The Washington Post editorial page weighs in again on choice, this time in the context of the Forest Grove vs. T.A. case pending before the United States Supreme Court.
Of course you wouldn’t want to clog the courts with lawsuits like the special needs law created. A voucher program with a voucher amount less than the total spending per pupil would be far more equitable and efficient.
What gives? A second Friday has passed without another sneaky political trick to rob low-income minority students of educational opportunities while attempting to attract as little media attention as possible. It’s almost like Obama and Duncan have stopped trying — like they are just phoning it in.
In a bipartisan appeal, Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins wrote a letter to Secretary Duncan asking him to reverse the Departments decision to rescind Opportunity Scholarships to 200 DC school children (HT Whitney Tilson).
The letter reads:
Dear Secretary Duncan,
We are following up on our letter dated March 17, 2009, asking that you refrain from making any administrative rules or policies that would disrupt the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) or prevent the grantee from accepting applications and students for the 2009-2010 school year. Prior to a response to our inquiry, we were disappointed to learn that you subsequently made the choice not to allow new students to enroll in the program.
By preventing new scholarships from being awarded, you are effectively ending a program before Congress has had the opportunity to consider reauthorizing it. Therefore, we respectfully request that you consider reversing your decision.
As we noted in our letter to you, the future of the OSP is presently under consideration by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. We will be holding hearings on the program in May, and Majority Leader Reid has promised floor time to consider a reauthorization proposal. We respectfully request that you refrain from implementing significant changes to the program until we have an opportunity to review the program’s results, hold public hearings, and have a thoughtful debate about the future of the program.
Your recent decision to suspend the program for new entrants will hurt families who are searching for other options for their children. We understand that many of these parents had been notified that they would, in fact, receive scholarships for their children. Now that the DC Public School’s out of boundary process has been completed and the majority of public charter school deadlines have passed for the 2009-2010 school year, the suspension decision will leave these families with little or no opportunity to explore viable alternatives.
We will continue to support the D.C. Public School System in its efforts to improve outcomes for all students. However, in the interim, we must continue to provide options such as the OSP and provide families real choices in ensuring access to a quality education for their children.
We thank you for your immediate attention to this matter.
Despite Obama and Duncan’s best efforts to conceal their steps to kill the D.C. voucher program by acting on Friday afternoons, they have utterly failed at burying this story. The hits just keep on coming.
“In a demonstration of obeisance to union power, however, Congressional Democrats refused to re-fund a private school voucher program in the District of Columbia and the administration swallowed the decision. Obama and Duncan say they have hopes to “work with” the unions rather than openly confront them and capitulation on D.C. vouchers may have been a goodwill offering. Whether appeasement will buy cooperation remains to be seen.”
“As the president and his party’s legislators are forcing minority children back into public schools, the doors of which would never be darkened by the president’s or legislators’ children, remember this: We have seen a version of this shabby act before. One reason conservatism came to power in the 1980s was that in the 1970s liberals advertised their hypocrisy by supporting forced busing of other people’s children to schools the liberals’ children did not attend.
This issue will be back. In a few months, the appropriation bill for the District will come to the floor of the House of Representatives, at which point there will be a furious fight for the children’s interests. Then we will learn whether the president and his congressional allies are capable of embarrassment. On the evidence so far, they are not.”
“Former North Carolina Sen. and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards liked to go around talking about the “two Americas.” Where education is concerned, he may have been on to something. There’s one America for the elites, like members of Congress and the President and Mrs. Obama, who send their children to private schools; and there’s one for everyone else, the regular people who, at least in the District of Columbia, are seeing the educational dreams they have for their children shattered on the altar of politics.”
And Adam Schaeffer over at Cato has given Arne Duncan an award. Unfortunately for Duncan it is the Chutzpah Award.
All of this is on top of the greatest hits collections, volume one and two, as well as a bunch of other hot singles from the Washington Post and others too numerous to mention in this 30 second commercial.
How can Obama, Duncan, Durbin, and the rest stop this pain? One easy solution is to do the right thing, follow the evidence, and renew D.C. vouchers.
So the University of Texas has a defensive coordinator named Will Muschamp. Muschamp is known as “Coach Boom” because a clip of him reacting to a big hit went viral on youtube. Going nuts after one of his players delivered a bone crunching hit, Muschamp ran out on to the field happily screaming “BOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!” in a voice louder than I would have ever expected humanly possible, with the possible exception of the Ladner children
Texas fans now happily yell “BOOM!” from the stands when they see a big hit.
This is the reaction I had when I read Dan Lips and Lindsey Burke in the NRO today. The lines from President Obama’s open letter to his daughters is priceless. I take that back. They are beyond priceless:
“In the end, girls, that’s why I ran for President: because of what I want for you and for every child in this nation. I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential – schools that challenge them, inspire them, and instill in them a sense of wonder about the world around them. I want them to have the chance to go to college – even if their parents aren’t rich.”
Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation published the results of the latest survey of where members of Congress sent/send their own children to school. The survey finds:
• 44 percent of Senators and 36 percent of Representatives had ever sent their children to private schools. Among the general public, only 11 percent of American students attend private school.
• While members of the 111th Congress practice school choice for their own families, they should also support school choice policies for all of America’s families. A failed amendment offered by Senator John Ensign (R–NV) on behalf of the popular and successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program would have passed if Members of Congress who exercised school choice for theirown children had voted in favor of the amendment. The future of the D.C. voucher program is now uncertain.Approximately 20 percent of Members of the 111th Congress attended private high school themselves—nearly twice the rate of the American public.
