On the 60-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, first lady Michelle Obama lamented that in many ways, our school system is just as segregated now as it was then. Ironically, her husband’s administration actually promotes segregation. Oops.
The Brown decision held that the old standard of “separate but equal” no longer applied, and that segregation was inherently unequal and a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Speaking to a group of graduating high school seniors in Topeka, Kan., the very city that the Brown case originated, she observed that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them,” according to The New York Times.
“Today, by some measures, our schools are as segregated as they were back when Dr. King gave his final speech,” she continued.
The moment that CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller repeated the first lady’s words in a tweet, the Twitterverse lit up. Twitchy was on hand to record every detail, beginning with the InstaPundit’s own reply to Knoller.
.@markknoller Says woman who sends kids to expensive private school.
— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) May 16, 2014
Others soon pitched in with their own brutal commentary:
.@instapundit @markknoller And who watched, calmly, as her political party got rid of all the poor minority students attending it.
— Moe Lane (@moelane) May 16, 2014
@moelane @instapundit @markknoller And watched her husband slowly kill the voucher system in DC.
— Pradheep Shanker MD (@Neoavatara) May 16, 2014
.@markknoller racist country elects black man president twice so his wife can rail about how racist country still is.
— S.M (@redsteeze) May 17, 2014
The Obama administration’s war on charter schools and school choice got so intense that the Department of Justice sued the state of Louisiana over its own voucher system last year. So what’s the administration’s beef with school choice? The teachers unions don’t like them because charter and parochial schools are generally non-union. This tidbit wasn’t lost on one Twitter user:
@fatdaddybulldog @markknoller Hmm. So whats the problem with vouchers that allow more choice? Oh, yeah….shhhh…unions
— Beatlegal09 (@Beatlegal09) May 17, 2014
That’s the trouble with serving two masters: You can’t purport to be a champion of good education for minority students and answer to teacher unions at the same time.
This fact wasn’t lost on Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who came out swinging after his state was sued over its own voucher system. Watch his speech via The Huffington Post.
