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Catholic Association of Latino Leaders Says Denying Parents School Choice is Morally Wrong

SAN ANTONIO, TX (January 24, 2011 -- At the start of National School Choice Week, when the education reform movement in the U.S. draws attention to the need for better options for parents and students, the Catholic Association of Latino Leaders (CALL) encourages its members, and all Catholics, to call for legislatively-enacted programs that pave the way for a broad system of school choice by providing vouchers and education tax credits. “It is our country’s most effective, and most enduring, form of discrimination to force students to attend schools assigned to them by their address when their abilities could lead them to greater achievement if their parents had the capability to select a more effective public or private school for them. Any system of education that restricts a child’s learning opportunities based upon their address or zip code is morally wrong and a grave injustice,” says Robert Aguirre, CALL president and CEO.

According to Aguirre, CALL members -- many of whom speak from the perspective of employers desperately seeking qualified employees able to meet at least minimum literacy skills -- are compelled to speak out on what has become a matter of not just economics but, more importantly, a matter of social injustice. Statistics provided by nationalschoolchoiceweek.com illustrate the economic impact of school choice. According to America’s Promise Alliance, “only 65.1% of Texas’s children graduate from high school, ranking them 38th in the country in graduation rates.” And, a 2007 study commissioned by The Foundation for Educational Choice titled “The High Cost of Failing to Reform Public Education in Texas” revealed that "The beneficial effect of private school competition on public schools is large enough that even a modest school choice program, one that increased private school enrollment by fewer than five percentage points, would reduce the number of Texas public school dropouts by 8,720 to 17,440 students per year, saving Texans between $27 million and $53 million in tax revenue, Medicaid costs and incarceration costs every year.”

CALL leadership stresses that school choice presents a much-needed opportunity for our country’s system of education to improve. “We must be clear. Educational justice is not a political option or position,” explains CALL’s Episcopal Moderator Archbishop José Gomez. “It is a fundamental tenet of Catholic social teaching,” he continues.

“Ultimately,” says CALL Board Chairman Ruben Escobedo of San Antonio, “school choice is about parents, not government, having the right to choose the best possible school for their children.”