at lower costs.

"The reforms that are cheap and work," Peterson says, "are the hardest to get by the special interests that dominate education."

Amen to that.