By any other name

Saturday, Feb. 2, 2008 | 2 a.m.

In his State of the Union address this week, President Bush called for a $300 million program that would provide low-income parents with grants to help them send their children to private or religious schools.

Bush has named the initiative “Pell Grants for Kids” and likened the proposal to the federal financial aid program for college students, also called Pell Grants. This latest education initiative drew swift — and, we believe, appropriate — criticism for being nothing more than a national voucher system.

Instead of calling for increased funding to help improve urban public schools, Bush proposes to funnel millions of taxpayers’ dollars to low-income families so they can pull their children out of public schools and send them to private and religious institutions.

And Bush proposes this at a time when he has yet to adequately fund his No Child Left Behind Act — a failure in its own right.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Health, Education and Labor Committee, said Bush’s proposal is nothing more than another effort “to siphon scarce resources from our public schools to create new voucher programs.”

Even Bush should be able to see the folly of launching such a proposal. If his No Child Left Behind law were working — as he claims it is — it seems he would not think it necessary to help parents pull their children out of public schools in financially struggling districts.

Public schools are the best way to ensure that a nation’s citizens are literate and productive members of society.

As such, government should use taxpayers’ money to improve and expand public schools rather than diverting the money to private ones.