From NRO’s The Corner:
For those who would like to see D.C. voucher program opened to new students again, expect an uphill battle. Today the White House Office of Budget and Management released a statement opposing House speaker John Boehner’s legislation:
While the Administration appreciates that H.R. 471 would provide Federal support for improving public schools in the District of Columbia (D.C.), including expanding and improving high-quality D.C. public charter schools, the Administration opposes the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill. The Federal Government should focus its attention and available resources on improving the quality of public schools for all students. Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement. The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students…
Which misses the point, entirely. The reason DC public schools suck is because they are run by an entrenched, unionized bureaucracy which has a captive market – namely, the poor kids of DC. Take away that captive market and the public schools will be forced to improve no matter how much the unions would prefer the schools remain garbage (garbage schools require less work but actually tend to have higher rates of pay…its a win/win for the unions). President Obama and his Administration simply do not care about the poor kids of DC – in their mind, the political calculus of obtaining fat donations for 2012 completely outweighs what will happen to the children in DC. Those kids, ill-educated, won’t become a problem for years – but next year is an election, for crying out loud. Gotta keep our liberal, Democrat priorities in order, ya know?
School choice is the silver bullet to fix education. Not because every kid who goes to a private school will go on to Harvard (which, in fact, is pretty much a useless achievement these days unless you’re just an idiot burnishing your credentials to impress other idiots…which is a quite lucrative practice, by the way…but not worthy of a lady or gentleman) but because it is only when organizations are forced to change that they will change. Allow an organization to enjoy continually higher funding no matter how bad the result and all you’ll get is an increasingly high price paid for an increasingly bad product. That is what is wrong with education – that is why we’ve gone from first to worst in so many categories. School choice will break up the monopoly and allow people who actually care about education to rise to the top.
But as long as Obama and his Democrats are in charge, we’ll make little headway on this matter. Because they don’t care about it. Because their only goal is personal power and wealth – and if it take screwing the kids in order to secure big union donations, then that is what they will do, and have done. Our job, once again, is to get them out of power as soon as possible…and, conservatives, the real fun about this is that beating Obama is now something we can do “for the children”.
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