SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook THE SCHOOT-CHOTCE JUGGERNAUT Despite the best efforts of its opponents in the educational establishment, the cause of school choice continues to gain steam. This week, the investment...
...The unions hoped to defeat the reelection of at-large school board member (and vociferous school choice champion) John Gardner...
...Forstmann and Walton are each putting up $50 million, and have raised another $70 million in matching contributions...
...If the Labor Department doesn't just laugh at this, it means some federal bureaucrats don't have much real work to do...
...And now they've gone running to the feds...
...Not surprisingly, the program was overwhelmed with applications...
...Even better, reform candidates swept all the board's open seats, leaving the unions with only two remaining allies on the nine-member board...
...Last year in Washington, D.C., Forstmann and Walton offered more than 1,000 scholarships to poor parents to send their children to schools of their own choosing...
...No kidding...
...The crowd was "shocked," according to the Plymouth Western Morning News, when a 62-year-old white woman from Cornwall— and an unpublished one at that—showed up at the awards ceremony two weeks ago to claim her prize...
...And it's meant to be the most fair, since all submissions must be previously unpublished and submitted anonymously...
...Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the notoriously fractious nature of online "communities," a number of disgruntled volunteers have parted company with AOL on unfriendly terms...
...Not for back pay, they say, but to draw attention to their grievances: AOL didn't appreciate their efforts...
...And now for the rest of the country . . . POETIC JUSTICE The National Poetry Competition is not only Great Britain's most prestigious poetry prize...
...How worried...
...However, everyone was far too polite to say so...
...This, and other threatened punishments, don't seem to have fazed the chairman of South Carolina's Democratic party, Dick Harpootlian: "They're going to put us in bad hotels and give us bad seating at the convention," he said...
...Just as significant for the long-term prospects of school choice is the roster of supporters the two have signed up...
...they got kicked off AOL for life because of bad-mouthing...
...Earlier this month, the teachers' unions poured more than $500,000 into a single school board race in Milwaukee—where an independent-minded coalition of parents, teachers, and politicians has struggled to make the school district a showcase of charter school and choice programs...
...Now they are taking the cause nationwide...
...This week, when they announce the winners of those scholarships, Forstmann and Walton will also reveal that hundreds of thousands of students applied for fellowships, despite little in the way of a major publicity campaign...
...For years, it turns out, AOL has given free access to its services to people who log on to the service from home and do useful things like rat on other users who use profanity in AOL chat rooms...
...It's about time...
...Their presence testifies to the bipartisan, and increasingly trans-ideological, appeal of school choice...
...The status quo in the Milwaukee Public Schools was turned on its head Tuesday," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported after the upset...
...As is this claim in the release: "global warming is largely due to the sun and not man...
...This will allow about 40,000 poor kids to attend private schools in cities across the country...
...Her name is Caroline Carver...
...And while the Democratic National Committee has no real power to dictate when South Carolina holds its primary, the DNC is now threatening to reduce by 25 percent the number of delegates South Carolina will be given at the Democratic convention...
...they did more for the company than paid employees...
...TAKE THAT, NEW HAMPSHIRE One of the silly little rituals of American politics is the quadrennial fight over which state will host the first presidential primary...
...This, it turns out, not only angers New Hampshire, it's against national Democratic party rules, which require other states to wait until March...
...She began writing poetry as a hobby about five years ago...
...After all, why do something as grubby as protecting immi- grant Chinese girls working in a sweatshop in Los Angeles, when you can make a name for yourself by going after AOL on behalf of middle-class folk who once had a hobby, but then got bored with it...
...New Hampshire, of course, clings fervently to its first-primary tradition, and always threatens to make life miserable for any candidate, or party, that doesn't honor it...
...So, as Forstmann puts it, hard-up parents who currently get something—public education—for free, are lining up to pay to get a chance for their kids to escape the system...
...The Center issued the following press release last week: "Sun Plays Key Role in Global Warming...
...The establishment should be worried—and it is...
...Probably true...
...Can't imagine anyone will disagree...
...What makes this even more remarkable is that the fellowship requires a matching contribution averaging about $1,000 from these lower income parents...
...It's the most generous, paying £5,000 for the poem that's judged the best...
...The national board of advisers for the Children's Scholarship Fund includes Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz, Joseph Califano, Henry Cisneros, Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III—all certified liberal Democrats...
...But you can't take anything for granted...
...yadda, yadda, yadda...
...This week, the investment banker Ted Forstmann and Wal-Mart executive John Walton will announce plans to expand their privately funded initiative to restore competition to the country's innercity schools...
...the "free service" they got for their efforts used to be worth more because AOL used to be more expensive than it is now...
...But it's possible to tell a bit about the poet, or so the judges must have thought when they awarded this year's prize to "Horse under water," a poem in Jamaican dialect about using a dead horse as bait to fish for sharks: hundreds of teeth iiiiiichin to bite me dead an i liff de knife but it move slow for everything cep dis killer move slow in de water but fear drive my hand an i slash him in de stomach The three judges surely thought they had discovered a fresh new voice out of Britain's Caribbean community...
...Thus it was amusing to note that the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic party voted last week to hold its primary next February 26...
...LABOR OF LOVE According to a fascinating story last week in the New York Times, the Labor Department "will neither confirm nor deny" that it is investigating the use of volunteer labor by America Online, the nation's leading online service and portal to the World Wide Web...
...The intent was to draw attention to recent research on climate change, suggesting that industrial pollutants may have less impact on the earth's climate than some global-warming enthusiasts argue...
...If that's the best these sissy boys can do, I think we'll be having a primary on February 26...
...he was attacked in a polished and predictably distorted series of radio, TV, and newspaper ads...
...PRESS RELEASE OF THE YEAR The Scrapbook is in receipt of a remarkable revelation by the National Center for Public Policy Research...
...I don't think they expected a white woman," Carver said...
...It didn't work: In an election that was widely considered a referendum on Milwaukee's growing voucher program, Gardner trounced his union-backed challenger...
Vol. 4 • April 1999 • No. 30
