Jason Riley asks the question in the Wall Street Journal.
His answer:
“Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems more interested in the sentencing gap than the learning gap. The president pays lip-service to the need to open pathways to educational achievement, but he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been actively working to shut down Washington, D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides low-income children with $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school. Mr. Obama can’t claim that the program isn’t working. The latest evaluation by his own Education Department showed scholarship recipients — 99% of whom are black or Hispanic — outperforming their public-school peers in reading. That finding takes on even more significance when you consider that black 12th-graders in this country average lower reading scores than white 8th-graders.
Yesterday, the administration announced that it will support allowing current students to remain in the program but will oppose letting any new kids join them. The illogic is exquisite. If the president believes that school vouchers are effective enough to grandfather existing participants, the scholarship program deserves to be expanded, not shuttered.”
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
What’s sweet is that the program wasn’t shut down.
The message is pretty clear: shut down the program and there’ll be a price, an unpleasantly high price, to be paid. The NEA has to be satisfied with promises when what they were after was the cooling corpse of the program at their feet.