Forget “standing up” to them, and just crush them mercilessly.

Obama and the Schools

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said last week that poor children receiving federally financed vouchers to attend private schools in Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be forced out of those schools. Bully for Mr. Duncan. But the voice that matters most is President Obama’s, and so far he’s been shouting at zero decibels.

His silence is an all-clear for Democrats in Congress who have put language in the omnibus spending bill that would effectively end the program after next year. Should they succeed, 1,700 mostly black and Hispanic students who use the vouchers would return to the notoriously violent and underperforming D.C. public school system, which spends more money per pupil than almost any city in the nation yet graduates only about half of its students.

The D.C. voucher program has more than four applicants for every available slot. Parental satisfaction is sky high. And independent evaluations — another is scheduled for release later this month — show that children in the program perform better academically than their peers who do not receive vouchers. This is the kind of school reform that the federal government should encourage and expand.

I doubt Obama has any interest in better educated kids or standing up to teacher’s unions. He’s too much of a creature of collectivization and the dependency on government that comes with it. But one hopes the people of the nation take the lead, and drive the corrupt money changers out of the temple of our education system.

Tags: corrupt teacher's unions, Wall Street Journal

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under 2010 Elections, Bankrupting Illinois. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.