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.
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):
Posted by Greg Forster 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 