This week more than 1,000 recipients of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship gathered in the heart of Washington, D.C. Dressed in little plaid school uniforms, holding signs that read, “Options = Power” and “My voucher is my future,” they sang, cheered, and chanted within sight of the Capitol where their futures will be decided.
The pint-sized activists could be politically problematic for Barack Obama–adorable harbingers of doom for an administration trying to navigate between its message of promised education reform and its allegiance to the teachers’ unions, which vehemently oppose the Opportunity Scholarship.
The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship gives 1,700 kids, 99 percent of them minority students and many of them children of single-parent families, $7,500 per year to attend private schools of their choice. Despite evidence that children and parents are satisfied with a program that costs half per-student what the D.C. public schools spend (and with better results), Sen. Dick Durbin put language into a recent spending bill stripping the program of its funding.
Durbin and the administration likely hoped the school-choice program would die a quiet death. But the families, many of whom were Obama supporters during the election, are making noise and hoping for an assist from the president, who could easily get his party in line if he were willing.
“We voted (for Obama), we walked, we went to the parade. We stood freezing,” scholarship parent Ingrid Campbell told Reason.tv.
Now, she’s confused by an administration that promised to do what’s right for kids, ideology aside, but is unwilling to stand up for a program that’s working for her daughter.
Caught between the pressure of the scholarship’s sympathetic activists and the unions, the Obama administration has alighted upon another in a series of squirrelly positions on the program:
The budget documents, which expand on the fiscal 2010 blueprint that Congress approved last month by outlining Obama’s priorities in detail, would provide $12.2 million for the Opportunity Scholarship Program for the 2009-2010 school year. The new language also would revise current law that makes further funding for existing students contingent on Congress’s reauthorization of the program beyond its current June 2010 expiration date. Under the Obama proposal, further congressional action would not be necessary, and current students would automatically receive grants until they finish school.
Translation: “Let me be perfectly clear. Everyone is going to know I’m killing this demonstrably effective program because of the political debt I owe teachers’ unions, which I of course assured everyone would not dictate my education policies. So let’s just extend this enough to get people off my back even if it means taking the morally indefensible position that the program is good enough for these succeeding, satisfied kids and parents, but no one else should be allowed to be similarly successful and satisfied, lest I lose my gazillions in union support. The children are our future, as long as they’re not putting their grubby little hands on money that should be going to NEA members. Thank you, and God bless America.”
Before now, Obama had promised that his Sec. of Education Arne Duncan would “use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” That was shortly before Duncan rescinded scholarships for next year’s recipients, effectively killing the program off with even more enthusiasm than Congress, which had scheduled it to die quietly at the end of next school year.
All of this on top of a Department of Education study that indicated the program works, prompting the Washington Post editorial page to write in its favor.
Of course, that study came after Duncan had made the statement that it didn’t make sense “to take kids out of a school where they’re happy and safe and satisfied and learning,” which I guess is presumably the position we’re back to now. Too bad for this year’s and future scholarship recipients, who are asked to rely only on the reforms sanctioned by Duncan’s career. Duncan, incidentally, was the CEO of the Chicago Public School system during the time that Barack Obama was noticeably not sending his children there. Take heart, scholarship recipients!
Here’s Obama, former private-school scholarship kid himself, in 2007 on where his kids went to school in Chicago, and what that means for the “ordinary parents” and kids like the ones in D.C.:
That is what he needs to fight for, and could fight for in the form of this program, but as is often the case, this Obama statement had an expiration date . Sorry, kids. This jug of hope is past its drink-by date.
It’s hard to tell yet how this will affect reauthorization going forward. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, who has indicated tepid support for the program, met with Sen. Joe Lieberman this week. Lieberman’s committee will hold the evaluation of the program in the next couple of weeks, and the schedule for that and the House-side hearing will be forthcoming. School-choice activists will have children and parents on the Hill during the hearings, some of them testifying before Congress.
Kevin Chavous, a former D.C. Councilman who helped bring charter schools to the District and is a school-choice proponent, has been talking to Duncan and his staff about supporting the program.
“He says he’d like to see more local support. I think the local support is evident,” he said, gesturing to the large crowd at the Opportunity Scholarship rally.
Chavous and other activists are working on a letter from D.C. Council members to Congress to make that local support explicit, he said. Councilman Marion Barry, one of the program’s most vocal local proponents, spoke at the rally, declaring that leaving kids in failing schools is a social injustice activists must fight against, ferociously.
Other speakers had a lighter touch, such as Maudeen Cooper, president of the Greater Washington Urban League, who repeatedly voiced her support for public schools, but noted that promised reforms moving through the slow gears of government do not help children in the here and now, as the scholarship program does.
“It’s not about abandoning public schools. It’s about saying, ‘what can I do today?'” she said.
Obama must have heard her inspiring call to arms and decided, “I know! I’ll obfuscate!” Not quite the inspiration all those parents were counting on when they voted for him, I’d bet.
Mary Katharine Ham is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
