Secretary of Education Arne Duncan jumped into the political fray over the Washington, D.C. school voucher program yesterday, indicating the administration would be more friendly to the scholarship than Congressional Democrats.
Duncan opposes vouchers, he said in an interview with The Associated Press. But he said Washington is a special case, and kids already in private schools on the public dime should be allowed to continue.
"I don't think it makes sense to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning," Duncan told said. "I think those kids need to stay in their school."
Obama's former Illinois colleague Sen. Dick Durbin, however, has different ideas. Language he added to the $410-billion omnibus spending bill under consideration in the Senate today would cut off funding for the Washington Opportunity Scholarship at the end of the 2009-'10 school year, sending 1,700 low-income students back to the failing public schools they left after Congress narrowly passed the program in 2004.
Sen. John Ensign planned to offer an amendment today that would have stripped the Durbin language, allowing funding for the program- about $14 million a year- to continue. School-choice activists and scholarship students were encouraged by Duncan's support for the program, and Ensign displayed the secretary's quote prominently at a press conference to tout the amendment, also attended by Sens. Jim DeMint and John Kyl.
Several scholarship students, as part of a push by Voices for School Choice, have produced an online video asking Obama to weigh in on their side, but the administration's opinion is not weighing heavily on the Democratic Senate.
A Senate source working on the amendment process said today that even getting a vote on the Ensign amendment was unlikely, as Democratic leadership has been blocking most amendments to the omnibus bill. Allowing a vote would require Democrats to go on record against a scholarship program for inner-city school children that even the Democratic Secretary of Education backs. But by trying to quietly kill the program now, they may be setting up a significant P.R. problem for the administration going forward.
Once the omnibus passes, school-choice activists enlivened by Obama's apparent blink on vouchers, may fight to get the funding for the program officially reauthorized by both Congress and the D.C. City Council, as the Durbin language requires. It will be an extreme uphill battle in a Democrat-controlled Congress, which was exactly Durbin's intention. But led by Virginia Walden-Ford, a D.C. single mom who was instrumental in getting the scholarship program through Congress, the Obama administration may be surprised how much noise 1,700 kids and parents can make when they're committed to going to the Hill every day. Those involved in the first push for the scholarship, however, say that anything that would pass a Democrat-controlled Congress would likely not include religious protections that currently allow Catholic schools to accept the scholarship students. (This paragraph edited for clarity on the process going forward. --mkh)
Now that Duncan has given them a glimmer of the hope Obama promised, activists can at least highlight the distance between Obama and his allies in the Senate, creating yet another unnecessary P.R. problem that Obama could have solved with a simple call to his Democratic friends. Or, that his Democratic friends could have solved by avoiding this kind of partisan overreach.
It's increasingly clear that the vetting process is not the only thing Obama has lost control of. The Democratic message on the vital issue of education is now being formed without his input, too.
Update: Ensign offered his amendment, but Democrats objected:
But when Ensign tried to offer the amendment on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, objected. The Senate is expected to vote no later than Friday on limiting debate on the package.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., suggested Thursday that the Senate should continue to debate the bill into next week if it meant a vote could occur on Ensign's amendment.
"The United States secretary of education, Arne Duncan, said yesterday that poor children getting vouchers to attend private schools in the District of Columbia should be allowed to stay there," Alexander said. "I think Secretary Duncan is right."
Update:News from the Hill is that Dems will likely file for cloture on the omnibus bill tonight. If the Senate doesn't pass any amendments, which it hasn't thus far, the future of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship hinges on whether Harry Reid can scrounge enough Republican votes to offset his defecting moderate Democrats.
