The Heritage Foundation is launching a four-week Metro advertising campaign to save the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which was axed by Congress even though voucher recipients are doing better academically than their peers in public school and a majority of District residents supports the program.
The “Let Me Rise!” ads feature eighth grader Shaketa, kindergarteners Nia and Nico, and several other scholarship recipients who represent the program’s 1,700 student enrollees. The ads will be displayed at the Union Station Metrorail stop and plastered on 225 Metro buses.
The $7,500 scholarships allow hundreds of families who otherwise couldn’t afford private or parochial school to escape the District’s second-worst-in-the-nation public schools. But on March 16, an amendment to reauthorize the program offered by Sen. Joseph Lieberman was killed in the Senate on a 55-42 vote.
“Thirty-eight percent of members of Congress have sent a child to private school,” one of the ads points out. “Now, Congress wants to phase out a scholarship that gives children in D.C. the same opportunity.”
Killing this tiny but effective education program to satisfy the National Education Association has got to be one of the most cynical acts taken by a Congress that has abandoned even the pretext of fairness as it bribes and bullies its way through the session.
Taking away this lifeline and throwing innocent children back into District’s worse-than-mediocre school system ranks right up there with legislative abominations such as the bank bailouts and the health care takeover.
The only consolation is that thanks to Heritage’s ad campaign, members of Congress will get to look into the eyes of the tykes they’ve so brazenly betrayed.
