TORONTO, January 20, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s National Post newspaper reports today the federal government has been quietly giving Native students the full amount of their public education funding amount toward the cost of private schooling. No other Canadians receive this benefit, although there is limited government assistance towards private schooling costs in a number of Canadian provinces.

The private schooling funding for Natives has helped to overcome the dismal failure rates among Native students and has proved the benefit of alternative, private education.

Pierre Bellegarde, the Assembly of First Nations’ regional chief responsible for education, is quoted as admitting the funding arrangement is a form of voucher system. Most Canadian education bureaucrats and teacher unions adamantly oppose any government support for private education fearing it would weaken their monopoly stranglehold on education. Conversely, according to a 2001 National Post poll, a majority of Canadians support greater choice in education.

In a January 6 National Post editorial Fazil Mihlar reported that evidence from studies in the U.S., where vouchers are more common, shows: 1. private schools tend to more racially diverse and integrated than public ones. 2. private schools help promote more tolerance and social involvement than public schools and 3. voucher students predominantly come from very low income families and have initially poor academic records. For low-income African-Americans the results of voucher payments towards private education have been positive.

In an interview with LifeSite, Doug Dewey, former policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Education, warned that public education has long been a way of undermining the family. “The destruction of the role of the family is intended by that education. They don’t want the child to feel he belongs to the mother and father but rather to the state.”  Public education, he says, “is not really a state function” and it “moves education away from the family.”

Dewey cautions, however, that private schools should ideally stay self-funded. Vouchers, “build new constituencies for more government funding”. He warns that, although unions and bureaucrats oppose change, “the deep thinkers among them know how to adapt and exploit government support for private schools to co-opt those schools and control them.”

A former Canadian, Dewey is familiar with the Ontario government’s granting of full funding to the Catholic system under Premier Bill Davis. That arrangement has led to the loss of most of the distinctiveness of that Ontario private school system. With some exceptions, Ontario Catholic schools have in practice become far more secular, regularly undermine Catholic beliefs and produce many students who are no longer Catholic or who even become anti-Catholic as a result of their ‘education’.

Doug Dewey now leads a major U.S.-wide initiative to provide private scholarships to children of poor families to help them obtain private school education.

See National Post report on the native private education funding program
http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?id={2BB3B77E-0958-4325-99FD-26EEB6803481}

See Alliance for the Separation of School and State
http://www.sepschool.org/
The Cato Institute: Vouchers and Educational Freedom: a Debate
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-269es.html

How Government and Public Schools Subvert Homeschooling and Private Schools
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/zysk3.html

Vouchers: another name for welfare
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/voucher2.html

Tax Credits, Not Vouchers
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dieteman/dieteman86.html