theblogprof: It's official: Democrats kill successful DC voucher program, resegregate DC Public Schools

Friday, January 1, 2010

It's official: Democrats kill successful DC voucher program, resegregate DC Public Schools

From Big Government via Instapundit: Democrats Officially Kill Successful DC Voucher Program

This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape. The Heartland Institute reports:

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

Yet, despite the clearly positive results and the proven success of this program, Sen. Dick Durbin, Rep. Jose Serrano, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Secretary Arne Duncan worked together to kill the OSP. Funding the program only for existing children shrinks the program each year, compromises the federal evaluation of the program, denies entry to the siblings of existing participants, and punishes those children waiting in line by sentencing them to failing and often unsafe schools.

[emphasis mine]
The Democrats have effectively ended the voucher program. Obama only extended it into the 2009-2010 school year. He could have done more. He didn’t. Underpriveleged children–whom the Democrats ~~oppress~~ “protect” from the greed and injustices of the Right had a chance to gain the social justice and fairness Obama continuously touts in his speeches.

The Democrats have spent trillions of our tax dollars so carelessly with failed stimulus pork payouts, cash for clunkers, auto bailouts, bank bailouts, and additional Fannie and Freddie bailouts, you would think they could spare an extra $50 million over five years to continue to educate poor children–especially minority children.

What the MSM has done its best to do is to lose this down the memory hole, as it is an utterly shameful act by Obama and Congressional Democrats in deep-sixing the successful voucher program in D.C., dooming 1,800 low-income mostly black students to one of the worst educational systems in the country (the worst is DPS -Detroit Public Schools, which I have bogged about ad infinitum here).

Education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” More than $28,000 per student. Failing miserably. The only success in that district was a voucher program that Obama attacked, even though vouchers cost a quarter (that's right - 25%) of the $28,000 number and helped the students. Should Obama get his head screwed on straight (good luck with that one), he will announce today to all students that since vouchers have been a smashing success in D.C., proved by concrete educational data, they should be a smashing success elsewhere. I mean -wouldn't that be a move to "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision making?" Especially since vouchers are proven to help students and drive down costs?

But that is not what anyone will hear. That's because Obama and his administration hid data indicating the program's successful educational results as they pushed Congressional Democrats to scrap the program. After all, they have the teachers unions to protect. The WSJ published an article a while back about the shenanigans:

It's bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they'd support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would "not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids." Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.

Mr. Duncan's office spurned our repeated calls and emails asking what and when he and his aides knew about these results. We do know the Administration prohibited anyone involved with the evaluation from discussing it publicly. You'd think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program. A reasonable conclusion is that Mr. Duncan's department didn't want proof of voucher success to interfere with Senator Dick Durbin's campaign to kill vouchers at the behest of the teachers unions.

The decision to let 1,700 poor kids get tossed from private schools is a moral disgrace. It also exposes the ugly politics that lies beneath union and liberal efforts across the country to undermine mayoral control, charter schools, vouchers or any reform that threatens their monopoly over public education dollars and jobs. The Sheldon Silver-Dick Durbin Democrats aren't worried that school choice doesn't work. They're worried that it does, and if Messrs. Obama and Duncan want to succeed as reformers they need to say so consistently.