Fox guest uses Supreme Court ban on affirmative action to push for school choice
Published
Citation From the June 29, 2023, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
DANA PERINO (ANCHOR): I have a question for you, because over the last couple of weeks we've been talking about the nation's report card. This is for younger students, not college students. But, hopefully they would aspire either to go to college or they all want to pursue happiness as we are all given the right to do. And people have called education the civil rights issue of our time and you were in the civil rights division under the Trump administration. These test scores-
ROGER SEVERINO (HERITAGE FOUNDATION): Obama.
PERINO: Obama, excuse me. These test scores are horrendous in the K-12 and we see backsliding in math and reading, in science, in history, and I'm wondering about the civil right of those students, right, to be able to have either choice in their school, for their parents to have a choice, or for there to be more accountability so we don't set up a situation where they don't feel like they can compete fairly if they want to apply to Harvard or other elite schools.
SEVERINO: Yeah and there are huge disparities in educational outcomes and I think the best solution to that is you get it early and you need school choice. You need to break the monopoly of the government schools, you need to hold them accountable when they fail. You need to give students who are poor money so that they can be on equal footing of those of higher means and that's what vouchers and school choice provides. And if you start it early, then you don't have to do this hard, bludgeoned tool of racial balancing at the back end. You go at the front end to address the educational disparities as best you can. Our educational is broken. Too much government intervention, too much government, control, not enough choice. Educational Savings Accounts (ESAs) have been spreading like wildfire throughout the states and that is one of the solutions. And then we won't have this difficult problem of mismatch. And that's one of the things why is it racial balancing actually hurts minorities? Well, if you put somebody in a place where they weren't prepared for it, based solely on race, then you are setting people up for failure. I saw this firsthand. A lot of folks were put in a position where they were set up for failure and it is dispiriting. It's better if you are put in the place where you qualify for based on your merit and there you have a chance to flourish on equal footing with everybody else. It's much better to flourish there than to be set up for failure and have that be something that haunts you forever where you think, well, I guess I didn't measure up. I guess I didn't belong. Why was I here? That's the thing that is underappreciated. And the best they could get to having the equal opportunity for everybody is starting young and you nailed it. We do it with educational choice, try to get the government out of it, and empower parents