Stand up for children’s sake

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Wake up, everybody!

As we spend considerable time tweeting, texting, yakking, emailing and debating America’s most noticeable birth defect (and its statues and memorials), now is the time for all good women and men to renew discussions about solutions.

To wit:

Health. Are we to continue bickering about gun control while our young people commit suicide and take the lives of others and anesthetize themselves with opioids?

Education. Are we to continue allowing self-serving political hacks to praise public schools for increasing graduation rates, while parents still have to spend $1.5 billion a year on college remediation courses because their kids failed to grasp the three Rs in government-run public school systems?

Welfare. Are we to continue denying that the failure to keep hope alive fuels the flames of hate, bigotry and resistance.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who takes the heat from carpetbaggers and scalawags alike, understands it is his job to deal with the health and the law-and-order aspects that spawn crime.

We need to remember that the stats don’t lie.

By way of examples, Baltimore had 220 homicides as of Aug. 16, which was only the 228th day of 2017. Chicago, meanwhile, which sought the help of federal authorities to help stem the bloodshed in the Windy City, has seen more than 2,330 shootings and at least 432 killed so far this year.

If that news isn’t frightening, consider this, as my colleague Laura Kelly reported: “Drug overdose deaths among teenagers rose sharply over a one-year period after nearly seven years of decline after hitting a peak in 2007.” The numbers are from federal research that focused on adolescents ages 15-19.

Federal research also said that suicide rates among 15-to-19-year-old girls spiked from 2.4 per 100,000 in 2007 to 5.1 per 100,000 in 2015.

Mr. Sessions is on the front line of the battles on both fronts.

“As the homicide rate has gone up, the fatal overdose rate has gone up even faster,” Mr. Sessions told those gathered for the annual Gangs Across the Carolinas training symposium.

It’s worth noting that in 2016, 60,000 people died of overdoses. For comparison, the 2016 population of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was 59,246.

On the education front, let’s admit that government-run school systems do a fantastic job of convincing us that high school graduation rates are rising and that social promotions no longer occur. Heck, unions even back them up, telling us the teachers and the students aren’t the problem, the system is the problem.

Well, lo and behold, more and more parents aren’t buying the smoke-and-mirrors act. For them the rubber meets the road when they have to dig into their wallets to pay for their “graduate’s” remedial college courses to the collective tune of $1.5 billion a year.

Understand, too, it’s the norm for remedial students to not get college credit for those remedial classes. So the likelihood of them graduating four years after graduating high school is, well, unlikely.

The costly game that’s being played helps to explain why parents are jumping aboard the school-choice wagon. Indeed, they are not merely availing themselves of public charter and magnet schools, they are pushing for public voucher programs, too.

Opposition to publicly funded vouchers, which help cover private school tuition, has dropped from 44 percent in 2016 to 37 percent. The other great news from a new poll from Education Next, which is published by Harvard’s Kennedy School and Stanford University, is that 45 percent of respondents favor the voucher idea.

A third possible game-changer is tax credit-funded scholarships for private schools. Opposition to such scholarships declined from 29 percent to 24 percent, and support stands at 54 percent.

“The data,” said Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill, “shows that the majority of parents still want more and better options when it comes to education for their kids.”

You want more health, education and welfare options — and better options?

Speak up. Say so.

In other words, drive the discussion and actions on health, education and welfare. That’s what the people whose monuments and memorials are being removed did.

Don’t wait for Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi to tweet.

• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.