The gap between what Congress practices and what it preaches was best illustrated by the Heritage Foundation’s analysis of a recent vote to preserve the program. The measure was defeated by the Senate 58 to 39; it would have passed if senators who exercised school choice for their own children had voted in favor. Alas, the survey doesn’t name names, save for singling out Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), architect of the language that threatens the program, for sending his children to private school and attending private school himself…
Mr. Duncan, in a recent interview, spoke eloquently of his family’s choice of Arlington as a place to live because of what he called the “determining factor” of schools. He told Science magazine: “My family has given up so much so that I could have the opportunity to serve; I didn’t want to try to save the country’s children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children’s education.” We don’t think it’s too much to expect our leaders to treat their constituents with the same fairness and regard they demand for their own families.
Next year, I’d love to see Heritage go in to even greater depth. Let’s see how many Congressmen sent their children to Anacostia High, etc. Let’s put the over/under at one.
As hard as Obama, Duncan, and Durbin try to minimize media attention to their efforts to kill D.C. vouchers with language slipped into an omnibus spending bill and Friday afternoon sneaky political tricks, the story just won’t go away.
Since our latest summary of greatest hits, I have an op-ed in the WSJ. Greg has a new piece in Pajamas Media. Shikha Dalmia has a piece in Forbes. Glenn Beck has devoted a segment of his Fox TV show to the issue. Senator Ensign gave a speech describing his fight for D.C. vouchers and vowing to expand federal voucher programs to include special education nationwide. Senator Lieberman will begin holding hearings on the re-authorization of D.C. vouchers next month.
If D.C. vouchers go down, they won’t go down quietly. Politicians who break their word to abide by the evidence, who would deny to others the choices and opportunities they enjoy, and who try to get away with sneaky Friday afternoon political tricks will have to account for their actions.
“Vouchers may lose in D.C., but that doesn’t mean they’re not winning in the long term. Every successful movement loses some battles. Indeed, the more important the cause, the more we should expect the entrenched interests of the status quo to invest in fighting it off. That will inevitably mean some setbacks alongside the victories.
Where would we be today if Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail had just said, ‘Well, here I am in jail — I guess I’ve lost the fight’? King knew he wasn’t in jail because he was losing. He was in jail because he was winning.
And the cowards who put him in jail knew it just as well as he did.”
Or maybe his conscience is getting to him and he could no longer betray his commitment to “do what works for kids” regardless of predisposition or ideology. Maybe he was sick before and is now getting better.
Whatever the case may be, let us wish for the physical and policy health of the Secretary so that he does what is right by D.C. vouchers with good body and spirit.
The Watchmen has a great scene where one of the heroes is unmasked and sent to prison. Needless to say, the place is swimming in criminal anxious to kill him. Our hero, a rather rough-edged sort of chap, is assaulted in line by a prisoner far larger than himself and using a makeshift knife to boot.
Not only does our hero quickly disable his attacker, for good measure, he smashes a plate of glass, grabs a container of hot cooking grease, and douses the bloke who dared to assault him. As the prison guards dragged him away, he growled out “You don’t seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you…YOU’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH ME!!!!!”
You can watch this, grisly violence and all, here:
Now much gloom surrounds the fight over DC vouchers. Jay even seems to refer to them in the past tense in the Wall Street Journal. Could it be, however, that we’ve misread things? Perhaps we’re not locked in the prison with Dick Durbin. Perhaps he is locked in the prison with us.
Now Messrs. Obama and Duncan find themselves in a Vietnam-style quagmire. They’ve crushed the hopes and dreams of 200 low-income D.C. families while staking out the otherwise-reasonably-decent position that 1,700 youngsters already in the program should be protected until they graduate. Yet even that outcome is in doubt, as the program’s enemies strive to kill it outright. Meanwhile, both are vulnerable to personal attacks, with the President’s children in an elite private school and the Secretary admitting that he chose a (public) school outside the District for his daughter because he didn’t want to “jeopardize my own children’s education.”
The time has come for both to learn some key lessons. First: though it might look like a teapot, the D.C. voucher program is capable of causing a major tempest that isn’t going to end anytime soon. Second: if you want Congress to cough up funds to keep the program’s current students in their schools, it’s going to take a fight–an affirmative fight by you in defense of vouchers that work for poor kids! And third: don’t fear such a fight, because the facts–not to mention a compelling human narrative–are on your side.
This fight rids us of all illusions- you are either with the kids, or with the unions. Period. You either believe in evidence based education reform, or you do not. No middle ground. If you are a Democrat, you must choose whether you are a hero or a zero. If you want to be a zero, are you willing to throw 1,700 kids under the bus in order to do it?
No amount of complaining by policy wonks, of course, is going to change the political realities on this. It’s not hard to imagine, however, the DC Parents drenching the zeros in the political equivalent of hot grease.
In today’s Wall Street Journal Jay makes a lot of good points about the teacher unions and their true feelings about charter schools. Along the way, however, he says Obama has “done union bidding by killing the D.C. voucher program.” This is likely true, but readers should not think that all attempts to save the program have run their course. Senator Lieberman has stated that he plans to hold hearings about the program in May. Senator Feinstein said in March that if the official evaluation by the Department of Ed found positive results (which it did) then she too would support extending the program. Negative press and public pressure calling on Obama to support reauthorizing the program has been increasing daily.
Congress and, most importantly, President Obama, still have an opportunity to do the right thing, stand by their stated principles, and reauthorize a program that has been scientifically proven to help disadvantaged D.C. schoolchildren improve their lives.
DC kids would tell Jay (although certainly with less cheese):
When a study comes out showing positive results for vouchers the teacher unions are normally quick to release a statement dissecting the results, highlighting any negative discoveries, and pointing out (mostly imaginary) flaws in research design.
Posted by matthewladner 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Jay P. Greene's Blog 