Patrick Dorinson writes in his blog Politicians Kill DC Voucher Program, Dash Students’ Hopes about the efforts of Sen. Dick Durbin to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program provides parents who wish to send their children to a parochial school with money from the government to pay for school with school vouchers. Patrick Dorinson states that a provision designed to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program initiated by Sen. Dick Durbin is intended to benefit teachers unions in return for campaign contributions. Patrick Dorinson also argues that refusing to give parents vouchers for parochial schools will do away with poor students opportunity for a quality education. The intended audience is parents, politicians, teachers and schools, who are knowledgeable of the debate over school vouchers.
His goal is to persuade the reader that increasing access to better schools helps increase chances for students success. He attempts to lead the reader to his point by trying to demonstrate that private schools improve student achievement and by telling of his own experience with three seniors from a charter school.
There are three major points given to support giving school vouchers to students so that they can go to parochial schools. The first being that vouchers help fight inequality in education caused by economics. The second is that vouchers help improve educational achievement. Finally, Patrick Dorinson attempts to persuade the reader that the school vouchers program was eliminated due to corruption in government because of campaign contributions.
In his blog Dorinson states, “We cannot continue to condemn America’s children to dead-end schools that produce kids who will have dead-end jobs, if any jobs at all, or worse, they just end up dead on the streets.” This argument assumes parents should not expect to see improvement from public schools and without vouchers students are stuck in schools with academic deficiencies.
Dorinson's blog is in response to Sen. Dick Durbin efforts to end the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Dorinson's goal is to convince the reader that the best way to improve opportunities for children is to improve their education and giving vouchers to families gives them away to escape failed public schools. He does this through several points. He gets his idea across very clearly. However, he ignores the fact that public schools can improve and tries to convince us that we should not have faith in the public school system. In the end, in our attempt to fix the education system we find yet another idea that sounds really good on paper, but falls apart when put into action.
14 years ago
