They were dancing on Capitol Hill and in the John A. Wilson Building last week. Congressional Democrats approved the District’s appropriations sans controversial riders, which had prohibited the city from enacting a medical marijuana referendum, implementing a needle exchange program and providing free abortions for low-income women.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting congressional representative, called the vote “historic” and said it ensured “greater democracy in the nation’s capital.” Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray praised “our friends in Congress, especially those on the appropriations committees, for bucking their colleagues who would continue to unfairly treat the District of Columbia differently from other states.”
Neither Gray nor Norton mentioned Congress also killed a valuable program that allowed 1,700 low-income children to attend schools of their choice. Democrats refused to extend funding for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
By their actions, they asserted it was fine to pass dope around District neighborhoods; encourage low-income women to become pregnant, then have taxpayers cover the costs for abortions; and use local and federal money to distribute needles in areas where young children might come upon them. But it’s unacceptable to use federal dollars to provide high-quality education for poor children.
Instead of patting themselves on their backs, Democrats, including the big man in the White House and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, should hang their heads in shame.
When Democrats gained control of Congress, I predicted in this space they’d assault the voucher program in short order. Liberals have no objections placing their children in private schools or using federal dollars for tuition at expensive universities and colleges. But when low-income families ask for the same, they’re treated as if they’re common thieves, attempting to snatch the government’s purse.
“The decision to end the program — a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill — destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families,” former D.C. Councilman Kevin Chavous and Virginia Walden Ford, leaders of the education choice movement, said in a prepared statement after the vote.
District parents and voucher supporters had held rallies and lobbied elected officials during the past year, hoping to persuade congressional representatives to continue and reauthorize legislation that created the scholarship program. Rather than listen to the pleas of the poor, Democrats heard only unions and others who argued that vouchers were foisted on the District without its permission. That’s poppycock. Then-Mayor Anthony Williams, D.C. Board of Education President Peggy Cooper Cafritz and Council Chairwoman Linda Cropp all supported the effort.
Chavous and Walden said the lack of funds meant siblings of existing participants wouldn’t be allowed to enter the program, and those who have been waiting in line were “sentenced to failing and often unsafe schools.” Equally important, the program’s slow death most surely will compromise its evaluation.
That suits Democrats; they’ll resort to anything to declare the program a failure. But children and families served by the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship know better.
Jonetta Rose Barras, hosts of WPFW’s “D.C. Politics with Jonetta,” can be reached at [email protected].
