There she goes again: Ann Coulter rips public education

Columnist and best-selling author Ann Coulter is at it again, this time smearing public school teachers as fat women and perverts who love to have sex with underage students.
Obviously, playing the provocateur has helped Ms. Coulter sell millions of copies of her books, but the sad fact is there are a lot of people who actually buy the venom that this woman spews.

Her latest column includes the following passages, allegedly based on last week's You-Tube Democratic presidential debate:

As usual, the audience consisted mostly of public schoolteachers. According to CNN, the highest reading achieved on the CNN feelings-knob was for Richardson talking about public schoolteachers. (Some in the audience said they hadn't been that excited since the last time they had sex with an underage student.)

Or this comment:

Noticeably, Gov. Bill Richardson got the first "woo" of the debate -- the mating call of rotund liberal women -- for demanding a federal mandate that would guarantee public schoolteachers a minimum salary of $40,000.

These comments lead into the point of her column- that all problems in American education can be solved with vouchers. While Ms. Coulter does make some legitimate points about the hypocrisy of these candidates who proclaim their unflagging support for public schools while finding all sorts of reasons to enroll their children in private schools, for the most part she is sounding the same notes, none of which are supported by studies, that a student enrolled in a private school automatically receives a better education than one who is enrolled in a public school. That is not the case and never has been. Undoubtedly, there are excellent private schools...just as there are excellent public schools.

Undeniably, public education has its problems, many of those in the inner-city areas that are being exploited by the voucher supporters. They do so by emphasizing the myth that the problem lies solely at the door of public schools. So more and more artificial barriers are constructed for the schools, while our elected officials take no actions to solve the societal ills that create many of the problems that our schools face.

No Child Left Behind has been doomed to failure from the start, and not just because of its unrealistic goal that every child will be proficient in math and reading, a goal that can never be met as long as there are children who do not want to learn, and parents who do not care.

That being said, how can a program like No Child Left Behind work when it fails to take into account such societal problems as drugs, broken marriages, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, poverty, and violence. Public school teachers and administrators have to do their part, but a support system also has to be built outside school grounds.

The proponents of educational vouchers have never explained, or even attempted to explain, how sending poor children to private schools is going to help solve these problems.
As with many of the poorly conceived notions that have come to the forefront in today's politics, vouchers are being pushed, in the state of Missouri, by outside interests, such as All Children Matter, who have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to political campaigns, and to a small group of billionaires, such as Rex Sinquefield and the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame, who have little or no concept of the problems of the poor, and whose views only gain capital because they are willing to underwrite the financing of political campaigns. As usual in our political system, it all breaks down to dollars.

As for Ann Coulter, the best argument that she could make for vouchers is if she turned out to be a product of public schools.