Death at an Early Age

I was in San Francisco the weekend before last, not at the big ETS teacher quality shindig with everyone else, but across town at an event sponsored by CFED (formerly, in a Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-to-KFC kind of way, the Corporation for Enterprise Development) focused on building assets for low-income families. The topic was school funding fairness, and the audience was mostly child advocates who tend to be removed from many education debates. It was a good reminder that that the conceptual and organizational divide between the education and human services spheres is significant and problematic. They often don't know or understand what we're doing, and vice versa.

So, in a small attempt to bridge the gap, let me just note that President Bush's veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion is surely the worst education news of the day. Children--students--die every day in this country for lack of health insurance, a moral stain that has set for much too long.

The New York Times reports that "The White House has rejected as “preposterous” any suggestion that Mr. Bush does not care about the welfare of poor children." I'm sure that's true, since you'd have to be a sociopath to feel otherwise. The President just doesn't care about poor children as much as he cares about financing massive tax breaks for the wealthy, disastrous foreign wars, cowtowing to big business interests, and staying in the good graces of the militant anti-governement types who comprise what's left of his small and shrinking base of support.