David Harsanyi on the Creationism Crisis That Isn't

Recently, Politico and other media outlets have been sounding the alarm about students using vouchers to attend schools teaching creationism. Indeed, 14 states spend nearly $1 billion of taxpayer tuition on hundreds of religious schools that teach kids the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

This would be more troubling if we didn't spend hundreds of billions every year not teaching millions of kids how to read, writes David Harsanyi. Voucher programs offer a wide variety of choices for parents, unlike the closed, failing schools that so many kids are trapped in. As of now, public schools spend about $638 billion on about 55 million students, but only 250,000 students—almost all of them poor—are free to use vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. Of those kids, the vast majority do not attend schools with curricula that feature intelligent design. Yet judging from all the "special investigations" of creationism in schools, you may be under the impression it is the most pressing problem faced by educators.