President Obama is rewarding District of Columbia residents — who gave him 92 percent of their votes in the 2008 election — by zeroing out an education program that 74 percent of them support. Enrollment in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program is up 60 percent this year, but Obama gave the OSP a goose egg instead of the expected $20 million in his new $3.8 trillion budget. To pacify the teachers unions, he turned his back on 1,615 disadvantaged District children — 92 percent of whom are black or Hispanic and live in households with an average annual income of $23,401 — who are taking advantage of the OSP to escape academically inferior and unsafe public schools.

Democrats have tried for years to kill the OSP ever since a Republican Congress created it eight years ago. The program provides tuition assistance of up to $8,000 for elementary and middle school students and $12,000 for high schoolers at qualifying private schools. In 2009, Obama tried to phase it out by closing the program off to new entrants. Last year, House Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., teamed up in a bipartisan effort to save the program, which Congress reauthorized for five more years.