Let’s be the ones who make change
Last week we told you about two men who took it upon themselves to make a difference when it came to education.
In his own way, Roynell Young is carrying on the tradition of the late J. Patrick Rooney, who passed away last week at the age of 80.
Mr. Rooney was a testament to the power of one individual to make a difference. He didn’t accept mediocrity, and he didn’t settle for band-aid solutions to the problems he saw in our education system.
The Wall Street Journal remembered Mr. Rooney and his contribution to education last week.
During the 1980s, while other businessmen were hoping to tweak a badly broken public education system, Rooney advocated more parental choice. In 1991, his company launched a voucher program that enabled low-income families to send their children to private or parochial schools.
“When all families, no matter how poor, have the freedom to walk away from bad schools,” Rooney told us at the time, “competition will force the public schools to improve.” Today, the voucher program serves some 1,700 children in Indianapolis and has spawned similar programs nationwide that provide educational alternatives for more than 50,000 students.
It is an important lesson for us all.
Some people sit around and talk about change. Others step up to the plate and make change.
Let’s be the ones who make change.
Sad news
In sad news for the school choice movement, J. Patrick Rooney has passed away. Cato’s At Liberty Blog has reported that:
Rooney, who was 80, founded a trend-setting private scholarship fund in 1991. The Educational CHOICE Charitable Trust provides financial assistance to low income families in Indianapolis who want to send their children to private schools.
Rooney’s model laid the groundwork for school choice programs across the country, and is similar to the legislation that has been introduced in Virginia for the past few years.
This model, in which donors give money to a k-12 scholarship organization, which then distributes it to the families who need it, became the framework for some of the school choice movement’s greatest successes. Today, school choice programs in six states offer tax credits to businesses or individuals who donate to such scholarship organizations (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island).
We join others in mourning the passing of one of the leaders who helped to make school choice a reality for many students, and who helped to influence as wave of change to create more opportunities for students across the country.
