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The Jax Files: With Tom Jackson in Pasco
Pasco County News | Breaking News

Choosing, and advocating, school choice

Posted Jan 24, 2011 by Tom Jackson

Updated Jan 25, 2011 at 12:02 AM

A reminder, first mentioned in my Friday Pasco Tribune column, of a local alternative to the President’s State of the Union Address:

As part of “National School Choice Week”—not just an event on the calendar, but a national movement of disparate groups interested in one thing: the best educational outcomes for America’s youngsters—a hybrid seminar and town-hall-style meeting featuring conservative media heavyweights is scheduled Tuesday at TPepin’s Hospitality CenEvents Center on north 50th Street in Tampa.

“Education Revolution: Restoring America’s Exceptionalism” features pundit/author Dick Morris, syndicated radio talker Michael Medved and veteran activist Ralph Reed. The trio is scheduled to convene its debriefing at 7:30 p.m. Admission to the main event is free.  Tickets for a meet-and-mingle reception that begins at 6 p.m. are $59.

Additional information is available at the Talk Radio 860, WGUL website.  Full disclosure: WGUL, 860 AM is home to “The Jax Files Weekend,” hosted by your humble correspondent (*blush*) Saturday mornings at 10.  My interview with Morris from our last episode is available, via podcast, here.

This also makes an opportune moment to note, as does Kathryn Jean Lopez over at National Review Online’s “The Corner,” that “National School Choice Week” will not go entirely unnoticed during President Obama’s speech:

This week is National School Choice Week and that’s not lost on Speaker of the House John Boehner, as he prepares for tomorrow night’s State of the Union Address.

His first Speaker’s box will include parents, students, and teachers. Three of four children who will be sitting there will be students who are attending Catholic schools in Washington, D.C. under the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program this president and congressional Democrats have thus far refused to renew.

Also sitting in the Speaker’s box will be someone who has written for NRO: Virginia Walden Ford, the brave, energetic hero to many D.C. parents and children, who runs D.C. Parents for School Choice (who I’ve met many a time at the Heritage Foundation). She’s been a tireless advocate for the D.C. school-choice program, a tireless advocate of young people in our nation’s capital.

One of two newly elevated American cardinals in the Catholic Church, Washington, D.C.’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl will also be sitting in the Speaker’s box.

The presence of Wuerl, Ford, students, parents, and teachers will underscore the Speaker’s commitment to not only these scholarships but a bipartisan effort to continue them in the 112th Congress.

A senior House GOP source tells NRO: “If President Obama is serious about bipartisan education reform, his administration should start by supporting bipartisan education reform in the form of saving the successful D.C. school choice initiative.”

On Wednesday morning, Boehner and Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman will hold a press conference to introduce the reauthorization of the school-choice legislation. To give an idea of prioritization: This is the only bill the Speaker currently plans to sponsor himself this session.

The rest of Lopez’s compelling post is here.

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