It’s virtually impossible to get rid of federal programs that don’t work, so it’s even more astounding that a successful education program for low-income African American children is being phased-out by Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Without, I might add, a peep of protest from President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
What happened to “the fierce urgency of now”? How in heaven’s name can Congress sit there bailing out failed automakers, irresponsible bankers and Wall Street tycoons while yanking hope away from 1,700 impoverished District schoolchildren?
Former D.C. Council member Kevin Chavous and Juan Williams of Fox News and National Public Radio passionately defended the endangered $13 million D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program at a press conference last week. But they’re practically alone in their opposition to sacrificing children on the altar of political expediency to satisfy the false education gods at the National Education Association.
Over the past five years, OSP has provided District children with a quality private school education for half the amount spent per student in the city’s public schools which, even with Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s reforms, are still the second worst in the nation.
“This is one of the most successful education programs ever created,” says Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation (whose heart-tugging documentary “Let Me Rise: The Struggle to Save School Choice in the Nation’s Capital” can be seen at voicesofschoolchoice.org).
Rigorous mandated studies found that OSP recipients tested four months ahead of their public school peers. If allowed to keep their scholarships, they would be two full years ahead at the end of high school — enough to close the minority achievement gap.
Carmen Holassi moved to D.C. from Trinidad when she was 18. Economic realities dashed her hopes of becoming a nurse, but she wanted better for her children. When her son Robert was a struggling fifth-grader, Holassi saw an OSP poster on the bus and applied.
Now a junior at Archbishop Carroll High School, the 17-year-old recently told her he was too busy with his schoolwork to socialize. A whiz in physics, Robert dreams of working at NASA someday. His 9-year-old brother, Richard, also attends a private school on an OSP scholarship.
Eliminating a program that has given hundreds of children like the Holassis a chance to excel is not only irresponsibly cruel, it’s also short-sighted. “We are going to be in a dependent care relationship with other industrialized nations because they’re educating their children and we’re not,” Chavous said, bemoaning a “lack of commitment and urgency that flies in the face of reality.” Williams lamented the fact that “[politics] is more important than children’s education.”
Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, gets late-night calls from desperate parents asking her, “What do we do now?” The daughter of the first black superintendent in the South who has been fighting for the program for 14 years, Ford concedes she has never been so discouraged.
Obama “has not lifted a finger” to help save this educational lifeline, Ford said. Given the fact that his two daughters attend private school and the president himself was the beneficiary of a private scholarship in Hawaii, his lack of engagement is particularly painful.
“Not only should OSP be continued, it should be expanded,” Lips says. It would be, if Democrats in Congress cared more about children than NEA campaign contributions.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
