OPINION:
In these final days of the 114th Congress (until Sept. 30, 2016, when Congress returns home to campaign for reelection), the most critical task that stands before us is to set our nation back onto the constitutional track by restoring “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The greatest form of reparations we can offer those who were tragically held in slavery in our country is to end the modern form of slavery in our nation’s schools. In a recent op-ed, Keith Benson, vice president of the Camden County East NAACP in Camden, N.J., compared the opposition to school choice and opposition to end slavery. “As a history major I am acutely aware of the massive resistance abolitionists faced at the very idea that slavery should be abolished,” he wrote. “In many ways this school choice ’controversy’ is the same argument. Abolition was ’Life Choice.’ We have narrowed it down to ’School Choice.’ The effects however, are the same.”
Just as the Declaration of Independence in 1776 paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so, too, will overwhelming passage of the Education Freedom Accounts Act (S.2455/H.R.4426) in 2016 pave the way for a new era of domestic tranquility, peace and prosperity “with liberty and justice for all.”
ISRAEL TEITELBAUM
Morristown, N.J.
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