Lots of reaction to Obama's killing off of the Washington D.C. school voucher program, in another example of the policy walk not matching the campaign talk. Caving to labor interests trumps the continuation of a successful voucher program that was rescuing poor D.C. area students from the miserable public schools there. And the administration's political maneuvering around the issue is even more cynical and transparent.
Democrats apparently don't want private schools outlawed. (Where else could the Obama girls go?) They just want rich people to be the only ones permitted to attend them. How progressive!
Juan Williams rips the administration here:
...all along the administration indicated that pending evidence that this voucher program or any other produces better test scores for students they were willing to fight for it. The president has said that when it comes to better schools he is open to supporting “what works for kids.†That looked like a level playing field on which to evaluate the program and even possibly expanding the program.But last week Secretary Duncan announced that he will not allow any new students to enter the D.C. voucher program. In fact, he had to take back the government’s offer of scholarships to 200 students who had won a lottery to get into the program starting next year. His rationale is that if the program does not win new funding from Congress then those students might have to go back to public school in a year.
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With no living, breathing students profiting from the program to give it a face and stand and defend it the Congress has little political pressure to put new money into the program. The political pressure will be coming exclusively from the teacher’s unions who oppose the vouchers, just as they oppose No Child Left Behind and charter schools and every other effort at reforming public schools that continue to fail the nation’s most vulnerable young people, low income blacks and Hispanics.
That evidence of the program's success that Obama said would cause him to reconsider the program was contained in a study that the administration has been sitting on. Here's Shikha Dalmia at Reason.com:
D.C. public schools are violent, chaotic places that have among the highest dropout—and the lowest graduation—rates in the country. In 2007, D.C.'s fourth- and eighth-grade students scored lower than children from all 50 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's most reliable standardized test. Less than half of its children are "proficient"—meaning they perform at grade-level—in reading and math.Against this grim reality, one would have thought an administration that ran on the theme of hope would do anything to nurture a program that offers a way out of D.C.'s hope-killing factories and into other schools.
Instead, the Obama administration has done everything in its power to strangle it. Obama cheerfully signed a spending bill that gratuitously included a provision phasing out the program next year unless Congress expressly reauthorizes it. Of course, making water flow uphill will be easier than winning approval from a Democrat-controlled Congress with strong ties to the teachers' unions who contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns.
As if that wasn't a big enough obstacle, no sooner had the ink dried on the law than Education Secretary Arne Duncan rescinded the scholarship offer to children admitted for next year, making the program's shuttering a fait accompli.
And now it turns out that, while the program's fate was being sealed in Congress, the administration deliberately sat on a study its own Department of Education completed weeks earlier. Why? Because the study found not that the program was failing, but that it was succeeding.
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The most blatant hypocrisy involves Obama's personal parental decisions. He chose to send his own daughters to Sidwell Friends, a private school among D.C.'s most exclusive institutions whose annual tuition runs around $30,000. If he felt so strongly that offering children an exit route would stymie the reform of public schools, then why not put his own daughters in one? Jimmy Carter did. This would not only please unions—prompting them to open up their war chest even more in the next elections—but also signal his resolve about reform. If he didn't, that's presumably because his daughters' futures are too precious to be sacrificed on the altar of politics. But, evidently, the futures of other children are not.
The pro-choice forces haven't given up. Senators Lieberman and Collins have written the Secretary of Education asking that the program be continued long enough for Congress to consider re-funding it.
(via MKH at TWS, and Andrew Stuttaford at The Corner)
Posted by dan at April 21, 2009 9:31 PM